Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Networking Vendor Huawei's Murky Ownership
A month ago we mentioned India's suspicions that telecomm equipment from China might contain backdoors. There hasn't been any smoking gun on such speculation. Now reader littlekorea sends in some background on the ties one important Chinese telecomm vender might or might not have to the government there. "Conspiracy theories abound as to whether networking kit vendor Huawei is owned or controlled by the Chinese government and/or the military-industrial complex. But who really owns Huawei? Kiwi journalist Juha Saarinen headed to Shanghai to find out."
I used to work in office where the upper floor was rented by Huawei: At first there would be 2-3 people, but they exponentially grew up to a small (and short) 100 I estimate.
Our cars on the driveway got hit more as there were more chinese and their "parking skills" were so telling, people started parking their cars close to those employers so they could get it through insurance to replace parts of their cars.
During lunch, it was pretty the hallucinant experience as well..
They never talked about their work or interacted with us, but when I inquired with my colleagues, it was the consensus: "They just relabel Cisco hardware and software."
A cynic would suggest that what our "analyst" friends are actually so butthurt about is the fact that all those sweet, sweet shares are locked up in some oddball quasi-coop/quasi-privately-held arrangement, rather than floating around on stock exchanges, where they can be traded and hedged and sliced and diced (for a variety of nice commissions) by the more and less blatantly parasitic middlemen who live there.
Rather analogous to the swarms of "social security reformers" who talk a lot about cash-flow and solvency; but are basically pissed off that all those billions aren't being overseen by Wall Street, for an appropriate fee...
Now, as a separate issue, it seems quite plausible that Huawei's stuff is bugged. A certain "coziness" seems to be virtually inevitable between strategic corporations and the state's military and intelligence arms. That was certainly the case in the (formally) much less government dominated economy of the US during the cold war, I have no reason to suspect that it isn't the case in china now. However, stuff doesn't get bugged because sinister agents of the state buy 51% of the shares, and then introduce a "motion to bug hardware shipped to capitalist running dogs" at the next shareholder meeting. There are much subtler and more tactful ways of getting that done.
Consider, for instance, the tracking codes produced by numerous models of color laser printer, built around print engines produced by a number of different companies, ostensibly as an "anti-counterfeiting measure". This occurred despite the fact that the US Secret Service has no ownership stake in any of the companies involved. Exactly what inducements where used is unknown; but anybody who thinks that stock ownership is particularly relevant is a moron.
Seriously, that was exactly what I was going to say, but I'll even go one further: it would surprise me in the least if Huawei's equipment had a backdoor put into Cisco's equipment by the NSA that Huawei didn't catch when stealing the source code.
If the look hard enough, the Indians may well find two backdoors.
my insights may be modded Funny, but at least some of my jokes are modded Insightful