Business / Gadgets

Beijing slams spying on Huawei

By Chen Weihua and Cai Chunying in Washington and Zhang Yuwei in New York (China Daily) Updated: 2014-03-25 07:16

Huawei has some 150,000 employees across the world. Its products and solutions are used in more than 170 countries, serving about one-third of the global population.

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"The security of our networks and our products is the highest priority for this company," William Plummer, Huawei's vice-president for external affairs, told China Daily on Sunday.

"This is an inflection point for the global technology industry. It's a call for action for all ICT (information and communications technology) leaders to rally around the common cause and that common cause is restoration of confidence in the information society."

Plummer added confidence in networks and the Internet and in the very fabric of the information society is collapsing because of these types of activities. He said Huawei has publicly communicated its commitment to working with its peers in a private and public partnership to develop standards and best practices in order to raise the security assurance bar and restore confidence in global networks.

"Now is the time for the industry to come together and develop mechanisms and make it harder for these kinds of activities to take place," Plummer said.

Plummer said Huawei is committed to its customers, employees and American company partners from which Huawei purchased almost one-third of its components.

The news about the attack against Huawei came just one day after US President Barack Obama met on Friday with US tech company executives, including Google Inc's Eric Schmidt, Facebook Inc's Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Inc's Reed Hastings, Dropbox Inc's Drew Houston, Palantir Technologies Inc's Alex Karp and Box Inc's Aaron Levie. Many of them have publicly rebuked the NSA's alleged infringement through its massive global surveillance programs.

The Friday meeting did not seem to calm the anger. "While the US government has taken helpful steps to reform its surveillance practices, these are simply not enough," Facebook said in a statement after the meeting.