The standards for 5G or fifth generation cellular mobile were officially documented in 2017 but a lot of hype preceded this event.
The rollout of fifth-generation cellular networks around the world will likely be a defining geopolitical event of 2020 adding another dimension to the COVID-19 pandemic and its many conspiracy theories. But Western consumers including those in the South Pacific and Fiji could easily mistake 5G for just another marketing ploy for early adopters — to the detriment of democracies worldwide.
When the number in the corner of our Smartphone screens changed from 3G to 4G, few of us even noticed. Ditto when LTE, another step in the evolution of cellular networks, appeared as an alternative to 4G.
Still, for the better part of the past two years, mobile carriers have been hyping 5G — which, they promise, will offer data speeds of up to 100 times faster than current connections.
Technically the specs mention speeds of 1Gbps or more but this is usually under lab conditions and tech futurists say fifth-generation networks will support a plethora of Internet-connected sensors, vehicles, appliances, and other devices that will perform functions yet unimagined.
Basically provide the connectivity backbone for the Internet of Things (IoT).
Amid this much public indifference, 5G may seem like an unlikely battleground between China and the West.
Yet the transition to 5G may mark the point, after decades of Chinese integration into a globalised economy, when Beijing’s interests diverge irreconcilably from those of the US, the European Union, and their democratic peers.
Because of a failure of imagination, Western powers risk capitulating in what has become a critical geopolitical arena. Simply put, neither the American nor the European public seems to view the networks that supply Snapchat and YouTube clips and Uber cars as anything close to a cybersecurity threat.
Some of the world’s leading telecom-equipment manufacturers, including Huawei and ZTE, are Chinese companies with murky ownership structures and close ties to China’s authoritarian one-party government.
Many in the US national-security sector rightly fear that equipment made by these companies could allow Beijing to siphon off sensitive personal or corporate data i.e. become an invisible spy networks.
Or it could also use concealed kill switches to cripple critical infrastructure during an active war – whether declared or not. The ongoing posturing allows China’s leadership geopolitical leverage through commercial enterprise.
The US and Five-eyes alliance, which includes our Pacific neighbours Australia and New Zealand, have agreed in principle to not “trust Chinese firms with critical network infrastructure”.
The framing of 5G primarily as a consumer-technology matter works to China’s benefit. The Huawei and ZTE network equipment is typically cheaper than the gear produced by the three suppliers based in democratic countries — the European firms Ericsson and Nokia and South Korea’s Samsung and our mobile carriers in Fiji made the switch years ago with earlier generation equipment.
Meanwhile, policymakers have viewed the 5G dispute first as a trade issue and secondly as a cybersecurity one.
The West has ample reason for caution about Chinese 5G suppliers. For one, the recent Chinese National Intelligence Law requirements enable access to customer data or otherwise engage in snooping or network-disruption activities.
Mandated into Hong Kong’s autonomous territory this has led to a lot of unease in the region.
Nation state actors in China’s public and private sectors have a past record of cyber attacks on the West, including stealing intellectual property from companies and sensitive personal information on citizens.
The case against Huawei isn’t just guilt by association.
The company itself is suspected of committing blatant corporate espionage: A US Government investigation from early 2019 cited highly specific demands by Huawei headquarters in China for information from engineers embedded in T-Mobile’s facility in Washington.
An email exchange supposedly exposed Huawei’s pressure on employees in the field to acquire guarded equipment and trade secrets; according to the US Justice Department.
Recent revelations have exposed how China’s ruling party exploits the full range of personal information it has amassed about its citizens — facial-recognition images, mandatory DNA samples, 24-hour GPS co-ordinates, and search-history and online-activity tracking, as well as plain old eavesdropping — to quash religious freedom and basic rights should give major pause to Western governments and infrastructure providers alike.
Does this sound familiar? Governments are using the COVID-19 pandemic to further muddy the waters and push political agendas onto unsuspecting citizens. The Scandinavian countries have already removed national tracking mobile apps for health purposes citing privacy violations.
European regulators are used to viewing the American tech industry as a rival, and they bristle today at taking direction from the US.
And despite the fact that two 5G suppliers are European, and EU officials have argued for “technological sovereignty”— a term most reasonably construed to mean technological independence from the US — member nations cannot agree on a joint policy.
The EU single market prides itself on principles of fair competition and an unwillingness to favor or reject a company because of its national origin, especially when its products are competitive, as Huawei’s are, on metrics such as price.
The failure to see 5G beyond the consumer lens is also a failure to understand Chinese companies as implements of state power as much as private entities in their own right.
The dispute over 5G isn’t the first time in recent history that economic infrastructure matters have overlapped with geopolitics in unhealthy ways.
The United States should ideally work with its European partners to reduce geopolitical dependence on China and protect privacy and human rights in a data-centric age.
But that will require Western policymakers and the public alike to conceive of 5G as something more than a consumer issue or a trade issue and devise a shared solution to protect the networks and critical infrastructure whose importance in our lives only continues to grow.
As Albert Einstein wisely remarked: ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’ This probably holds true for a lot of our global issues today.
* Ilaitia B. Tuisawau is a private cybersecurity consultant. The views expressed in this article are his and not necessarily shared by this newspaper. Mr Tuisawau can be contacted on ilaitia@cyberbati.com
