On Saturday, the New York Times published an article based on slides obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as well as interviews with anonymous intelligence officials that alleged the NSA had broken into the servers of Chinese telecom giant Huawei. There, the spy agency obtained sensitive information about the company's routers and switches that served to link its customers to its network. The NSA also monitored the communications of Huawei's executives, the NYT reports.

The US has long had a fraught relationship with Huawei, a company that has maintained that it is independent from the Chinese government and has no ties to the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Still, citing national security concerns, US authorities blocked Huawei's purchase of 3Com in 2008, accused it of un-American activities in 2012, and then convinced Sprint and SoftBank to limit their use of Huawei gear in 2013.

The New York Times report said that the 2010 NSA operation, code-named “Shotgiant” (link goes to leaked classified slides), was looking for clues that the giant telecom was working with the PLA.

The report also noted that the US had another strategic interest in its spying:

N.S.A. analysts made clear that they were looking for more than just “signals intelligence” about the company and its connections to Chinese leaders; they wanted to learn how to pierce its systems so that when adversaries and allies bought Huawei equipment, the United States would be plugged into those networks. (The Times withheld technical details of the operation at the request of the Obama administration, which cited national security concerns.) The N.S.A.’s operations against China do not stop at Huawei. Last year, the agency cracked two of China’s biggest cellphone networks, allowing it to track strategically important Chinese military units, according to an April 2013 document leaked by Mr. Snowden. Other major targets, the document said, are the locations where the Chinese leadership works. The country’s leaders, like everyone else, are constantly upgrading to better, faster Wi-Fi — and the N.S.A. is constantly finding new ways in.

According to Der Spiegel, a German magazine that is also in possession of the same Snowden files as the NYT, “A special unit with the US intelligence agency succeeded in infiltrating Huawei's network and copied a list of 1,400 customers as well as internal documents providing training to engineers on the use of Huwaei products, among other things.”