Governments routinely use the internet to spy on people and organisations, and to steal sensitive and classified information - and we'd all better get used to it.
That is the message from Chinese' networking company Huawei's head of security operations, John Suffolk, who told the Australian Financial Review that governments have always done so, and always will.
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Suffolk said that spying was the "second oldest profession", adding that no-one should be "surprised that any government around the world is trying to find out what other governments around the world are doing".
His comments in the Australian press follow claims that hackers working on behalf of China's government had gained access to classified designs of US weapons systems.
Huawei kit is used in the UK's internet backbone after the company beat Marconi Systems to a key contract in BT's major 21st Century Network (21CN) initiative. Marconi was subsequently sold to Ericsson.
In the US, the company has faced opposition from congressmen who believe that the company should be shut out of the US market on national security grounds. It was also barred from bidding for contracts in Australia's A$37.4bn (£23.8bn) national broadband network project over concerns of the level of cyber attacks believed to emanate from China.
Huawei itself was founded in 1988 by Ren Zhengfei, a former officer in the People's Liberation Army, but formed as a private company. Today it has more than 140,000 staff, with just under half engaged in research and development at 20 locations around the world, including Germany, Sweden, Ireland, India, Russia, and Turkey.
Eugene Kaspersky, meanwhile, has criticised Huawei for its lack of transparency, fuelling suspicions over its motives. For example, it has long been believed that the company has too close a relationship with founder Zhengfei's former employer, while Zhengfei himself has shied away from press interviews.
The founder of Russian anti-virus software maker Kaspersky, told the Australian Financial Review: "I wouldn't have closed the door on journalists and I would've answered all their questions and invited people to the company to meet the top managers and key engineers."
