The Ombudsman avoids investigating the decision of the Ministry of the Interior, headed by Fernando Grande-Marlaska, to leave the storage of Police and Civil Guard wiretaps in the hands of the Chinese company Huawei. In its response to a complaint from Clean Hands – which considers that in this way the fundamental rights to privacy and security of citizens are endangered – the institution chaired by Ángel Gabilondo refuses to carry out any action in this regard because it is not competent “in matters of national security.”
In his letter, the general secretary of the group, Miguel Bernad, warned of the risk that Huawei – to which the Interior awarded the contracts for the management and storage of these judicially authorized telephone interceptions within the framework of investigations – could provide China with “police and judicial data stored on the servers”, violating the privacy of citizens and “endangering their security and that of our country”.
As Clean Hands highlighted, Chinese legislation obliges every company in that country to provide “any state intelligence work secrets of which they have knowledge.” In addition, he recalled that the European Commission has warned on several occasions of the “potential risk” that having Huawei as a supplier poses to the security of the EU and its citizens due to the “security and governance laws” of the People’s Republic of China.
There are no complaints from citizens
But the response to Clean Hands, signed by Teresa Jiménez-Becerril, first deputy of the Ombudsman, emphasizes that the competent bodies in matters of national security are the Cortes Generales, the Government, the President of the Executive, the ministers, the National Security Council, the Government delegates and the regional and local authorities. But not, the Ombudsman emphasizes.
As highlighted in that response, it is a different matter if a citizen had been affected and had gone to a public administration “reporting in specific cases” that they were directly affected by “the improper use of their data” and had not been adequately attended to. A case of these characteristics, he emphasizes, “would be within the scope of possible supervision of this institution.”
Well, it would be, he explains, “about the supervision” of the actions of public administrations linked to “the protection of the fundamental rights of citizens.” But this supervision, he clarifies, cannot be referred to “the award itself”, but to “concrete facts after it” and to the presentation of actions or omissions of public administrations (not the Judiciary or companies) “in response to citizen requests.”
The Chinese company’s support system to preserve and classify communications legally intercepted by State Security Forces – Clean Hands recalled – is the OceanStor 6800 V5, “a line of high-performance storage servers developed by Huawei.”
The US warning
“There is such concern that the Huawei company could provide sensitive information collected from said police eavesdropping” – said Manos Limpas – that the directors of the intelligence committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States – Tom Cotton and Rick Crawford, respectively – sent a letter on July 16 to the US Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, alerting her of the possible risks for her country.
In fact, he added, he urged the head of United States Intelligence to “review” the intelligence sharing agreements with the Government of Spain “in order to guarantee that any information shared with the Spanish Intelligence, Defense and State Security services does not reveal national security secrets of the United States to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
The US senator and congressman highlighted that Huawei “has close ties to the CCP and is subject to China’s National Intelligence and Data Security laws, which require Huawei to provide the CCP with access to any information that the party deems necessary.”
Hence, the complainant group warned of the danger that “for security reasons of the Chinese dictatorial regime and the bloody Chinese Communist Party”, the company could provide the Chinese regime, a “non-allied foreign power”, with these stored police and judicial data from the wiretaps.