The Trump administration’s decision to block American companies from providing software and components to Huawei will not actually make the U.S. more secure, according to a majority of experts surveyed by The Post.
He was among 61 percent of respondents to The Network — an ongoing, informal survey of more than 100 cybersecurity experts from government, academia and the private sector — who said the ban was a bad idea. If the effort “to reduce [China’s] overall dependence on the U.S. tech sector is successful,” warned Stamos, who’s now a Hoover fellow at Stanford University, China “could emerge as the indispensable nation in consumer technology.”
Chris Finan, cybersecurity director on the National Security Council during the Obama administration who’s now CEO of Manifold Technology, called the ban an “act of self-immolation in the name of security” and argued it “will do nothing to change Huawei’s or Chinese government behaviour over the long term.”
“Huawei has acted in bad faith for many years, and it’s no surprise it is finally catching up to them,” said Dave Aitel, a former NSA researcher and chief security technical officer at Cyxtera Technologies. Even some supporters of the ban, however, worried it might have some negative outcomes for global cybersecurity. Betsy Cooper, a policy director at the Aspen Institute and a former DHS attorney, worried we might be “entering a world in which big powers build their own technology in-house, and smaller states have to choose between them.”