This September, a New York jury will finally evaluate whether the government's evidence matches its rhetoric
The most famous accusation against Huawei is not among the charges the jury will be asked to decide
When accusation becomes more important than evidence, history tends to remember another trial: Salem
For more than 14 years, Washington has waged a relentless campaign against telecom giant Huawei—and, by extension, Beijing.
The charge could not be more serious: Huawei hardware is a Trojan horse, a unique global security threat engineered for Chinese state espionage against the West.
"The Chinese Communist Party does not have a technical back door to Huawei. They have the front door," pomped then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in January 2020 during a diplomatic visit to London intended to pressure the UK into banning Huawei from its 5G networks.
It was a soundbite characteristic of America's campaign. Under intense pressure from Washington—driven by a barrage of sanctions, investigations, and trade bans—governments around the world spent billions on frantic rip-and-replace programs designed to purge Huawei hardware from their networks.
This September, political speechifying will at long last yield to sworn evidence in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn.
But the most telling part of the government's case, United States of America v. Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., et al. (Case No. 1:18-cr-00457) is what is missing.
The defining accusation—that Huawei is a tool for Chinese espionage—is entirely absent from the indictments that will be presented to the jury.
Let that sink in:
The United States is not charging Huawei for the crime that it has spent 14 years accusing it of.
Digital bigfoot
As a telecom journalist and telecom ombudsman, I always found the accusation that Huawei was a front for Chinese espionage puzzling.
The theory simply never made any sense at a technological level.
If your objective is espionage, why would you put your spyware in a telco switch—the one place you can be guaranteed carriers and law-enforcement agencies would look for it?
There are countless better places to put spyware: data centres, cloud platforms, applications, smartphones.
Modern digital infrastructure is replete with richer, easier, more distributed, and less conspicuous vantage points.
As the years passed, the hypothetical Huawei back door assumed the status of the Bigfoot of cybersecurity: frequently discussed, widely feared, endlessly searched for, but only ever photographed with a potato.
More importantly, the people who actually owned and operated the networks agreed.
I have never met a carrier executive who found Chinese spyware in their equipment. Nor have I met one who knew a colleague who had.
After commercial airline pilots, telecom executives are among the most risk-averse professionals on Earth. In the immortal words of the great American statesman Vanilla Ice, "if there was a problem, yo, they'd solve it."
What they made clear to me is that there wasn't.
Privately, and all around the world, senior executives at some of the largest carriers on the planet told me they saw the campaign for what they believed it to be: economic protectionism rather than digital protection.
The closest the United States has come to finding its Loch Ness Monster of telecom cybersecurity was when officials discovered a handful of modems installed in Chinese-made port cranes.
Even the U.S. Coast Guard said it had found no evidence that the devices were being used for spying. That did not stop Washington from treating the cranes as a national-security emergency.
Trial by fire
The fact—and facts, not narrative, are what matter in a courtroom—is that allegations are not evidence, indictments are not convictions, and political consensus is not proof.
For America, September is when the bill comes due.
The case is not even before a jury yet, but before the first witness is sworn, the government's lawyers have already suffered their first embarrassing pratfall.
The question is whether they possess a more solid evidentiary foundation supporting the other charges on their docket.
Do they "hold the cards," as our current POTUS would say?
We don't know yet.
But we do know one thing. Its ace card—the espionage claim it has trumpeted for fourteen years—is not even in the deck.
The Huawei trial is the ultimate put-up-or-shut-up moment in modern technology policy.
The logic bomb sitting at the centre of Washington's case is that the definitive allegation—the one most people associate with Huawei—is not one the government intends to prove in court.
It reminds me of another trial.
Salem, 1692.
There, an institution so certain of its own righteousness allowed accusation to substitute for proof, investing so deeply in a narrative of fear that questioning the dogma became harder than proving it.
Three centuries ago, Salem convinced itself that Goody Good was the villain. The accusation outpaced the evidence. Fear eclipsed facts.
The lesson of Salem was not that the accused was perfect. It was that the prosecutors were not nearly as wise, certain, or righteous as they imagined.
In twenty-first-century Brooklyn, the story may be set in a modern courtroom, but it's starting to look a lot like the same old witch hunt.
Related:
For more of my analysis of this and other essential topics in the global race to build the digital infrastructure transforming the world, click here.
And check back here Monday for my analysis of the credibility of the charges the U.S. government did include in its docket.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE is a communications analyst and USPTO-registered inventor examining how digital infrastructure — 5G, cloud, and AI — is reshaping industry, power and society, as well as underpinning the emerging, ubiquitous global digital economy. As anchor of FNTV and a longtime industry insider, he focuses less on growth narratives and more on execution, risk and how hyperscale technology is distorting markets, governance and society at scale.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.