INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The relationship between the United Kingdom and Australia is not usually a flashpoint in international relations
After all, the two allies share a common language, ancestry, and monarch
So what caused a dustup recently that saw a senior Australian parliamentarian rebuke the British foreign secretary, and for a group of
Australian MPs to then cancel a trip to London in protest?
The answer is fears over Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant at the center of the
5G next-generation wireless debate.Australian officials were miffed when the British government recommended that the company be allowed to
play a limited role in the U.K
5G deployment despite calling it a &high risk& supplier due to its close ties to the Chinese government (the company founder, Ren Zhengfei,
served for many years as an engineer in the People Liberation Army)
The Australian government, a fellow member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (which includes the two countries plus the United States,
Canada, and New Zealand), disagreed back in 2017 when it barred Huawei on national security grounds.
Now, two close allies are at cross
purposes about the very future of the internet
What at stake is not just who equips the future of telecom infrastructure, but the very values that the internet itself holds.
Two
countries, ocean(s) apart
It not just Australia and Britain that find themselves separated by an ocean (or two)
In America, Huawei has become the Trump Administration favorite company to hate
In a speech at this year Munich Security Conference, Defense Secretary Mark Esper called the company &today poster child& for &nefarious
activity& while another White House official compared the company to &the Mafia.&It should come as no surprise that the company is the
target of trade restrictions, a criminal action against its CFO, and a concerted diplomatic campaign.
The US is charging Huawei with
racketeering
America concerns are twofold
First, that critical infrastructure provided by a Chinese company with such close ties to the country central leadership is an unacceptable
Second, that arresting Huawei increasing dominance risks surrendering any chance for American leadership in 5G technology.
National security
considerations have predominantly driven policymakers in Australia
More alert by geography to the strategic risks posed by China, Canberra moved early and decisively to bar Huawei from participating in its
&The fundamental issue is one of trust between nations in cyberspace,& writes Simeon Gilding, until recently the head of the Australian
Signals Directorate signals intelligence and offensive cyber missions.
That lack of trust between China and Australia is compounded by the
difficult geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific
&It not hard to imagine a time when the U.S
and China end up in some sort of conflict,& says Tom Uren of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
&If there was a shooting war, it is almost inevitable that the U.S
would ask Australia for assistance and then we&d be in this uncomfortable situation if we had Huawei in our networks that our critical
telecommunicationsnetworks would literally be run by an adversary we were at war with.&
Gilding warned, &It simply not reasonable to expect
that Huawei would refuse a direction from the Chinese Communist Party.& And no matter what reassurances Huawei executives have given, they
just simply haven&t been able to ally those concerns
Beijing didn&t help Huawei case when it passed its 2017 Intelligence Law, which obliges all Chinese companies and individuals to assist with
intelligence efforts if asked
&People were always afraid [that might happen],& adds Uren, &and having it in writing really solidified those concerns.&
As a result,
Canberra policy to ban Huawei has been largely uncontroversial
With the exception of some of the country telecom companies, &the decision [to ban Huawei] has bipartisan backing,& says Simon Jackman, CEO
of the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.
Calling out London
American officials wish their British counterparts shared Australia
outlook & and haven&t been shy about saying so
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the UK to &relook& at the decision and lobbied Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the issue on a recent
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Esper has made clear that electing to use Huawei could threaten allies& access to American intelligence
&If countries choose to go the Huawei route,& Mr
Esper told reporters on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, &it could well jeopardize all the information sharing and
intelligence sharing we have been talking about, and that could undermine the alliance, or at least our relationship with that
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo leaves 10 Downing Street after a meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on 30 January 2020 in
(Photo by WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
British officials not only believe this to be a bluff & the Five Eyes intelligence
alliance is much too strong in their view & but have a different assessment of the risk Huawei poses
&Everyone perception of the Huawei risk is particular to them,& says Nigel Inkster, a former deputy chief of MI6 now at the London-based
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
The U.K
Experts in the British government, which started using Huawei in its 3G and 4G networks back in 2003, believe that not only can the risks be
mitigated, but they are being overstated in the first place
&The Australian approach is driven by the kind of worst-case analysis of the risk 5G could pose in effect on the brink of war,& says Inkster
envisages going to war with China any time soon.&
Inkster and other top officials remain confident in the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation
Centre (HCSEC), which was established by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) back when Huawei was first introduced into Britain
&We&ve never ‘trusted& Huawei,& wrote NCSC Technical Director Dr
Ian Levy in a January 2020 blogpost
has &always treated them as a ‘high risk vendor& and worked to limit their use in the UK and put extra mitigations around their equipment
and services.&
Levy and the government other cybersecurity experts believe that their system will continue to work
&The basic cyber security measures that have been used for 3/4G also apply to 5G,& argues Marcus Willett, who also served as the first
Director of Cyber at GCHQ, Britain signals-intelligence agency
&If Huawei had been playing games, we would have discovered it by now,& says Pauline Neville-Jones, a Conservative member of the House of
Lords, and previously security minister and cybersecurity advisor in former British Prime Minister David Cameron government.
