USA says they won't be friends any more with countries that use Huawei equipment, no intelligence, no embassy, no military base

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has confirmed that Uncle Sam will no longer provide top-secret intelligence to countries that use Huawei equipment in their core networks.

Speaking to Fox Business on Thursday, Pompeo said allies using the Chinese vendor's gear in their critical infrastructure can't be trusted to keep confidential info hush-hush, for fear their equipment might be bugged and transmitting US intelligence back to Beijing.

"If a country adopts this and puts it in some of their critical information systems, we won’t be able to share information with them,” Pompeo said. "In some cases there’s risk – we won’t even be able to co-locate American resources, an American embassy and American military outpost.”

The statements more or less formalize a series of hints the US has been dropping in recent months to European governments that they should not adopt Huawei devices in their core networks. Earlier this month, Pompeo hinted that America would withhold intel from countries that were using Huawei gear, but until now had stopped short of declaring a firm policy.

The US administration has already more or less banned Huawei from the public sector in the Land of the Free by blocking government agencies from using its gear and preventing any telco that gets government funding (read: all of them) from buying Huawei hardware.

[link to www.theregister.co.uk (secure)]