US vs. Huawei: NSA Warns Against Countries Allowing Chinese Telecom Company Into 5G Networks

National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien said Tuesday that countries should beware of letting China's Huawei into their 5G networks, as it could give sensitive personal data to the Chinese communist government.

"So every medical record, every social media post, every email, every financial transaction, and every citizen of the country with cloud computing and artificial intelligence can be sucked up out of Huawei into massive servers in China," he told NPR.

He said that the Chinese government collects information on its citizens which it uses to assign a "social credit score" to each individual. That "social credit score" is used by the government to determine whether a Chinese citizen can do tasks such as boarding a plane or getting certain jobs.

"But what if China had a social credit score for every single person in the world?" O'Brien added. "What if, for democracies, China knew every single personal, private piece of information about any of us and then could use that to microtarget people to influence elections?"

The U.S. government has pushed back against Huawei on multiple fronts, claiming that the company is a national security threat.

The Trump administration has implemented a blacklist on Huawei products, barring American companies from doing business with the Chinese telecommunications giant. U.S. diplomats and representatives, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have attempted to persuade various countries against allowing Huawei onto their 5G networks.

Poland and Japan are two nations that have agreed to exclude Huawei from their 5G rollout. The Polish government has even signed an agreement with Washington to exclude Chinese companies from 5G in the central European country.

The U.K. has postponed its Huawei decision until after its general elections this month. Germany and Norway have both decided against banning the company from their 5G networks, while Hungary will be working very closely with Huawei on the central European country's 5G rollout.

South Korea launched the first nationwide 5G network using Huawei technology in April, defying U.S. warnings from November 2018.