British
regulations already restrict Huawei and other high-risk vendors in several ways, including capping their market share at 35% and ensuring
their equipment is continuously evaluated by HCSEC
In addition, by preventing Huawei 5G kit from being used near sensitive sites and limiting it to the periphery of the network (as opposed to
the core), British officials are confident that they can contain any additional risk.
That not to say Huawei doesn&t face stiff opposition
Even if you mitigated the risk, it &quite a leap to allow the Chinese to be intimately involved in something as sensitive as this,& one U.K
retired diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic, told me
And the company is no one first choice
didn&t have Huawei in its system, it wouldn&t choose to have Huawei now,& Lady Neville-Jones told me
&But we are in a different place [than Australia] and we have set up a system which we believe enables us to manage the risk
And by God, we will be on alert
[But] you say to yourself, at the end of the day, do you trust your technical people or not? And there never been a complaint on backdoors
or traps.& Indeed, government experts have often caught coding errors she adds
&I suspect the result of [British inspections] is that technically Huawei is a better company than it might otherwise have been.&
The
British position is also rooted in game theory
&Even if you could [bring down the network], when would you do it?& asks Willett, formerly of GCHQ
&It is effectively a ‘one shot& capability &if used by China, it would undermine the position of all Chinese companies in the world tech
China would therefore presumably save the ‘one shot& for war or near-war, in which case it would need to be sure it would work
That is not easy.&
Australian experts are skeptical, though
&I think [the British] are overconfident in their ability to mitigate [the risk],& Uren, the ASPI expert, told me
His view & widely shared in Australia &is that defenders always think they can defend a system until they can&t, and giving a Chinese
company access to the network is already a concession too far
&Cybersecurity is all about raising the costs for the attacker,& writes Gildling, the former Australian official
&Network access through vendors — which need to be all over 5G networks to maintain their equipment — effectively reduces the access
cost to zero.&
The economic equation in Europe
It hard to understate the difference geography makes, though
In America and Australia — Pacific powers — China is physically present
For Europeans — including Britain — the risks of a rising China don&t carry the same emotional weight.
&The idea of China being a direct
security threat is still somewhat abstract,& says Dr
Janka Oertel of the European Council on Foreign Relations
With the exception of countries like Poland and Estonia which are reliant on U.S
military support and thus more willing to toe Washington line, &European governments have just begun to assess the risk China can pose in
the cyber realm.& Partly to allay those rising concerns, Huawei about a year agoestablished a a Cyber Security Transparency Centre in
Brussels, the de facto capital of the European Union
Unlike Britain HCSEC, however, it is not an independent evaluation center and it is not designed to carry out the same functions.
Economics
dominate the conversation on the continent more than national security concerns
The fragmented telecom market in Europe (105 mobile operators versus just four in America), has also proven beneficial to Huawei
In a competitive environment where cost has become everything, the state-subsidized Huawei is often able to underprice its competitors
Even in Britain, security concerns were weighed against the fact that &stripping out [the Huawei components already in the system] and
starting again would carry enormous costs,& Inkster told me.
