More and more countries and telecom companies “are waking up to the danger of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state” and allowing only trusted vendors in their 5G networks, excluding Huawei from deals with their telecommunications operators due to the Chinese company’s ties with the Chinese military, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement.
Companies like Huawei are required by China’s security law “to share any information that they have and that includes the private information, whether that’s health care information or other personal information of a citizen from the Czech Republic or a citizen of Germany or France,” Pompeo said at the German Marshall Fund of the United States’s Brussels Forum 2020 on Thursday.
Huawei can easily intercept any information that transits its system without even needing a backdoor or any “secret access” because “they own the infrastructure,” Pompeo said. “That information will be in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party as Huawei has a legal obligation to provide it to them.”
This is “the most egregious privacy violations in the world,” he added.
Among European countries that allow only trusted 5G vendors to build their 5G networks are the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden, Estonia, Romania, Denmark, and Latvia, Pompeo said in the statement.
“Greece agreed to use Ericsson rather than Huawei to develop its 5G infrastructure,” the statement said.
In March, the largest Greek mobile service provider, Cosmote, selected Ericsson—a Swedish telecommunication company as exclusive 5G supplier—for its 5G infrastructure, according to Ericsson’s statement.
Cosmote, which is part of the Deutsche Telekom Group, plans to launch commercial 5G services in 2021, the statement said.
Polish President Andrzej Duda signed a joint statement with President Donald Trump during his visit to the White House on Wednesday,
