The Real Reason Why Symantec Sold Its Interest in Huawei Symantec

Finally the truth about why Symantec CEO Enrique Salem decided to sell Symantec's share of the Huawei Symantec joint venture is out, thanks to the New York Times:

Less than four years after Huawei Technologies and Symantec teamed up to develop computer network security products, the joint venture is being dismantled because Symantec feared the alliance with the Chinese company would prevent it from obtaining United States government classified information about cyberthreats.

However I'd like to point out that I called this on November 15th, 2011 in this blog post where I wrote:

My question is, what happened between May and October to make CEO Salem change his mind?
Could it have been this Washington Times article last August about how four Senators and a Congressman were asking the Departments of Defense and Energy to look into the sale of H-S parts to a government research lab at the University of Tennessee? Or perhaps it was the release of an Open Source Center report on Huawei's Chairwoman Sun YaFang's past with the equivalent of China's CIA, the Ministry of State Security?
Or perhaps it was that the ludicrous nature of the relationship between a Chinese company with State affiliations and a security company who's supposed to protect their customers from espionage activities from that same State finally sunk in to Salem's brain?  No, it probably wasn't that.

And while the joint venture may be over, remember that a lot of Huawei equipment has already been sold to the U.S. government including DOD and NASA by Huawei Symantec through channel partners like MPAK and Dell Force 10 Networks. To make matters worse, no one is testing for backdoors in firmware updates to any of the hardware manufactured in China; not just Huawei but Dell's servers as well.

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Symantec CEO Salem Needs To Get His Priorities Straight

I just read that Symantec (NYSE: SYMC) CEO Enrique Salem wants to either increase Symantec's stake in Symantec Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. or sell shares to the public through an IPO, with a decision to be made by year's end. It's bad enough that the joint venture was formed in the first place. Why Mr. Salem would think that a leading U.S. security software company should form a business partnership with a Chinese company with strong ties to the State Council and Peoples Liberation Army is beyond me; particularly when the U.S. government has been so resistant to agreeing to Huawei's attempts to acquire U.S. companies or to buy Huawei products.

There's no lack of information about the Peoples Republic of China when it comes to informatized warfare, corporate espionage, technology transfer, information acquisition and processing, etc. Besides my own work on the subject, there's stellar work being done by Dr. James Mulvenon and LTC (ret) Timothy L. Thomas among others. So it can't be a question that Symantec's CEO is not aware of the problem. That leaves only two possibilities:

1. That he doesn't believe it to be true
2. That he doesn't care

If it's the former, then I'd be happy to arrange a briefing for him. If it's the latter, then I hope that he'll reconsider his obligation as a citizen of the U.S. to not engage in business practices that could negatively impact the security interests of our nation. Mr. Salem, you clearly have an obligation to your company, your board, and your shareholders to maximize profits. I hope that when you celebrate Memorial Day on May 30th, that you'll consider how to balance that obligation with the one that you owe to your country.

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