[By Yang Yongliang/China.org.cn]

Founded in 1987, the Shenzhen-based Huawei is one of the world's leading providers of network equipment, and the world's third largest smartphone vendor. NSA spying on Huawei is not just for national security purposes as it claims. It is also working on behalf of Huawei's U.S. competitor CISCO.

It is ironic that in announcing the "indictment," the U.S. Department of Justice claimed that "success in the global market place should be based solely on a company's ability to innovate and compete, not on a sponsor government's ability to spy and steal business secrets." The U.S. government itself is the biggest violator of that principle.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald who wrote about Edward Snowden's revelations, talked about his new book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U. S. Surveillance State on the TV program "Democracy Now" on May 13. He said many documents show the purpose of the spying system is not to detect terrorist plots or national security plots, but is overwhelmingly economic in nature. They are spying on behalf of the Department of Commerce, which the NSA considers one of its "customers."

Greenwald specifically stated that "a big part of the motive (of the U.S. government) in warning the world off Chinese products is so that the world will instead buy the products that the NSA can invade."

How does the NSA invade those products? According to Greenwald, it physically intercepts packages sent by CISCO to customers from FedEx or the U.S. mail service, brings them to NSA headquarters, opens the packages, and plants backdoor devices on the devices, reseals them and sends them on to the unwitting users, who then provide Internet service to large numbers of people, all of which is instantly redirected into the repositories of the NSA.

Edward Snowden, speaking to German TV in January, confirmed that "the U.S. is engaged in economic spying."

For the "collect it all" surveillance state that is the United States to accuse others of economic spying is "gross hypocrisy" as Greenwald puts it. In Greenwald's words, "The mission of the NSA is to eliminate privacy globally. Literally, their institutional mandate is to collect and store and when they want, analyze and monitor all forms of electronic communication that take place between human beings around the planet."

The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.shenbo75.com/opinion/zhaojinglun.htm

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