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Australia Wants China's Huawei to Stay Away From Its New Internet

A two-year ban stays in place, even though no one is allowed to know why it exists.
via Wikimedia Commons

Australia is rolling out its National Broadband Network, aimed at making phone and high-speed broadband available for every home, school, and workplace in the country. It’s a broadband divide-closing national exercise of inclusivity, but it carries a silver lining of international exclusion. Australia’s newly-elected government is going to keep a two-year-old ban on the Chinese networking equipment company Huawei, to keep it from bidding to help build the NBN.

"The decision of the previous government not to permit Huawei to tender for the NBN was made on advice from the national security agencies. That decision was supported by the then opposition after we received our own briefings from those agencies," Attorney-General George Brandis told Reuters, but he declined to elaborate on what exactly the national security agencies said.

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The AP reported the the chairman of Huawei Australia, John Lord, saying that the reasons for the ban have never been explained. He says the company poses no threat and is a victim of bad publicity resulting from a US House Intelligence Committee report from last year that also lacked any proof.

In 2012 the US House Intelligence Committee said that it had come to the conclusion that Huawei Technologies Ltd was a national security threat, and that using its telecommunications equipment would allow the Chinese government to steal secrets from American companies and government offices.

Huawei responded by saying the House committee’s report was weak, and lacked evidence. In May, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei broke a 25 year media silence to say that the company wasn’t responsible for America’s cybersecurity issues. In that story, a spokesman told The Verge that if anyone had evidence of them funneling information to the Chinese government they needed to put up or shut up.

An 18 month long White House-ordered probe didn’t uncover any evidence of spying, but did determine that Huawei was risky for other reasons, such as vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit. Given what we've found out about American intelligence gathering in the last few months, it seems like if anyone was going to recognize spying portals, it would be the US.

While it’s possible that a high-profile accusation like the ones made by the House Intelligence Committee could have a chilling effect, the Australian ban predates the House report by an entire year, and was originally put into place in response to cyberattacks in Australia that originated in China. It's fair to wonder then, as Huawei definitely is, what's in those intelligence reports, exactly?