Is the US shooting itself in the foot by banning Huawei?

• US authorities plan to use covertly gathered information in case charging the company with violating Iran sanctions
• The US government obtained the information via ‘electronic surveillance and physical search’, but gave no details

US prosecutors used a special warrant to secretly gather information about Huawei Technologies Co Limited for evidence of fraud and espionage charges against China’s largest telecoms equipment maker, a US court was told on Thursday.

Assistant US Attorney Alex Solomon said at the hearing in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, that the evidence, obtained under the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), would require classified handling.

The government notified Huawei in a court filing on Thursday of its intent to use the information, saying it was “obtained or derived from electronic surveillance and physical search”, but gave no details.

When the hearing resumes on June 19, Federal District Judge Ann Donnelly will decide how the case is to proceed, based on the gathered evidence.

The US government has been pressuring other countries to drop Huawei from their cellular networks, worried that its equipment could be used by Beijing for spying. The company says the concerns are unfounded.

At the US legal team’s request, Judge Donnelly gave federal prosecutors more time to gather evidence – involving the review of a large number of documents. James Cole, a US-based lawyer for Huawei and Huawei Device USA Inc, the company’s American subsidiary, consented to the request.

Donnelly designated the case “complex” – providing the lawyers with up to 150 days to conduct their discovery, 30 more than they would have had under the standard period.

Huawei, based in Shenzhen in southeastern China’s Guangdong province, and its US unit stand accused of defrauding banking and financial services company HSBC and other banks by misrepresenting Huawei’s relationship with a suspected front company, Skycom Tech Co Limited, in Iran.

The Chinese telecommunications giant has been charged in two sets of indictments with nearly two dozen counts of stealing trade secrets, violating economic sanctions and concealing its Iran business dealings via an unofficial subsidiary.

Cole, who talked over most of the procedural decisions with the government’s lawyers, expressed concern about the slow progress of the case.

“The case started in August (last year), but the discovery hasn't begun yet,” he said at the hearing. “I think they should begin soon.”

The lawsuit gained public attention in December when Canadian authorities arrested Huawei financial chief Meng Wanzhou, a daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, in Vancouver in response to a US request for Meng’s extradition.

Multiple charges were announced against Huawei, Meng and affiliated companies. A federal grand jury in Brooklyn charged Huawei and Meng with money laundering, bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy. Huawei was also charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice.

A separate indictment from Washington state accused Huawei, Skycom and Meng of stealing trade secrets from the telecommunications company T-Mobile.

Those charges stemmed from a civil lawsuit filed by T-Mobile USA in 2014 over a robot nicknamed Tappy that was used in testing smartphones.

If the Huawei case becomes a long, drawn-out affair, it has the potential to increase feelings of uncertainty among Western governments, corporations and academic institutions about Huawei and other large Chinese telecoms companies that the Trump administration has portrayed as security threats.

While the US pressures other governments to terminate their 5G technology contracts with Huawei, top American universities are shunning research money from Huawei.

Princeton University, Stanford University, Ohio State University and the University of California at Berkeley have all said they would cut or loosen ties with the company.

On Wednesday, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, another top-ranking American university, said it was breaking its funding ties with Huawei and ZTE, another big Chinese smartphone maker, citing the risks of continuing relations while the two companies were under US federal investigation.

“At this time, based on this enhanced review, MIT is not accepting new engagements or renewing existing ones with Huawei and ZTE or their respective subsidiaries due to federal investigations regarding violations of sanction restrictions,” Richard Lester, MIT’s associate provost, and Maria Zuber, the school’s vice-president for research, said in a letter to staff.

The tensions between Washington and Beijing over the months-long trade war have made the Huawei case a focus of the Trump administration’s hardline stance on China’s allegedly improper trade and business practices.

Meng’s arrest has also weighed heavily on the relationship between China and Canada: a number of Canadians in China have been arrested on various charges since her detention.

Last month, the Canadian government decided to move forward with proceedings to extradite Meng to the US, although she has said she is innocent and is fighting her extradition. She also is suing Canada and two federal agencies for detaining and interrogating her before declaring her under arrest.

Meanwhile, Huawei has filed suit against the US government, saying Washington overstepped its bounds when it banned the use of the company’s equipment by US government agencies.

Huawei has pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of bank and wire fraud contained in one of the two indictments.

Assistant US Attorney David Kessler said at the arraignment in Brooklyn that prosecutors were serving Skycom with the charges, but had not yet scheduled an arraignment for the company.

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• The company has been banned from providing 5G network equipment in the US, New Zealand and Australia
• But not in Malaysia, where its global training centre is based

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has extended a warm welcome to Chinese telecommunications giant

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– but says it will carry out its own security checks into the controversial corporation.
Speaking after a tour of the company’s global training centre in Malaysia, Deputy International Trade and Industry Minister Dr Ong Kian Ming said he understood that the Communications and Multimedia Ministry would be doing its own due diligence “but from my ministry’s perspective, the fact that Huawei continues to invest here in Malaysia, provide good quality jobs to Malaysians – this is something good for the long-term benefit of Malaysia as a country, and shows a very strong and strategic partnership we have with Huawei from an investment perspective.”

