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Letters | Concerns over Huawei and China? Remember what Snowden said about US spying

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Why you can trust SCMP
Whistle-blower Edward Snowden is seen on a screen in a control room as he takes part in a meeting at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on March 15 via video conference from Russia. According to Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald, the US government has done what it accuses the Chinese of doing: implanting back-door surveillance tools in devices exported from the US. Photo: AFP
According to your article of March 29 (“Australia’s Huawei 5G ban is a ‘hedge’ against future Chinese aggression, says Turnbull”), the reason former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull gave for excluding Huawei and ZTE from the country’s 5G infrastructure in August 2018 is: “We have to, in an uncertain world, hedge against contingencies where people who we have friendly relations with, we may not necessarily be friends with in the future.”
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As your article points out: Australia, along with Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the United States, is a member of the Five Eyes alliance, an anglophone intelligence-sharing group that dates back to the early 1940s. Both Australia and New Zealand have banned Huawei, while other members are considering following suit, “under intense pressure from the US government”.

But, as revealed by CIA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the US could and did spy on its allies, because the National Security Agency tampered with US-made computer network devices.

So, shouldn’t all non-Eyes think twice before buying from the Eyes?

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Peter Lok, Heng Fa Chuen

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