Pompeo and National Security Council Step Up Campaign against Huawei
Jan. 14, 2020 (EIRNS)—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo today told members of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club to get serious about breaking their partnerships with the Chinese government and companies linked to it. “None of us would have installed Soviet technology, right?” he even said, in arguing why they had to keep American technology from powering what he ranted is the “truly Orwellian state” which rules China. Note that this is not only contrary to President Donald Trump’s open admiration for China and President Xi Jinping, but also comes 24 hours before the signing of the critical phase one of a U.S.-China trade deal.
He waxed as poetic as he could, saying that “America is facing a challenge from China that demands every fiber of your innovative skill.” U.S. tech companies need to get in line with U.S. government agencies, “which are cooperating in new ways to stop the Chinese military from using our own innovation against us. And we’re putting our allies and partners on notice about the massive security and privacy risks connected to letting Huawei construct their 5G networks inside of their countries.”
On Jan. 13, a National Security Council delegation led by Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger flew into London to again threaten that the U.S. would cut off intelligence-sharing with the U.K., should it allow the Chinese tech company, Huawei, to participate in even “non-core” parts of the U.K. 5G network.
The delegation presented U.K. officials with a purportedly new “technical assessment” of the dangers of using Huawei, and told them it “would be nothing short of madness” for the U.K. to do so, as a member of the delegation told the press after their meetings, the BBC and the Guardian reported.
The Boris Johnson government is expected to make a decision on Huawei this month. Over the weekend, domestic intelligence MI5 chief Andrew Parker made the American team nervous with remarks to the press that “he had no reason to think that using Huawei technology should threaten intelligence sharing with the U.S.”
Prime Minister Johnson did not indicate which way the decision might be made, telling the BBC today that “the British public deserve to have access to the best possible technology.... Now if people oppose one brand or another then they have to tell us what’s the alternative,” only to quickly throw in, “let’s be clear, I don’t want, as the U.K. prime minister, to put in any infrastructure that is going to prejudice our national security or our ability to cooperate with Five Eyes intelligence partners,” comprised of the U.K., Canada, the U.S., New Zealand and Australia.
