London
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A humdrum office that stood next to an Amazon warehouse on an industrial estate in Oxfordshire, southern England, was for many years a crucial line of defense in Britain’s national security. “The Cell,” as the office was known, allowed the UK government to keep a careful eye on the operations of Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, as it built out Britain’s mobile networks.
Owned by Huawei but staffed by British cybersecurity experts with the highest levels of security clearance, “The Cell” was tasked – at Huawei’s expense – with checking every piece of hardware and software for strings of code that could be exploited for malicious purposes.
In the end,…