Chinese infrastructure firm Huawei has been getting a lot of heat from lawmakers in the US because of some paranoid delusions that there’s a plot by the Chinese military to spy on the communications of the American people. Back in 2008 Huawei lost a huge contract to Sprint for those reasons. It’s 2011 now and Huawei isn’t giving up. They’re a finalist for a contract to build a new 4G LTE network for U.S. Cellular, the 6th largest operator in America that boasts over 6 million customers. That’s made Republican Senators Jon Kyl, Saxby Chambliss, Richard Burr, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, and Republican Representative Darrell Issa a bit jumpy, so they decided to send Barack Obama a letter asking for a “permanent legislative solution” to ban Huawei from ever selling their gear on American shores.
What’s Huawei to do? They’ve offered, on numerous occasions, governments to send officials to their factories to exam their equipment and even comb through their source code. They say that the “falsehoods” they’ve been accused of “have had significant and negative impact on our business activity.” We believe them. In other, more positive news, Huawei is actively working with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology to test a 4G LTE network for use in public-safety networks. It’s the first such network that will be deployed on a nation wide scale, so all emergency services (think police, ambulance, fire department) can have access to a high speed network, free of congestion caused by teenagers streaming HD YouTube videos to their phones.
For a country that’s hell bent on promoting democracy and capitalistic values all over the world, we’re a little disappointed that this 21st century version of McCarthyism even exists. Sure, Grandpa is allowed to spit nasty comments about people from other countries because he’s damn near lost his mind, but people in power … what’s their beef?