An interesting threat vector arises here for Huawei... Ignore all the stuff about backdoors and such for a minute. I wonder if the administration fears that Huawai could simply attenuate their cell tower signals at a high wattage to disrupt all sorts of things. I never thought of that before - "5G as a weapon". Definitely a weird world. I need to start reading Judge Dredd again to start getting caught up on the futur…
IIRC: In the late-2019 BBC Click interview with GCHQ on the subject of Huawei, 5G, and security the spokesperson said information security wasn't an issue as we have end-to-end to handle that, the greatest risk was remote shutdown of the network. I assumed they're alluding to "in a time of war", falling back to non-5G wouldn't seem to be a big problem ... but then lots of our comms send to run on Huawei hardware alre…
That said, I agree with you about Huawei and non-5G. We shouldn't be talking about banning them on 5G, we should be talking about banning them (and anyone outside of the western alliance, really) from selling gear in our countries period. National security takes precedent. China doesn't even let reporters from the NYT in their country ffs.
But whatever. Politicians are reactive and don't understand cybersecurity and the few that do don't have the sway or incentives to really push for this. Though I will say one thing, in a cyberwar we'd brick China just as badly as they would brick us, so at least we have MAD working for us.