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."
Surely some capitalist ideologue must be spinning in his grave...hey, I bet that could be harnessed to drive a generator.
He won't mind, it's a free market solution!
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.
Don't they mean Nortel's source code?
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Except of course that the WTO agreements prevent exactly this kind of national/regional/local concerns and specifically prohibits tender discrimination on the basis of national origin of the tendering company. Welcome to the brave new world.
Cisco alleged Huawei stole their tech, but had to drop the suit after the chinese gov't made it uncomfortable for Cisco.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/24/cisco_sues_huawei_over_ip/
Huawei is an arm of the Chinese government. Officially and in practice. There are members of the Chinese Communist Party permanently assigned to it who monitor correctness and suggest policy (under pain of death). They will spy and steal tech if the Party thinks it's useful. That's just how they roll.
The only real question is whether anyone gives a damn what's going over Australia's National Broadband Network. If not, then Huawei may be cheaper.
Huawei already supplies 3G USB dongles, cheap android phones and tablets to the Aussie consumer. If that's the case, isn't the Chinese govt already harvesting data from our private citizens? Hmmm, paranoia much?
Conroy might partner with the Chinese on his great firewall of Australia - apparently they have expertise in such matters. ;-)
I just bet that Huawei networking has really neat built in ways to censor all sorts of content from pirated stuff, child porn, maybe even (gasp!) political comments. So maybe our (Oz) government really isn't interested in censorship?
Nah. On second thoughts, they were just too dumb to notice the opportunity.
See here and here.
But the Cisco incident is relevant too.
Australia has done that in the past. ....
http://www.australiandefence.com.au/DB96D390-F806-11DD-8DFE0050568C22C9
Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board let SingTel purchase Optus i.e. Singapore's government-owned telco got the Optus C1/D joint civil/military communications satellite.
The dedicated military payload paid for by Australia is used for satellite communications in Australian and south-east Asia.
The payload came from the USA and Japan was the contractor
The main problem for the NBN would be the US/UK/NZ/Canadian/Australian telco choke points- who gets to mirror off every packet in and out of Australia.
An embassy or joint space project can be contained. Communists deep in your ducts long term is not a good idea.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Questions over the legality of the Government's move are already being raised.
...by people who support Huawei, most likely. Unfortunately for Huawei's defenders in Australia (and outside of Australia as evidenced by those), it puts them in the open as standing against their own country and having a greater allegiance for the PRC.
Stand strong Australia, and resist the urge to bend to the will of China. They will do everything to get you to back down - stop only when they give up and lose face.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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.
Having a copy of the source provides only minimal protection. See for example the Underhanded C Code Contest.
It would be an almost trivial exercise to introduce a vulnerability into a code base that wouldn't be picked up easily by either human or mechanical inspection. Even if such a vulnerability was detected, the vendor could simply claim that it was a coding error, fix it, and get away with it unpunished. By adding a few dozen such vulnerabilities, the vendor could play this game for years without anyone ever being able to prove wrongdoing.
There's no hope of isolating the equipment or software from the Internet either, because the use-case here is a National Broadband Network, the whole point of which is to create a new public Internet backbone.
Duh Nortel, where have you been?
G'day Clive, you fat bastard! How are your "Greens are a CIA plot" claims working out for you?
Clive's clearly a loon, but he's just a symptom of the problem.
Check each of the links below and ask yourself "Would this be happening in a country where the actions of the government are in the best interests of its people".
Let me know your answer. I'll be interested.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-21/australians-pay-highest-power-prices-says-study/3904024
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2012/s3460798.htm
http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/03/21/official-australia-the-best-place-for-miners-in-the-world-again/
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/billionaires-grow-fat-off-lazy-government-20120321-1vij7.html
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
No doubt you will feel cheated if Australia doesn't receive all the benefits of Chinese attention that the United States has received.
FBI cracks down on China's elusive army of amateur spies
The FBI estimates that more than 3,000 "front companies" have been established by Chinese nationals in the US specifically to purloin military and economic secrets illegally.
Let Me Count The Ways China Is Stealing Our Secrets
China: Suspected Acquisition of U.S. Nuclear Weapon Secrets
This CRS Report discusses China’s suspected acquisition of U.S. nuclear weapon secrets, including that on the W88, the newest U.S. nuclear warhead.
China's Secret War
Of course, why worry?
China warns Australia against military pact with US
Aussies fear threat of war with China
Australia is usually very open with China and acknowledges them as a crucial trading partner; often bending over backwards to accommodate Chinese business, especially the current government.
I would think that there must be some serious intelligence information motivating this public slap in the face for a top-tier chinese company.
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