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I'm seeing a lot of debate and stupidity about Huawei so let's tackle from a very simple angle whether or not Huawei is a security risk. Let me emphasize there are many ways to study this question and this is just one. Is Huawei a private company free from CCP influence? 1/n
Well to date, they say publicly they are employee owned. Could be. They refuse to release any records that would prove or disprove this assertion to any satisfaction. Furthermore, if you start trying unravel their ownership records through corporate filings, it makes Alibaba 2/n
And Enron look like amateurs. Are they privately owned? Nobody in the public domain knows and what makes this so problematic is that this would be an astoundingly easy one to prove but they refuse to. Next let us turn to the broader industry they occupy of telecommunications 3/n
In China every company from big to small in this narrow and more broadly defined industry is a ward of the state. From the service providers like China Mobile/Telecom/Unicom. (explicitly state owned) to the hardware providers like ZTE (implicitly state owned) to the ancillary 4/n
service and hard providers like HIK (like ZTE PLA linked ownership) to the small tech start ups doing facial recognition who get most of their revenue from security contracts for cities and places like Xinjiang. To even propose that Huawei is somehow uniquely independent 5/n
requires such tortuous and astounding leaps of logic as to defy explanation. This would be akin to believing Kim Jong Un started a Ayn Rand Milton Friedman Center at Pyongyang U or the Taliban allowing Bible studies for Osama's favorite nephew. It defies any sense of logic. 6/n
Then there is whether or not they are a formal spy for Chinese intelligence. This is again, like most pro-Huawei arguments, a big irrelevant point. The CCP only has 89.5 million members yet runs China and you don't go against the Party. You cannot think of this as we will 7/n
a JV agreement between Huawei and MSS that reveals how they have agreed to cooperate. Unless they are an EXTREME EXTREME outlier like 40 standard deviations away, they are a protectorate and directive of the Chinese state. To believe they are fundamentally different from 8/n
any and all other companies in China and to a very extreme degree, is just not probable. It is 2019, so absolutely anything is possible, but if you look at just the logic, not other known facts, it defies any logic they aren't a security risk. Done