Still, Oertel thinks the debate in Europe is being debated on the wrong grounds
&It really hard to say Huawei is cheaper than Ericsson or Nokia
No one has the numbers because these are all contracts between private companies
We&re talking a lot of hypotheticals.& Her concern is that while Huawei might seem cheaper now, that might change if it able to squeeze out
competitors and raise prices.
The battle isn&t over yet, though
Ericsson and Nokia maintain that they are competitive on technology and cost
Indeed, Ericsson is already running 27 5G networks in 15 countries and was just selected by the Danish government to build the country 5G
network, displacing existing Huawei equipment
Meanwhile in Germany, the government move toward using Huawei has run into sharp opposition in the Bundestag, the German federal parliament
Norbert Röttgen, a prominent member of Chancellor Angela Merkel own party, helped draft a billthat would bar any &untrustworthy& company
from &both the core and peripheral networks.&
Norbert Roettgen, CDU at the Bundespressekonferenz the occasion of the candidacy for the CDU
chairmanship, on February 18, 2020 in Berlin, Germany
(Photo by Felix Zahn/Photothek via Getty Images)
The Trump Administration is still concerned enough about Huawei potential ability to
dominate 5G worldwide that it is actively campaigning for a Western alternative
&We are encouraging allied and U.S
tech companies to develop alternative 5G solutions,& Defense Secretary Esper said in Munich, where he also exhorted fellow security
officials to &develop our own secure 5G network … so we don&t regret our decisions later.&
Other American officials have suggested even
more extraordinary measures
Declaring in a February speech that nothing less than &our economic future is at stake,& Attorney General William Barr (who also served
formerly as a long-time lawyer for U.S
telecom and TechCrunch parent company Verizon) bluntly called on the U.S
and its allies to &actively consider& a proposal for the government and U.S
companies to take a controlling stake in Nokia and Ericsson
&Putting our large market and financial muscle behind one or both of these firms would make it a far more formidable competitor.&
Ericsson
&Personally, I find it odd that Barr is even thinking like this really,& Gabriel Solomon, a senior Ericsson executive in Europe, told me
&We were first to commercial deployment in four continents
We are in a very competitive market.&
Indeed, that echoes a common view in Europe: that the goal of American policy on Huawei is less about
security and more about market share & and making sure America, not China, owns the future of 5G
And that has its own risks
&Cutting out Huawei altogether potentially moves us toward a kind of bipolar, bifurcated internet, which if taken to logical extreme would
have some very serious adverse implications for everyone in terms of cost, a slowdown in innovation, and general reduction in intellectual
and technical interchange,& says Inkster, the former MI6 official.
Things would be easier, Europeans say, if America presented an obvious
Without one, America allies feel they have little choice but to use Huawei if they don&t want to fall behind technologically
&The West has got itself in a mess,& says the retired British diplomat
&It is a striking failure of political cooperation and coordination that we should find ourselves in this position.&
There is still optimism
on both sides of the Atlantic that a Western solution can be found
As Röttgen of Germany wrote in a tweet in February:
The #USA - EU could team up to counter #China #5G dominance
We share the same security concerns - should cooperate to expand
alternatives
But to do so we must know that tariffs against Brussels are off the table
Partners don&t threaten one another
https://t.co/ZPvZFKWNYq
— Norbert Röttgen (@n_roettgen) February 8, 2020
Rather than pick a champion, another solution would be to level
&Telecoms security doesn&t pay,&concedes Dr
And &externalising the security costs of particular choices (including vendor) will help operators make better security risk management
decisions.& Another option: better national screening investment mechanisms that would limit the ability of state-owned enterprises to
operate unfairly.
But to get there requires coordination and cooperation & and that isn&t necessarily as forthcoming as you might expect
Germans still remember that the NSA hacked Chancellor Merkel phone & and the Trump Administration trade war has targeted Europe almost as
Röttgen cautioned that cooperation on 5G was connected: &[W]e must know that tariffs against Brussels are off the table,& he said in the
&Partners don&t threaten one another.& Meanwhile, Huawei is earning goodwill by sending medical equipment to Europe to help combat the
COVID-19 pandemic.
&Technology was supposed to unite us,& laments Jackman, the Australian professor; &instead it driving us apart not just
from our rivals, but our allies, too.&
