Britain’s spy agency delivers a scathing assessment of the security risks posed by Huawei to the country’s telecom networks

The British government released a scathing assessment of the security risks posed by the Chinese telecom company Huawei to Britain’s telecom networks, as London weighs whether to heed US calls to bar the firm from the next-generation 5G network over fears it will enable spying by the Chinese government and potential cyberattacks. This is the second consecutive year the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ — the British spy agency equivalent to the US National Security Agency — has identified serious problems. This year, officials said they have found “further significant technical issues” in the firm’s engineering processes, as well as continued “concerning issues” in Huawei software, “leading to new risks” in Britain’s 4G telecom networks. Most ominously, the spy agency, which oversees a center that vets Huawei hardware and software for bugs and security vulnerabilities, said it can provide “only limited assurance” that the long-term national security risks can be managed in the Huawei equipment deployed in Britain, and that “it will be difficult” to manage the risk of future products until the current defects are fixed.