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US Government Probes Huawei and ZTE

judgecorp writes "Two leading Chinese telecoms companies, Huawei and ZTE, are under investigation for possible spying in the U.S. A government committee says the companies may be stealing U.S. economic secrets, and use of their equipment might open U.S. infrastructure to espionage."

12 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Duh! by DontBlameCanada · · Score: 4, Informative

    Huawei is a Chinese government funded company. I'm sure the funding isn't charity.

    I would've thought after Huawei was caught stealing cisco tech (http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/Cisco_Mot_for_PI.pdf), that they'd be blackballed for any government network deployments.

    1. Re:Duh! by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, but every single country in the world does this. Including the USA (the USA is actually one of the worst, it's not even government level stuff, it's handing Airbus secrets to Boeing so they can compete, stuff like that).

      Why all the stories about Chinese spying...? It's just more smoke and mirrors to give the population something to focus on other than the government's failure.

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    2. Re:Duh! by joocemann · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No. The frequency by which China can be indicated in espionage is a tell of the size of their collection eforts.... MASSIVE.

      You hear about espionage on their part every couple weeks. Nearly every espionage related incident originates from the same source. It is reckless to assume its because they have poor tradecraft and get caught. A better and more real assumption is that the freq of esp. Being caught is a tell of the overall size.

    3. Re:Duh! by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's a pretty famous case*, a special European commission was even formed to investigate it.

      For the lazy: http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep-fin.htm

      [*] ie. a Google for something like "nsa boeing airbus" would have found a cite in seconds

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  2. Economic Secrets? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The best way to compete with China is probably to give them all the secrets to our current economy and hope they use them.

    1. Re:Economic Secrets? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The US economy is actually working great. You might be under the false impression that you're one of the people it's intended to work for. But the people who have 10,000 times your income couldn't be happier.

  3. Experience with my Huawei router by FTWinston · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It was free with our ISP, so don't judge me. (We're with TalkTalk in the UK ... ok, do judge me.)

    It used client-side validation only to determine whether or not I was entering a valid port to forward to. By copying the admin page to my local machine and updating the target, I was able to remove the validation and set up my port forward to .255 ... I managed to resist the urge of setting up a forward to something actually invalid, in case the router completely died on me.

    If the guys that made my router are spies ... they're not very good.

  4. No good can come from this by MikeRT · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The People's Republic of China is a totalitarian state and most of its "private industry" is a facade for their civilian government or military. They routinely get caught with massive espionage operations in other countries. Whatever good that can from theoretically lower prices are negated by everything else that'll come with their increased role.

    Even if the federal government so thoroughly separated itself from the telecommunication system that the NSA spy scandal was not even remotely possible, letting China get its tentacles deeper into our country's workings is asking for a lot of trouble. If in time they establish a backbone connection to Asia, you can bet your ass their spy agencies will be tapping it harder than a keg of top grade beer at a college party.

    1. Re:No good can come from this by hedwards · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Oh, please, compared with the rights abuses in China that's not even worth mentioning.

  5. Industrial espionage by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Everyone is so concerned about China, but wouldn't you know, France is so well-known for industrial espionage that executives for pharmaceuticals and large companies are told not to use fax machines in hotel rooms because the lines are monitored, or send unencrypted email, etc. Laptops not only aren't allowed to be left unattended, most people in the know won't let sensitive information be left on them -- encrypted or not.

    Everyone acts like China invented industrial espionage. Well, they didn't... they're just really bad at it, which is why everyone is noticing them. First rule of effective espionage: Don't suck.

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  6. Huawei and Ericsson by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I used to work for Ericsson in Sweden, and it was a well know fact that Huawei stole a lot of research material from the company. There was a case were a Chinese employee was caught hard copying (-as in Xerox) several research papers (I don't remember all of it, but I think even the Chinese embassy was involved).

    One of the few things Ericsson has going for them is their research (since their services division is a joke and doesn't bring any substantial revenue for the company), but if this continues they will be dead on the water in 10 years time.

    Funny thing about all of this is that Ericsson has a research center in China, from where they bring those 'employees' who end up getting the info for Huawei.

  7. Re:Competing interests by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I used to work for Ericsson, now I work for Alcatel-Lucent, both at US offices, but not US companies. One of the things we've noticed is anywhere one of those two companies opens an office, shortly after, huawei opens an office within 10 miles. I swear it's true. Right now I'm sitting less than 5 miles from one of their office, at my old office, the story was the same, and remember the ericsson and alcatel offices are only 50 miles away from eachother, yet huawei has two, one close to ericsson, one close to alcatel. We started keeping track once we noticed at first. When at Ericsson, we'd always laugh that when we published our roadmap, 2 days later huawei would publish theirs, and it'd look similar so we started screwing with our roadmaps. I understand that in slashdot it's popular to go "ohhh evil amerika!!!!!!!!!!! they do it two!!!!!" but really, the behavior of chinese companies is more than a little suspect.