National Post (February 1) quoted Yuval Shavitt, an electrical-engineering expert at Tel Aviv University, as saying that China Telecom, a state-owned internet service provider that has two legally operating “points of presence” on Canadian soil had in 2016 secretly diverted Canadian internet traffic to China, particularly from Rogers subscribers in the Ottawa area says an Israeli cybersecurity specialist. Shavitt told The Canadian Press that the China Telecom example should serve as a caution to the Canadian government not to do business with another Chinese telecommunications giant: Huawei Technologies, which is vying to build Canada’s next-generation 5G wireless communications networks. “It’s too dangerous to let them in. You can just imagine how Chinese companies are co-operating with the Chinese government.” The 2016 Ottawa area incident that included Rogers was part of an attack in which Canadian internet data bound for South Korea was rerouted to China over a six-month period. The diversion of the South Korean data was first documented in a report last fall co-authored by Shavitt and Chris C. Demchak of the U.S. Naval War College. The report described how China Telecom uses two points of presence in Canada and eight in the United States to take “information-rich” internet traffic crossing its network — part of the ordinary working of the internet, in which packets of data pass through numerous servers on the way to their destinations — and reroute it through China with no noticeable effect on customers.

China Telecom did not respond to a request for comment.