Chinese Media: Snowden Says Cisco Helped the US Spy on China

China has been concerned about the threat Cisco poses to Chinese information security since right around the same time the US got serious about Huawei. It’s not a coincidence, but if recent reports in the Chinese press are to be believed, China might have more reason to be concerned than originally thought.

This story, for example, suggests that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has told Chinese authorities that Cisco is helping the NSA spy on Chinese networks and computers. That would be a problem given that Cisco’s equipment is a part of the infrastructure of much of China’s internet.

But whether Snowden has actually said anything like that is a bit difficult to determine. The Cisco-NSA connections have been reported in a number of Chinese media outlets, but no Western outlets that I can find. Moreover, many of the Chinese media reports — like this one in English — suggest that Cisco was one of the nine companies reported to be working with the NSA in the PRISM scandal, but in fact it was not. (The nine companies are Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, Youtube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, though many have since denied having any open access arrangements with the NSA).

Earlier in the week Snowden did tell the South China Morning Post that the NSA “hack[s] network backbones,” presumably including China’s, but he did not apparently mention Cisco by name or suggest that the NSA had any kind of agreement with the company; in fact the use of the term “hack” certainly implies that the NSA was gaining access to network backbones without the knowledge or permission of the people who produced and owned the network infrastructure.

So did Snowden actually say anything about Cisco, or is the Chinese press simply using the NSA leaks as an excuse to relaunch last year’s anti-Cisco PR campaign? I have no idea, and honestly, it probably doesn’t matter at all. The PRISM scandal seems to have done for American tech companies what Huawei and ZTE’s military connections have done for Chinese ones, and it’s likely that regardless of what Snowden actually said, Cisco and other American companies are going to have a much harder time winning Chinese contracts than they used to.

It’s hard to see exactly where this buildup of mutual distrust ends. Just a decade or so after internet and communications technology brought the whole world closer together, it increasingly looks like hacking and surveillance scandals and suspicions are likely to tear it back apart.