Slashdot Mirror
Australian Gov't Bans Huawei From National Network Bids
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like paranoia regarding Chinese cyber-espionage is riding sky-high within the Australian Government. It was confirmed today that the country's Attorney-General's Department had banned Chinese networking vendor Huawei (the number two telco networking equipment vendor globally) from bidding for work supplying equipment to the government's $50 billion National Broadband Network universal fibre project. The unprecedented move comes despite Huawei offering to share its source code with security officials, and despite Huawei not being accused of breaking any laws in Australia. Questions over the legality of the Government's move are already being raised."
I think Huawei was also left out of consideration when AT&T and Verizon were looking to build more LTE towers in the US. Or was that the federal government didn't want their equipment out of this fear?
Would love if someone clarified this.
OTOH I know a lot of private companies that have banned huawei. I seriously doubt at this point that this is a coincidence.
Personally I think they've been caught red-handed in a high-profile network about 2 years ago and the big guys employ people who know the details about this.
This is true - we know AT&T forwards all your packets to the NSA, pissing itself with its eagerness to do so, and the other ISPs probably do so as well.
In theory you should encrypt everything strongly. But in practice, people overwhelmingly just don't do that.
So this is the Australian government, who we know wants to inspect every single packet sent in Australia (since they've said so), deciding they want to limit it to companies under their thumb instead of under China's thumb.
The current Australian government has been making increasingly bizarre decisions, many of which will clearly will be to the detriment of Australian citizens. It's very likely this decision to ban a specific vendor, along with many other recent government mandates are at the behest of their puppet masters.
“Four Corners” itself noted that the key Labor coup plotters, as revealed in WikiLeaks cables, had long been secretly informing Washington about the internal workings of the Labor government. The same cables make clear that the Obama administration was disenchanted with Rudd over a range of issues, especially his attempts to moderate rising tensions between the US and China. Gillard, on the other hand, was viewed in positive terms as someone who could be counted on to toe Washington’s line.
http://indymedia.org.au/2012/02/22/the-role-of-the-us-in-the-leadership-crisis-in-the-alp
http://pirateparty.org.au/2012/03/22/pirate-party-disgusted-by-rampant-government-secrecy/
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Who needs to be paranoid when companies whos bottom line is to send out work to a low wage paying country so they can turn maddive profits at the expense of national security?
Cisco doesn't seem to care so why should any other company?
If you think for one moment that the Chinese governement doesn't have spies working in those factories and making coppies of every single chip and installing doomsday chips in those electronics you are very naive.
Duh Nortel, where have you been?
lightreading.com doesn't say that Huawei is behind it. I was curious about the relationship between Huawei and Nortel. So, I dug around the Internet and found this relevant article see here. It says that Nortel's products were shoddy enough to cause it to lose a lot of clients. So, it proposed a joint venture with Huawei in order to resell Huawei products as Nortel products. But it went bankrupted before the proposal happened. Sound like Nortel was trying to steal Huawei's source code to save itself from bankruptcy.
The reason that india, Oz and the US blocked using chinese core networking equipment is because that don't have access to the firmware or can check that what they are told is the firware really is what is burned into the hardware.
Also they can have other dedicated stuff in the hardware that n one would know about.
so they worry that their core networks can be hacked by the chinese government.
this is why they are banned.
this is NOT a solution though. We have to leanr to co-operate.
The ONLY way that these types of crazy situation can be fixed is by social and democratic change world wide
G