> There is magical thinking involved if someone thinks that base stations alone completely break national security.
One thing that base stations need, by their nature, is total surveillance of location and unique identification of devices. It seems to me that these together are a major threat to national security, ignoring all the other things base stations have access to.
To cut it short. No, those databases are not stored in base stations, not even close. They are part of core network.
In LTE your handset talks to base transceiver station who talks to eNB who talks to MME who talks to HSS where the data is physically located. MME (Mobility Management Entity) is already part of the evolved Core Huawei has no access to that. Even MME keeps data just temporarily. This all happens in control plane.
If Huawei supplies transceiver stations or eNB's it's nowhere near the point where it could store and distribute user information or track them and not be noticed immediately.
It is not about where your metrics are conventionally stored. Your base station is measuring your gain, all the time; if all your base stations are Huawei, then you can be located quite reliably, then add the other signals the network gives the base station for QoS, this does not seem all that difficult. There is no reason that information can't be gathered through a different channel and analyzed.
I don't know why y'all are lacking imagination all of a sudden on this one matter, but I hope you come around.
It would be prudent to push secure protocols that didn't require these things. eg scrap the IMSI, rotating ephemeral IMEI, network-independent VOIP, and blinded bearer tokens for payment.
But governments intrinsically see surveillance as an unquestioned good and likely wouldn't even approve such protocols for overt telecom use, never mind helping to develop them. The public has already been pwnt by design - this whole topic is just squabbling over who gets the proceeds.
One thing that base stations need, by their nature, is total surveillance of location and unique identification of devices. It seems to me that these together are a major threat to national security, ignoring all the other things base stations have access to.