In a move to get approval of its acquisition of Sprint Nextel Corp., executives of Japanese telecom company SoftBank have agreed to give the US government veto power over the choice for Sprint's director responsible for oversight of national security issues, the Wall Street Journal reports. Government representatives involved in the negotiations with SoftBank also reportedly want to be allowed to approve Sprint's network hardware purchases.

Additionally, the government is pushing for Sprint to pull radio base stations manufactured by Huawei already installed on the network of wireless broadband company Clearwire. Sprint is a partner in Clearwire and is in the midst of acquiring it. Clearwire markets wireless broadband in the US under the CLEAR brand.

Details of the negotiation over network systems from Huawei and ZTE were first reported in March. The US government has expressed concerns about potential security threats posed by hardware and software from the two companies; a report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence found that the companies' close ties to China's People's Liberation Army posed a risk to national security and urged US telecom companies to "seek other vendors for their projects" because of the risk of cyber espionage and cyberattacks through hidden back doors in the hardware. Huawei had offered to allow a third party to certify the security of its systems; in April, the company's executives announced they were no longer interested in the US market.