Huawei ban is beating a path to protectionism

By the lofty standards of the NSA scandal, the revelation that it hacked not just Huawei’s servers but also its products may rank as a mere footnote.

But it sends a few more awkward questions to the agency’s inbox. Such as over the legality of planting backdoors in Huawei’s equipment. Does that enhance national security or is it unlawful over-reach?

There’s also the obvious point, made by Huawei executive William Plummer and many commentators:

“The irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us.”

It reinforces the view of this blog that US suspicion of Huawei is a massive case of projection; the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA fear that Huawei will do to the US what they are doing to everybody else.

In fairness, probing communications vendors, and especially those from China, the world’s most shameless cyber attacker, is a reasonable part of the NSA mission. Building backdoors is probably not.

But the NSA occupation of Huawei’s networks failed to yield any sign of an intelligence relationship with Beijing – something else this blog has previously inferred. In which case the US should allow the company to go about its business in the United States and elsewhere. 

The logic of the security state lays down a path to protectionism. This harassment of Huawei gives China the excuse to do the same to foreign companies in China. In a state-driven economy in a country held together by nationalist ideology, it doesn’t take much encouragement.

MIT’s Technology Review makes exactly that point:

But the bigger fallout may be a rise in protectionism. “It’s been mostly open competition since the beginning of the Internet, and the companies that did well are the ones that won the competitions,” says [analysts James] Lewis. Now, with escalating security worries, countries may take the chance to stack the deck against foreign competitors or build up their own industries.