The Silent Thinker
By Dindo Danao
NO LESS THAN a former magistrate from the highest court of the land has ruled that allowing a Chinese state-owned company to establish communication facilities within Philippine military camps poses a clear and present danger.
Senior Associate Justice Antonio T. Carpio said this would compromise the country’s claim over the West Philippine Sea.
Allowing Dito Telecommunity Corp., a joint venture of local firm Udenna Corp. and China Telecom, to operate cell site towers within military camps would create a problem.
“Our problem is with the ChinaTel because it is a state-owned company of the People’s Republic of China,” said Carpio, who was reacting to reports that Dito Telecom agreed to pay the Armed Forces of the Philippines in cash to set up cell sites in military properties.
China has a law that any Chinese citizen or corporation must cooperate with the state intelligence services of China.
They are bound to give any information that they have to the Chinese intelligence agencies.
This is a problem because among the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, and if you ask the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, they all have agreed to ban Huawei because of the Chinese law.
Under this Chinese law, all Chinese companies and citizens are mandated to disclose to their intelligence services any information required by the intelligence service.
If the Philippines is allowing ChinaTel to install telecom equipment in military camps and the fact that we have a conflict with China, then there is indeed a problem.
China is stealing territories such as the West Philippine Sea and our maritime zones. We do not have that problem with Globe, PLDT, or with the Indonesians because we do not have territorial disputes with them.
This is unique to Dito and ChinaTel. We have to be very careful because we are fighting to preserve our territorial maritime zones in the West Philippine Sea and China is encroaching on our territory maritime zones.
On reports that Dito is tapping an American cyber security company to make sure there would be no breach on national security, this is a complicated and technical issue beyond the capability of simple cyber security firms.
This is very technical because the backdoors and the spyware can be embedded in the chips and they can be embedded in the software and the software then changes.
So, we have a big problem just keeping up with all of these developments. These backdoors are very complicated now and only state agencies can afford to develop this kind of backdoors and spywares. You can rely on McAfee, you can rely on other security services, but they are not that highly skilled when dealing with state-developed spywares.
Dito Telecom, on the other hand, plans to install 880 cellular towers across Mindanao, including 237 in Davao City, the hometown of its owner Dennis A. Uy.
DITO said they are aiming to have these infrastructures in place in time for their March 2021 commercial launch.
At least 79 towers in Davao City are already fully mobilized.
Dito has appointed four duly authorized representatives (vendors) to assist in site acquisition, namely: Huawei for North Luzon and the National capital Region, ZTE for South Luzon and the Visayas, Nokia-Huaxin for Mindanao, and Udenna Infrastructure.
Silent thinker asks, Folks do you really think that the third telco player becomes a security risk in our lives or would you rather welcome the idea that Dito must come in to provide us better lives with sterling services never delivered before by Globe and Smart.
(Dindo Danao is the Executive Director of Odyssey Foundation. He is also involved in policy research and advocacy.)
