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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
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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