Eli Lake, Columnist

U.S. Spies Think China Wants to Read Your E-Mail

The prospect of Chinese telecom Huawei working on the U.S. 5G cellular network raises alarms.

September 13, 2016 at 6:00 AM EDT

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

China's big brother?
Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

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For more than a decade, the U.S. military and intelligence community has quietly warned that the world's largest telecom equipment manufacturer, Huawei, is an arm of the People's Liberation Army and that its phones, circuits and routers are instruments of Chinese eavesdropping.

Now these agencies are starting a formal review, led by the FBI and the NSA, examining the national security implications of Huawei's potential participation in building the U.S. 5G wireless network, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

LEARN MORE