A report from Holland made serious allegations against Huawei, China’s tech giant that supplied mobile cellphone network equipment for KPN, a Dutch mobile telecom company that also operates in Belgium, Germany and France. According to the report, Huawei was able to monitor any calls that subscribers made, even including the Prime Minister and several cabinet ministers.
According to reports from The Daily Mail on April19, “Huawei staff were able to monitor all of KPN’s mobile users and eavesdrop on their private conversations. According to the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, the staff even knew which numbers the police or intelligence agencies were tapping.”
“The newspaper cited a report that consultancy firm Capgemini prepared for KPN, which it said flagged that Huawei could have been accessing users’ calls in 2010 without KPN knowing.”
“Huawei was, allegedly, even able to monitor phone calls that the former Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, government ministers and Chinese dissidents made.”
Ma Yongtao, a Chinese citizen movement activist living in exile in the Netherlands, told Radio Free Asia that this is a real-life version of the movie “The Lives of Others.” Ma said, “Unlike the former East German regime, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been practicing high-tech totalitarianism not only in China, but around the globe. The CCP allows Huawei to enter the Western market as a private company with a low price and then it acts as a tool for its expansion.”
According to an anonymous source, Huawei remains a key supplier to KPN. This even includes the radio antenna equipment for its 5G network. This means that the company’s mobile network now runs almost entirely on Huawei equipment and technology. The source warned that once the Western governments start to monitor Huawei, Huawei can immediately turn off its surveillance functions. In Europe, he said, if these telecom companies cannot remove Huawei equipment, the security risks will remain.
The Daily Mail added, “The report’s findings were so shocking that the internal report was kept secret, de Volkskrant reports. … ‘The continued existence of KPN Mobile is in serious jeopardy as licenses can be revoked or the government and businesses can lose their trust in KPN if it becomes known that the Chinese government can eavesdrop on KPN mobile numbers and shut down the network,’ the report said.”
The report disclosed that Huawei, as early as 2004, was acquiring the information of the then Dutch telecom company Telfort, which was later merged with KPN. In 2009, KPN started using Huawei’s network technology and hired six Huawei employees to work at its headquarters in the Hague.
KPN switched to working with Ericsson and Nokia only after the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD issued an alert and launched a security investigation into the matter. After the report came to light, KPN said it found no evidence of wiretapping by Huawei and insisted that it had not outsourced its core network to Huawei.
Source: The Daily Mail, April 19, 2021
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9487631
Radio Free Asia, April 20, 2021
https://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/nd-tap-04202021114941.html