Huawei, being China’s largest manufacturer of telecom equipment, is having a hard time focusing on the development and manufacturing of its products, since it’s constantly dealing with accusations from both the U.S. and the U.K. about being a spy for the Chinese government.
Of course, Huawei denied all of this allegations and now it finally fed up, with the company’s vice president William Plummer telling both countries to “shut up” unless they can prove anything. The final drop of water was made by former CIA director Michael Hayden, now director at Motorola Solutions Inc, who made the accusations about Huawei sharing with the Chinese government “intimate and extensive knowledge of the foreign telecommunications systems” that they currently develop and build. Hayden then added to Bloomberg that he couldn’t comment on specific instances of espionage or any operational matters. The U.K. said that they would review Huawei’s new Cyber Security Evaluation Center, mostly because the don’t know if the company has any ties to the Chinese government.
Huawei Technologies spokesman Scott Sykes said: “These tired, unsubstantiated, defamatory remarks are sad distractions from real-world concerns related to espionage, industrial and otherwise”
Obviously, it would be foolish for Huawei not to be cooperative with all the investigations, to which Sykes added “Huawei shares the same goal as the U.K. government,” and that “Huawei is open to new ideas and ways of working to improve cyber security.”
China’s relationship to the world has always been tense and with Huawei being owned by its employees, with 74,000 out of the total of 155,000 workers being shareholders, it’s at least a little bit understandable that governments from such powers like the Unites States and the United Kingdom have doubts when not everything is clear to the world. Huawei might be sure of how they handle data and secrets, but they should be as clear as possible to everyone if they hope to stop being the lightning rod of these accusations. The recent accusation to China from the White House, certainly don’t help Huawei’s case, making the end of these matter not visible in the short run.