The reason America is scared of Huawei: internet-connected everything
As much as you can (rightly) criticize the US, particularly the current administration, the US still has the rule of law to a degree far larger than almost all of the rest of the world. While there are failures (eg holding anyone accountable for the subprime mortgage fiasco) there are also positives (eg it seems the US is the only developed nation that goes after the banks that enable tax evasion; see all the actions and settlements with Swiss banks as examples). The US has a largely independent judiciary that isn&#x27;t afraid to say no to the administration (eg all the injunctions against the travel ban from Muslim countries).<p>It&#x27;s also true that the US government spies on its own citizens to a degree that&#x27;s debated in the post-Snowden era. So I certainly believe all phone call (and probably email) metadata is spied upon (and no doubt a sampling of the content for each). And NSLs and pen registers are obviously a thing. I certainly don&#x27;t believe the tinfoil hats who think that a significant portion of Internet traffic of the tech giants is eavesdropped upon however just based on how much data that is.<p>Contrast this to China. Questionable rule of law. Chinese companies and their leaders are certainly complicit with the Chinese government and intelligence agencies. There have been recent stories about how the Muslim population is spied upon and&#x2F;or put in &quot;re-education&quot; camps (this has also happened with other groups like Falun Gong). China continues a policy of erasing Tibet. Xi Jinping is largely installed himself as a Putinesque dictator (eg term limits for the presidency were recently abolished).<p>Given a choice between the US spying on me and China, it wouldn&#x27;t even be close. The US &quot;wins&quot; hands down. At least I have some faith that there are limits to what the US can and will do and that the government can be held accountable to some degree (at least a far larger degree than in China).<p>China has aggressively pursued an agenda to further its national interest that includes the arguable exploitation of developing nations (through loans for capital programs), intellectual property theft from the developed world (through forced &quot;partnerships&quot; as well as repatriating Chinese nationals and outright hacking eg Google).<p>As largely tech people here we all know something about security. To me it&#x27;s <i>obvious</i> that ceding control of your network (with all the potential harm that could do) to a foreign government is a national security issue.<p>Huawei (and others eg ZTE) have been caught here as bad actors and not actors I personally would trust if I had anything worth protecting.<p>China plays favourites with its own companies. It has clearly decided that it doesn&#x27;t want a foreign company to control a local market, <i>any</i> local market, which is why you have the likes of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent instead of Google, Amazon and Facebook. And no it&#x27;s not because foreign companies don&#x27;t understand the Chinese market. It&#x27;s because the Chinese government wills it.<p>Access to China&#x27;s 1B citizens has been dangled as a carrot to the developed world for years. It should be clear that the game is rigged.<p>So, if China has decided not to relinquish control of domestic markets to foreign companies, why shouldn&#x27;t the US respond in kind?