GROSS: Some of the things you've described about China's capabilities of spying on us and hacking data and interfering with cyberwar, even - I mean, that's - it's some pretty terrifying stuff. At the same time, the U.S. has done similar things to China and other countries. Would you describe an operation that was named Shotgiant?

SANGER: Terry, Shotgiant was a National Security Agency operation that happened around 2010. We know about it because some of the details were leaked out in the Snowden documents. It was an effort by the NSA to do to Huawei exactly what we have accused Huawei of doing to us, which is breaking into networks, figuring out how they operate and setting ourselves up to either steal information from those networks or cripple them in the future.

What did the NSA do? It got into Huawei's corporate systems in Shenzhen, the Chinese industrial city. It looked for any evidence that the Chinese PLA was actually secretly controlling the company - doesn't appear they found any. It looked to understand how Huawei's equipment operated, how the software worked so that if Huawei sold a network switching system to an American adversary - say, Venezuela or Cuba or someplace that clearly wouldn't buy American equipment - then the NSA would have an easier time breaking into that equipment. The - this is not unusual. This is what the United States government created the NSA to go do. This is the kind of offensive cyber activity that the NSA conducts not only against China but against Russia, Iran, North Korea and so forth.