This feels like everyday news That Huawei has been targeted by Governments for privacy concerns in the devices that they sell.US was the first to shed light on the matter and numerous measures were taken to stop Huawei from doing any kind of security breaches, but Huawei claimed that it had no such intention whatsoever. This was followed by UK, which also considered Huawei to be using its devices to interchange data with the Chinese government. But Pakistan following this was unexpected.
Pakistan has gone through some difficult times with a constant threat of bombings and in accordance with that threat the PSCA (Punjab Safe City Authority) contracted Huawei to place 1800 CCTV cameras for constant monitoring of places. However, in recent months with the above-mentioned concerns regarding Huawei’s devices, the authority has pulled the WIFI cards from these cameras, which is quite uncommon to do so in the first place. The Founding Chief Operating Officer at Punjab Safe Cities Authority, Akbar Nasir Khan, said in a statement,
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It is always the choice of the parties in a contract to finalize the technical details and modules as per their requirements and local conditions.
Huawei has gone forward to explain that the cards were only installed for remote access, which is denied by the PSCA which claims that the access is already given through other needs so the need for the card wouldn’t arise. Even the terms of the contract had no mention of the installation of WIFI cards and yet, they were. The UK based cybersecurity firm that regularly checks the cabinets for PSCA also commented,
If you put a wi-fi card in then you’re potentially giving someone some other form of remote access to it. You might say it’s done for one purpose, but as soon as you do that it’s got the potential to be misused.
It seems to be that Huawei is getting a lot of stick from Governments and might just need to start clarifying the situation before its starts losing its customers.
