Sugath Kulatunga

There is a raging controversy on the proposal to privatise SLT. The Sectoral Committee in Parliament has said that it will be a threat to national security. The Sectoral Committee on Finance has stepped in to declare that it is not. There are comments supporting the privatization proposal from some professionals. It seems the debate has become political and not evidence based. The following excerpt from a longer article on the ban on Huawei in the USA may help to clear some of the doubts whether a telecom company can become a national security threat.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-huawei-threat-us-national-security

Note: Data is as of February 2023.

Source: CFR research.

Cyber espionage. The main concern, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, is that the Chinese government could use Huawei to spy.

Officials, primarily in the United States but also in Australia and several other countries, point to intentionally vague Chinese intelligence laws that could be used to force Huawei to hand over data to the Chinese government. (The United States has not publicly provided evidence that this has happened.) There are also concerns that Huawei’s 5G infrastructure could contain backdoors that allow the Chinese government to collect and centralize massive quantities of data and give Beijing the necessary access to attack communications networks and public utilities. In 2022, an FBI investigation found that Huawei equipment can be used to disrupt U.S. military communications, including those about the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Congress began receiving warnings about Huawei as early as 2012, when a U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report [PDF] concluded that using equipment made by Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese telecommunications company, could undermine core U.S. national security interests.” In 2018, six U.S. intelligence chiefs, including the directors of the CIA and FBI, cautioned Americans against using Huawei products, warning that the company could conduct undetected espionage.”

At the heart of Washington’s concerns is 5G, the latest technology standard for cellular networks, which provides faster download speeds for smartphones, connects devices in smart cities, and supports autonomous vehicles and robots. 5G is a different type of risk versus 4G or 3G. It’s much harder to separate the core from the periphery,”

says CFR’s Adam Segal. Once you have those risks, you have to trust the company much more. But it is difficult to trust Huawei, given the relationship between companies and the Communist Party.”