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The first wave of concerns about Huawei had more to do with cell towers than cellphones. Huawei is one of the main suppliers for network infrastructure (basically, the hardware that your phone connects to), alongside Ericsson and Qualcomm. As carriers raced to build out 5G networks, lawmakers rushed to keep Huawei hardware out of whatever was being built.
There was never any hard evidence of backdoors in Huawei’s cell towers — but, as hawks saw it, there didn’t need to be. As a hardware provider, Huawei needs to be able to deploy software the same way Apple deploys iOS updates. But as long as there was a pipeline from Huawei’s China headquarters to cell towers in the US, there would be a strong risk of Chinese surveillance agencies using it to sneak malware into the network, whether they did it with Huawei’s help or by hacking themselves into the middle. As intelligence agencies saw it, the risk was just too great.
That might not seem fair, but it’s at least a logical response to a real concern. Cell networks are a very tempting target for espionage, and China has a long history of this kind of spying.
