The Terrible Irony of American Espionage

According to the New York Times and Der Spiegel, the NSA has been spying on the Chinese company Huawei, one of the world’s major telecommunications equipment manufacturers.

Huawei primarily makes routers and equipment for cell phone towers. The company is known throughout the world for its product performance and prices. According to information that I obtained in December 2012, Huawei products are commonly used on Bell, Telus and Videotron mobile networks.

The United States and its allies, such as Canada, have always been wary of Huawei. The U.S. government published a report in 2012 indicating that it would not use Huawei products for fear of the presence of “back doors” that would allow the Chinese army to spy on people or otherwise disrupt communications.

Canada has also been very lukewarm about using Huawei equipment in the construction of a new government security network.

Elsewhere in the world, however, the opposite situation is occurring. Enemies of the United States prefer to use Huawei over American rivals, such as Cisco, for the same reasons the U.S. is hesitant to use Huawei.

This situation thus explains the interest that the NSA has in Huawei. One the one hand, it wants to know once and for all whether the company really and truly responds to the orders of the Chinese army, or whether it is as autonomous and independent as it says it is. On the other hand, American spies want to be able to exploit Huawei equipment themselves to intercept communications from enemy countries that use it.

The irony is clear, and one of the executives at Huawei in the U.S. was not hesitant to say so: “The irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us.”