The White House has stepped up warnings to the UK about allowing Huawei into its 5G telecommunications networks, saying that any such move would pose a risk to MI5 and MI6, the British secret intelligence services.
Washington has now issued multiple warnings to London over the risks it associates with Huawei, the alleged state control and espionage risk, all denied by the Chinese tech giant. That said, the stakes have been raised somewhat in the latest rhetoric. O’Brien claimed the information at risk includes “nuclear secrets or secrets from MI6 or MI5,” with the clear implication that a compromise in network security would put intelligence sharing at risk, impacting the heart of the U.K. security establishment.
The U.K. and U.S. are the cornerstone members of the Five Eyes alliance that also includes Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There is essentially an open-access agreement to share top secret collection covering defence, national security and counter terrorism. To reassure its partners, the U.K. has previously said that Huawei would not be given access to the country’s core network, the data backbone, but would be limited to the edge, the radio technology out in the field. The U.S. argues that the pervasiveness of 5G renders such a distinction irrelevant.