Re: it's better to stick to reality
Surely if the UK decides to use some less expensive though probably equally vulnerable Huawei gear in its peripheral pond-life public networks then your super duper cleverer-than-anyone-else NSA will be able easily to continue snooping on us via the Huawei gear and indeed if the horrid Chinese are similarly clever then they are almost certainly already snooping on us via the non Chinese (and apparently vulnerability rich) gear we are using already anyway. I suspect the reality is that this would just be a shift on the dial of relative convenience for the respective agencies rather than some sort of dramatic new difference of kind. It would just mean the NSA would probably have to work a little bit harder and the Chinese would probably have to work a little less hard in order to get the kind of information they are both almost certainly already slurping daily from the UK anyway. Narrowly then I suppose it should come down to how much value the US gets from the UK being in the five eyes and if that value outweighs the extra inconvenience to the US of having to hack peripheral networks in the UK running on gear made by non US friendly manufacturers (useful practice - no?) but I think there are probably much wider economic issues and also all manner of longer term geo-political shit to be considered which is much more likely to be the true substance of this row.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
