When you're the second-largest supplier of communications infrastructure in the world and your president is an ex-member of the Chinese military, suspicions of espionage -- warranted or not -- are pretty much a foregone conclusion. Indeed, Huawei has suffered a couple of high-profile business setbacks in the past year over vague concerns that the company could be some sort of Trojan horse for Chinese intelligence, and they're fed up: after being pressured into shelving a planned acquisition of server virtualization firm 3Leaf Systems' intellectual property by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, they've published a lengthy open letter that implores the government to fully vet the company to put to rest any concerns or fears it has.
The gist of the letter is that Huawei is owned by its employees, not the Chinese government, its loans are commercial, its products are continually audited by third-party companies for security, and the tax breaks it gets from the government are consistent with what private corporations in other countries receive. Huawei also manages to quote both Obama and Lincoln in the letter -- just to make sure it has both Democrats and Republicans covered, we suppose -- and concludes by saying it believes that "any thorough government investigation will prove that Huawei is a normal commercial institution and nothing more." Sounds like a challenge to us.
