BRUSSELS — Spain’s multimillion euro contract with Huawei to store judicial wiretaps could lead to foreign interference, European Commission tech chief Henna Virkkunen said Wednesday.
Spanish outlet The Objective reported in July that Huawei won a €12.3 million contract from the Ministry of the Interior to store the country’s judicially authorized wiretaps used by both law enforcement agencies and intelligence services — a decision that drew sharp criticism from some officials and analysts.
In response to a question from an EU lawmaker, Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech and security, said the decision “can potentially create a dependency on a high-risk supplier in a critical and sensitive sector.”
Such a dependency, she said, “would increase the risk of foreign interference.”
Spain’s interior ministry said in a statement to POLITICO that the contract “does not entail any security risk and complies with the levels required in the National Security Scheme.” Spanish interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said on Sep. 9 that security services are in control of the data on the servers and that it would not be possible to extract the data.
Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In recent years, Brussels and a large group of EU capitals have called for a careful approach to the use of Chinese technology and particularly to Huawei, which is seen as a high-risk vendor under criteria set out in 2020 under a 5G “toolbox” security exercise.
However, the European Commission has estimated that only 10 countries have fully implemented the toolbox; others have done so partially or not at all. The Commission itself has committed to “avoid[ing] exposure of its own corporate communications networks to mobile networks using Huawei and ZTE,” Virkkunen said in Wednesday’s response.
The Spanish government more recently canceled a separate contract with Telefonica over the use of Huawei equipment, Reuters reported.
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