I have two sets of personal experiences that cause me concern when I hear the “Huawei as PRC front company” line in articles. As a young engineer at AT&T in the late ‘80s a senior engineer who was consulting with our small team broke it down for me that the DSP algorithms we were working on were probably being used for eavesdropping. He recused himself from the team after this discovery and this event I suppose left me a bit jaded.
Some 20 years later, I happened to meet some of the Huawei employees in their Botswana office while there on an extended visit. Seemed like the typical big co. field office. The office manager was so annoyed when the first of the Huawei stories came out. She responded with words to the effect “why all the U.S. hate? Why is it that a successful Chinese company can’t just be successful?”
I don't doubt that there’s a lot of questionable stuff going on at Huawei. This happens with companies operating in the confines of countries with extreme geopolitical goals. Those of you that have worked on federal contracts probably can attest to the murky relationship between government and company interests.
In terms of the human rights of PRC vs US, I am not a deep student of PRC. I will say that as a U.S. citizen I’ve experienced a sliding scale of human rights. The egregious human rights violations meted on on non-US citizens in Vietnam, GWOT, the current U.S. southern border situation, etc has been documented. The human rights violations of African Americans, indigenous Americans, LGBT Americans — these may be of less degree than that of PRC towards its citizens including ethnic minorities, but they are shameful nevertheless and painful (as I and many people that I care for have experienced) and demand a resolution.
The American citizens do have the rights to demand better accountability of their intelligence agency practices by voting in people who will enforce those practices. For several administrations running, they seem to have abandoned that responsibility.