The feud between Huawei and the US government is not new but the company recently lost access to all the important hardware and software, thanks to the sanctions by the Trump administration. This is a big deal for Huawei since the company might not be able to manufacture smartphones altogether. However, Huawei is much more than just a smartphone brand. It’s one of the biggest companies in China and is currently leading the 5G race. With all that in mind, the lawmakers have expressed their concerns in the past and no one is actually happy to see one company dominating the 5G development. It’s not like the concerns are solely based on the fact that Huawei is leading the 5G race but the fact that there’s evidence suggesting wrongdoings on the company’s part. While researching on the topic, we came across an interesting article from PhoneRadar that summed up all the allegations made by lawmakers in the past. The article supported those allegations with proper evidence suggesting Huawei might not be innocent after all. The article goes back to the early 2000s when the Chinese hackers got the passwords of Nortel’s top executives and they accessed the proprietary IP which was then used by Huawei to sell the same services at lower costs forcing Nortel out of the business. Huawei was also accused by Cisco for I.P. infringement and even said that Huawei stole the software code of its routers. The lawsuit was later settled with no details revealed to the public. Fast forward to 2007, FBI found $30,000 cash and a bag full of classified Motorola documents on an employee who was connected to Huawei. The plan was to copy Motorola’s wireless technology for Huawei phones and the case was later settled confidentially. Learn more by visiting OUR FORUM.

Germany's Interior Minister Horst Seehofer purportedly wants to force messaging providers such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Threema to provide plain text chats to law enforcement agencies on a court order as reported by Der Spiegel and from a number of other German news outlets. This means that the leader of the Christian Social Union (CDU) basically wants to ban messaging end-to-end encryption since for keeping cleartext logs of encrypted chats the apps would either have to be injected with some sort of backdoor or the encryption removed altogether. Seehofer is also known for his "zero tolerance" policy toward criminals and for calling for "video surveillance at every hot spot in the country" according to Deutsche Welle. "Messenger services such as WhatsApp or Telegram should be obliged to record the communications of their customers and to send them to authorities - in a readable form, ie unencrypted," as Der Spiegel reports [automated translation]. Also, "providers who do not fulfill this obligation should be banned by order of the Federal Network Agency for Germany" with the new rules to be enacted by the end of the year. The proposal also says that the freedom to use messaging encryption has to be "reconciled with the unavoidable needs of security agencies" to have access to communications when mandated by a court. According to the German Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community proposal, messaging apps can use encrypted communication by default but they would also have to ensure "state-of-the-art access to the contents of communication as a legally regulated exemption for their users". Further details are posted on OUR FORUM.