Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1115758
3 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 12 MAY 2019 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 "Whilst everyone has a right to his or her opinion, I prefer not to comment. This project is going through design and risk considerations before it is implemented. Based on our risk assessment so far, and the design and security architec- ture, we have no reason to be- lieve that data can be exploited for authoritarian purposes," Cuschieri said. Malta's Safe City CCTV sys- tem is expected to be deployed in 'crime prone' villages, such as Paceville. Cuschieri said that the Mal- tese government and Hua- wei have already cooperated together under an MOU on innovative technologies and knowledge transfer in "Safe City applications in experi- mental lab conditions, and not in public spaces." "The implementation of pub- lic space advanced surveillance in Paceville and other places in due course is a different matter. It will involve various hardware and software technologies, some of which may be Huawei technology re-used from the previous phase. Such providers of technology, including Hua- wei, would be suppliers to Safe City Malta Ltd," he said. Cuschieri said any pub- lic space surveillance will go through all necessary legal and regulatory processes. Key steps will include a Data Protection Impact Assessment and neces- sary approvals from the data protection commissioner. "We will not put the cart before the horse. The DPIA will be pre- sented to the IDPC by the Data Controller in due course when the project reaches that stage," he said. The United States is raising international concerns over Huawei, a 5G vendor which it suspects has "unchecked or ex- trajudicial control" by China, and which could be used to conduct espionage, or disrupt critical services provided by the 5G network. The use of 5G – the fifth gen- eration of wireless technology – will be transformative for society, providing up to 100 times faster connections than 4G networks. Most important- ly, 5G will enable new critical infrastructure services that will power autonomous vehicles and transportation, and auto- mated manufacturing. "A significant cause for con- cern are a number of Chinese laws that compel their compa- nies to cooperate with intel- ligence and security services without independent judicial controls," Strayer said in an interview this week with the press. The US has prohibited the federal government from using services provided by Huawei or ZTE or other high-risk compa- nies. "We think that a true as- sessment of technologies that are being provided such as by Huawei that contain, as the United Kingdom just found, hundreds of vulnerabilities in their software, would, over the long term, be potentially more costly than other alternative vendors that come from Fin- land or Sweden or South Ko- rea," Strayer said. The United Kingdom, through their Huawei oversight board report, has also noted hundreds of vulnerabilities and systemic engineering problems with Huawei technologies. The US is alerting all EU countries that putting Hua- wei or other untrustworthy vendors in any part of the 5G telecommunications network is a risk, even at the edge of a network. "Having potentially compromised equipment and software provided by vendors in any part of that network is an unacceptable risk," Strayer said. He said that should coun- tries like the UK allow Huawei into their 5G network, the US would "re-assess how we are sharing information with those countries to ensure that we are protecting the information that we are sharing with them." However, no single European country has gone ahead and banned Huawei. Strayer said that what Eu- ropean countries should put forth are security practices into their consideration of 5G net- works. "Over time if principles re- lated to the influence of third- party countries are embodied in the European Commission recommendation… that should lead inevitably to the ban of companies that are subject to the type of control that they are in China." As recently as March, the European Commission issued a recommendation that coun- tries rolling out their 5G as a security consideration should think about other non-tech- nical factors like the model of governance and the track re- cord of the country where the vendor is located. Huawei and the Chinese Gov- ernment have repeatedly de- nied US allegations that Hua- wei equipment poses a security risk, claiming that the US has not offered any concrete evi- dence. China has been accused of us- ing data to assign social credit scores, to then conduct surveil- lance against citizens, and use that information for the incar- ceration of over a million Uig- hur Muslims into re-education camps. mvella@mediatoday.com.mt NEWS Robert Strayer Huawei Safe City risk "A significant cause for concern are a number of Chinese laws that compel their companies to cooperate with intelligence and security services without independent judicial controls"