Huawei had a Trojan horse in the heart of Europe as early as 2009, or possibly as early as 2004. The scandal this time comes from Holland, not surprisingly one of those countries that is still relying on the infrastructure of the Chinese giant for 5G, while other countries such as the United Kingdom (but also France) are giving in to US pressure and preferring European suppliers, such as Nokia or even better Ericsson, which, moreover, are even bankrolled by Washington in order to stem the Asian presence in the Old Continent. The fear is that the Chinese exploit the latest generation networks for data theft and political and industrial espionage, but apparently a possible spy story already existed over a decade ago, in The Hague, the operator's headquarters Dutch tlc KPN, which already in 2009 used the devices of the Shenzhen company and hosted 6 Chinese technicians in its headquarters. The news rebounded in Europe thanks to the newspaper Le Monde which reported on it in today's April 20 edition.
According to a report published in 2010 but remained secret until a few days ago, Huawei was able to spy on data and even telephone conversations of 6,5 million customers, including former Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and other "sensitive" personalities of the political and industrial world. The report does not state with certainty that this espionage was actually carried out, but potentially the Chinese company, which had full access to the servers, could have done so and this doubt already casts a shadow on the opportunity of a future collaboration with Huawei, given that moreover the Dutch press hypothesizes a possible interference also in the data of the other operator Telfort, and this since 2004, i.e. even in pre-smartphone era. The risk, in addition to letting Huawei get hold of billions of sensitive information, is also that it could damage network security. The Chinese giant obviously denies it, as does KPN which guarantees that no employee has had uncontrolled access to the system, and therefore believes that it has not been hacked.
Regardless of what happened over ten years ago, the consequence is that the disclosure of the report (who knows why after all this time…) forces the Dutch government to impose strict measures on infrastructure security on telecommunications operators. At the moment Huawei has not been officially banned, but the air you breathe in Amsterdam and its surroundings is that of imposing at least even more restrictive rules on the Asian group, perhaps ending up focusing primarily on European partners, such as Ericsson which already supplies KPN with the bulk of the technology for 5G, while with Huawei there is only an agreement for radio wave equipment.
Apparently everyone who can spies on each other. Let's not forget that the Echelon network has existed for many years, from the USA with support from Great Britain, Australia, etc. that spies and intercepts everything. In the meantime, who knows what other interception networks they have set up and we still don't know anything about them. Let us remember that Chancellor Merkel's phone itself was controlled by US services. One question: why when "others" spy on us is it an inadmissible and anti-democratic thing while when "ours" do it is a defense of democratic freedom? Does anyone still believe that the servers of Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. are not available to US agencies?. If they weren't, they would have already been scaled down and regulated by ad hoc laws. In the end the behavior methods of governments is always the same. Only we call ours “good” our opponents we call them “bad” like in old western movies