OK, I've lived in the US but now live in China, where I once lived right down the road from a Huawei office. Recently, I was visiting my birthplace of Australia and met a friend who now manages IP networks for (one of?) the largest mobile data providers in the country. He said they were about to buy Huawei gear as it was cheaper and as featuresome as they required. Then the government came to visit. They said, you're welcome to buy it but there's no guarantee your licenses will be renewed. Of course, they didn't buy it.<p>There's a lot of this government and intelligence pressure on infrastructure providers going on. The general public is not informed. The situation appears to be global.<p><i>Our secret intelligence culture and process is antithetical to democracy, and enabling of plutocracy, neo-fascism, and the total corruption of our government.</i> - Robert David Steele, ex-Marine, ex-CIA, Open Source Intelligence Expert, 'The Open-source Everything Manifesto'<p>A lot of the US capacity to break in to networks seems to come from just being aggressive paying individual hackers to sell them exploits out of public view. Some of these people have said to me 'I know it's unethical, but it's what I enjoy and I'm good at - the only other market is organized crime'. It's a constant digital arms race where the public loses. Hopefully the governments of the world will realize the futility here and begin to redirect resources toward open source systems.