US intelligence in private briefings against Huawei and ZTE

US intelligence agents privately putting the squeeze on Huawei and ZTE, claims Senator Marco Rubio

The US government has been briefing technology companies about what it claims are the security risks posed by Chinese telecoms equipment makers Huawei and ZTE.

The admission was made by US Senator Marco Rubio at a security conference last week. He admitted that the US government is "hold classified briefings" with major technology and communications companies, but added that the companies were hedging their bets.

"I think it's important for us to do what we can to warn people about the threat," Rubio said. "I think some of those companies are aware of [the intelligence concerns], but they make the decision that they'll worry about that later. They want access to 1.3 billion people," Rubio told Cyberscoop.

Rubio has been critical of President Trump's compromise with ZTE, on which the US Department of Commerce placed a sales embargo in April for breaking a deal over sanctions busting. The embargo bars US companies from doing business with ZTE, effectively putting it out of business as it is unable to source the components it needs to build its networking equipment and smartphones.

"It honestly makes no sense why anyone would argue or take comfort in new leadership [at ZTE] being enough of a change to allow these companies to buy American semiconductors, for which without them these companies would not be able to operate," said Rubio.

Rubio claims that the Chinese government uses Huawei and ZTE as an extension of its own foreign policy. It has also been accused of, for example, bugging the headquarters of the African Union which was built by Chinese construction firms. The Chinese government has denied the claims.

The move echoes the approach it took with Russian anti-virus software firm Kaspersky, who US intelligence has accused of being ‘too close' to the Russian government, allegations that Kaspersky has repeatedly denied.

However, the only evidence of Kaspersky compromising US security that has been publicly revealed so far has been unconvincing - a National Security Agency (NSA) staffer's home PC which ran Kaspersky Anti-Virus, on which he took home NSA malware to analyse, and which was picked up by the heuristic detection technology built-in to the anti-virus software, according to Kaspersksy's own report.

There have also been claims that Israeli intelligence broke into Kaspersky's network and observed in real-time the company's technology being used to scour users' PCs for the code names of US intelligence programs.