Re: Right ... but perhaps for the wrong reasons
"So the question is not what China intends, but what it can do"
This goes against pretty much every standard the Western world stands for. China COULD compel Huawei to put in backdoors. But then again Huawei kit is probably the most closely-studied kit in the world, and it is trivially easy to compare firmware releases to make sure that the kit you have is running the same version as a trusted reference version. It might be more difficult to check that the hardware you get isn't a one-off specially modified version instead of the standard one, but the organisations likely to be targeted in this way are either big enough to have the resources for deep checks or would not be buying Huawei kit anyway.
For the vast majority of commercial customers and 100% of retail customers, having eg GCHQ check out the kit is a perfectly acceptable safeguard, indeed one which they do not even get from other vendors' kit (eg Cisco) which might be backdoored with other countries' spying malware.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