The lawmaker said he was confident that as more Chinese companies expanded operations to the Asean region, they would “see Malaysia as … a good place to recruit, train and also deploy talent”. Huawei’s partnership with major telco Maxis, he added, was a “good sign” of the confidence local players had in its technology.

His comments come in the wake of concerns from several Western nations over Huawei’s links to the Chinese government, with the US accusing the company of enabling state espionage.

Three members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – the

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,

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and

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– have banned Huawei from providing 5G network equipment, while fellow member Canada has resolved to carry out its own security review.

European nations such as Germany, meanwhile, have set down firm security requirements for Huawei, which the company has maintained it will comply with. CEO Ren Zhengfei said it would sign a proposed ‘no-spy’ agreement, while underlining Huawei’s commitment to simple, secure and private networks.

The US has applied particular pressure on Huawei, banning federal agencies from using its equipment over security concerns – a ban that the company has challenged with a lawsuit. This January, a number of US universities also set about getting rid of Huawei equipment to prevent losing federal funding, after President Donald Trump signed a law banning recipients of state funds from using equipment, services or components from a host of Chinese companies, including Huawei.

In Malaysia, analysts said they were sceptical about the government’s ability to conduct security checks given the newness of 5G technology.

“The baseline of comparison is limited,” says Alan Yau, chief technical officer for cybersecurity solutions provider SysArmy. “At the moment, we can only use 4G tests for 5G. Most 5G advancements come from China, so there isn’t much methodology from the West to test it at the moment. Tests will come only when the tech is more matured.”

Dhillon Kannabhiran, founder of the Hack in the Box collective that organises a regular regional security conference, brushed off Western concerns.

“The question is more of whether Huawei would be the best choice, and how dependent we would be on a single vendor. Security issues aren’t really a technology problem at the end of the day, they are a people problem. So it doesn’t really matter which vendor Malaysia ends up using. The end users are the issue … All vendors have bugs.”

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The U.S. State Department touted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's recent visit to Latin America as an opportunity to "deepen U.S. partnerships in the Western Hemisphere." Instead, it was an attempt to drive a wedge between China and Latin America through groundless accusations.

Washington's agenda to turn several Latin American countries against China came as no surprise, and Pompeo's "utterly irresponsible and unreasonable" remarks -- in the words of Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang -- would not be the last.

While China's detractors never sleep, the diatribes won't stand the test of reason and reality in a global era of win-win cooperation and common development.

Pompeo calls Chinese investments "corrosive" while "eroding good governance" in Latin American countries. But experts and officials in the region disagree. They have long spoken positively of the Asian country's investments in the region.

In a recent interview with Xinhua, Alicia Barcena, executive secretary of the Chile-based United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, praised China for showing its willingness to support growth in the region and elsewhere beyond the Asian continent.

During last year's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Economic Leaders' Meeting in Papua New Guinea, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera stressed deepening cooperation with China regarding investment, trade and infrastructure.

The list of countries -- both in Latin America and beyond -- that welcome Chinese investment continues to grow. Nothing could better exemplify the widespread acceptance of Chinese investment than the significant traction enjoyed by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Among the 125 countries and 29 international organizations taking part in BRI projects are those from the developing world aspiring to improve their dilapidated infrastructure.

While the BRI well meets such needs for development, false claims have emerged of a so-called "debt trap."

No participating country so far has complained of falling into a so-called "debt trap" of Chinese loans. In fact, if there is any trap, blame the one set up by self-serving western countries who wish to keep the developing world in poverty and backwardness.

On various occasions, officials and scholars from the developing world have refuted bizarre western claims by citing facts and underscoring how China's investments help to advance local development.

In February, Moussa Faki Mahamat, chairperson of the African Union (AU) Commission, said China and the pan-African bloc have enjoyed an "unprecedentedly dynamic" partnership in various areas.

Dushni Weerakoon, a Sri Lankan scholar, and Sisira Jayasuriya, professor of Economics at Australia's Monash University, wrote that Sri Lanka's debt repayment problems had very little to do with Chinese loans, which comprise roughly 10 percent of Sri Lanka's total foreign debt.

In the case of Pakistan's participation in the BRI, Shandana Gulzar Khan, Pakistan's parliamentary secretary for commerce, said earlier this month at the World Economic Forum on the Middle East and North Africa that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor has created tens of thousands of jobs and revived the economy of an entire region.

"You will not find China an unfair partner," he said.

It is not just in the realm of investment and infrastructure that China is pursuing fair, win-win and sustainable development with its partners.

In recent years, many countries have been cooperating with China on 5G technology, another thorn in Washington's side.

However, the U.S. campaign to ban Chinese tech giant Huawei on the pretext of national security isn't gaining much traction beyond its own borders, with an increasing number of nations now welcoming China's development in 5G technology.

With protectionism and unilateralism rearing its ugly head, humanity is standing at a crossroads. Wisdom and courage are needed for the world to grow together.

Washington's barrel of lies against China is failing to sway global public opinion. A growing China is good for the world, a truth that even the U.S. cannot change.

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Icmer said:

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Apple is essentially clear to use 5G Qualcomm modems.

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