We all remember the news that made headlines back in December 2018; arrest of Wanzhou Meng, CFO of Huawei. Reports are surfacing stating that when the tech leader was arrested, she was carrying an iPhone 7 Plus, iPad Pro, and MacBook Air. Meng was taken into custody by Canadian authorities at the request of the US because her company is suspected of having been involved in breaking trade sanctions with Iran.
As per the court filings, the suite of Apple products was seized by Canadian police when it captured Meng on 1st December 2018. At the time of arrest, she only had one Huawei device with her, the Porsche Design Huawei Mate 20 RS. The Apple devices are part of the list in the court documents that contains the request for extraction of data. The court order was granted with Justice Heather Holmes of the British Columbia Supreme Court. It requested that the Royal Canadian Mounted obtain the data from the said devices and procure it to her lawyers.
The request also involves resealing of the devices. Two copies of the data pulled from the sealed devices and the sealed devices shall be placed in an exhibit locker. The fact that Meng was carrying Apple’s products is shocking because of the fact that the company has a strict and public policy about its employees using devices from the competitors.
It was reported back in January that two employees of Huawei were given quite severe punishments after they made use of an iPhone for posting a message to the company’s official Twitter account. The two employees were demoted and also suffered from pay cuts. The news that Meng was carrying Apple’s products has raised several questions with the prime question being that why does she not trust the hardware of her own company?
There’s also a heated debate going on about the use of Huawei’s technology in 5G networks. It has been reported that New Zealand and Australia have already gone back on deals with the Huawei and that the United States has declared that the use of Huawei’s product is a threat to the national security. The European Union has ignored the call from the United States to ban the use of Huawei’s products but has proposed enhanced data-sharing around possible security threats from suspicious hardware use.
We are waiting to see how this will develop and what will be the role of Huawei in the 5G networks.
