China syndrome5G Choices: A Pivotal Moment in World Affairs
It is disappointing that the Brits are doing the wrong thing on 5G, having not exhausted other possibilities. Instead they have doubled down on a flawed and outdated cybersecurity model to convince themselves that they can manage the risk that Chinese intelligence services could use Huawei’s access to U.K. telco networks to insert bad code. But if your telcos have a 5G operation and maintenance contract with a company beholden to the intelligence agencies of a foreign state, and that state does not share your interests, you need to consider the risk that you are paying a fox to babysit your chickens.
It is disappointing that the Brits are doing the wrong thing on 5G, having not exhausted other possibilities. Instead they have doubled down on a flawed and outdated cybersecurity model to convince themselves that they can manage the risk that Chinese intelligence services could use Huawei’s access to U.K. telco networks to insert bad code.
5G decisions reflect one of those quietly pivotal moments that crystalize a change in world affairs.
This is partly because the technology itself promises to be revolutionary, connecting not just humans but every device with a chip in it with super-fast, high-bandwidth and low-latency communications. That means if you have the keys to 5G networks, you will be trusted with the nervous system running down the backbone of every country which uses your gear and contracts you to service it. That includes critical infrastructure and safety-critical systems on which the lives and livelihoods of our citizens depend—traffic, power, water, food supply and hospitals. You get to be “The Borg.”
But 5G is also a touchstone for the coming age because it is the first in a line of revolutionary and highly intrusive emerging technologies in which China has invested heavily. Through means fair and foul, China has built world-leading companies with high-quality, competitive offerings for everything from video surveillance and industrial control systems to artificial intelligence and internet services via hyperscalers such as Tencent and Alibaba. So any decision to exclude Chinese companies from 5G is a threat to China’s economic and strategic positioning.
Having been caught off guard by BT’s decision to use Huawei equipment in the core of its network, in 2010 the U.K. government set up a Huawei-funded cybersecurity transparency center ‘to mitigate any perceived risks arising from the involvement of Huawei in parts of the U.K.’s critical national infrastructure’ by evaluating Huawei products used in the U.K. telecommunications market.
Australia has taken a different approach and reached a different conclusion. I was part of the team in the Australian Signals Directorate that tried to design a suite of cybersecurity controls that would give the government confidence that hostile intelligence services could not leverage their national vendors to gain access to our 5G networks.
We developed pages of cybersecurity mitigation measures to see if it was possible to prevent a sophisticated state actor from accessing our networks through a vendor. But we failed.
