-US House of Representatives committee
Chinese company Huawei, which has been contracted by the Government of Guyana to build communications systems as part of the administration’s e-governance project, is being flagged by a United States House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee, which is warning US firms to avoid doing business with it because of spying concerns.
On Monday, the panel will release the findings of a nearly year-long investigation of security risks presented by Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp, which is also being described as a concern.
According to a report from Reuters, the committee is warning that doing business with the two Chinese firms could open the door to spying and commercial espionage. The article said while Huawei is the world’s No 2 maker of telecommunications gear, ZTE ranks at No 5.
Reuters quoted head of the Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers as saying, “If I were an American company today … and you are looking at Huawei, I would find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property; if you care about your consumers’ privacy and you care about the national security of the United States of America.”
Rogers, a former FBI special agent, made his comments to the CBS television programme 60 Minutes to be broadcast on Sunday.
“One of the main reasons we are having this investigation is to educate the citizens in business… in the telecommunications world,” the article quotes Representative CA Ruppersberger of Maryland, the committee‘s top Democrat, as saying.
In March last year, the local corruption watchdog Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc. called on the Auditor General to investigate whether the government’s use of Huawei’s US$50,000 ‘thank you gift’ was in line with the rules governing public expenditure. The gift came after Huawei was granted the contract to lay the fibre optic cable and the government had said it used it to jumpstart its One Laptop Per Family Project.
TIGI had questioned government’s single-sourcing of the contract to the Chinese company and called on the government to publicly address questions about the contract and the ‘gift’.
Huawei has been contracted to build communications systems, including 4G and LTE technologies, as part of the government’s e-governance project.
Earlier this year, Huawei advertised a number of vacancies here seeking to fill some critical positions as it commenced a new phase of its work on Guyana’s broadband platform.
The US committee believes allowing Huawei to build and maintain large swaths of America’s telecommunications infrastructure opens a door for the Chinese government to spy on the US government and engage in industrial espionage, the Reuters article said, referring to a segment of the programme 60 Minutes.
Huawei, which has said it operates independently of the Chinese authorities, said in response that it was “globally trusted and respected,” doing business in almost 150 markets with more than 500 operator customers, including nationwide carriers across every continent except Antarctica.
“The security and integrity of our products are world proven,” William Plummer, a company spokesman in Washington was quoted by Reuters as saying in an email. “Those are the facts today. Those will be the facts next week, political agendas aside.”
“The efforts of Huawei and ZTE in the United States have been stymied by US concerns over allegedly mounting Chinese economic espionage, especially in cyberspace,” the article said.
It noted that Huawei has marketed its network equipment in the United States since last year and has sold to a range of small to medium-sized carriers nationwide, particularly in rural areas. It has marketed mobile phones through a broader range of US carriers, for the last four years.
