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US Congress Rules Huawei a 'Security Threat'
dgharmon writes with the lead from a story in the Brisbane Time: "Chinese telecom company Huawei poses a security threat to the United States and should be barred from US contracts and acquisitions, a yearlong congressional investigation has concluded. A draft of a report by the House Intelligence Committee said Huawei and another Chinese telecom, ZTE, 'cannot be trusted' to be free of influence from Beijing and could be used to undermine U.S. security."
Don't panic. If you have a Huawei phone just fill a bucket with water and drop the phone in. After 12 hours you can safely dispose of t in the bin. Then go and buy a phone made in the West like the ....uhm ..... well ... do without a phone.
I guess the same applies to companies like IBM, AT&T and Microsoft in the European Union, companies which undermine our domestic security (see the IBM Lotus Notes backdoor scandal in Sweden) and seek to influence our law makers. In particular AT&T with their lobbying for censorship rules and Microsoft which does not disclose the source code of its applications to the IT security agencies and undermines open source and open standards policies --- as if they were part of the European constituency. Oh, and don't mention the OOXML case.
Sure, if by 'security threat' you mean 'economic threat', and by 'United States' you mean 'Motorola'.
Anonymous Coward
Other government will eventually do the same to Microsoft, following the logic that US always accuses its enemies of everything it does.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Now all the other governments of the world should ban Microsoft for being a security threat and things could become far better for most of the people. Even could be considered "a national security threat", played a major role in Stuxnet/Flame/etc targetted attacks, where US agencies could had been involved.
In fact, with that argument most US based software companies could be banned outside, unless by licence (i.e. open source ones) you can get all the source, recompile and deploy it yourself. And that includes embedded software devices
First off i have a very hard time believing backdoors are built in the large networks they sell. In complex systems like that its next to impossible to hide things in the long run. Anything suspicious would have been found in the audits.
This looks like a try at restricting import with arbitrary reasons without any substance behind them. I am sure many countries smile at this as they get to block American goods like GM corn etc citing safety reasons, and now they can use US own rhetoric.
HTTP/1.1 400
I'm told this is ironic because the reason that Huawei got started was because the Chinese did all sorts of experiments with Cisco gear and determined that they couldn't trust them because of all the backdoors they had to accommodate US agencies.
The Chinese needed network gear they could trust, they'd been tearing the Cisco gear down for a while to check them for back doors, so they just went the whole hog and started their own router company.
The main reason that the US *know* that the Huwaei gear has back doors in it is probably because they are the same back doors cloned from the Cisco gear, but with different encryption keys.
Hauwei should have started lobbying harder sooner. They spent over 800 million this year but only 200 million last year. Well, if they keep it up things will turn around. Gotta grease those palms in DC to get what you want.
So we'll get our new 4G LTE system where? Per the 60 Minutes segment that aired last night, there is no U.S. company capable of providing the infrastructure. They named a French, Chinese and perhaps a Swedish company as the only options.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
That the US Government officially took notice of Chinese efforts to spy on and undermine the US; wasn't all that fake Cisco equipment that ended up in the department of defense enough of a wake up call.
....Is why they will have trouble selling their networking hardware in much of the world. If Huawei wasn't founded by a ex-Chinese military official, that might be a different story.
First off i have a very hard time believing backdoors are built in the large networks they sell. In complex systems like that its next to impossible to hide things in the long run. Anything suspicious would have been found in the audits.
I think you underestimate the creativity of the people who make networking gear.
This looks like a try at restricting import with arbitrary reasons without any substance behind them. I am sure many countries smile at this as they get to block American goods like GM corn etc citing safety reasons, and now they can use US own rhetoric.
That's fine. The US House Committee is claiming that Huawei and ZTE receive billions from the Chinese government and are able to subsidize their products with that money so that they can be the lowest bidder to foreign countries. That's not entirely arbitrary as they're not claiming the same thing against Foxconn or Asus. If you want to say Monsanto receives government subsidiaries as tax credits or whatever, you're probably right but so does almost every other international company headquartered out of the United States. Want to place an embargo on the United States? Go right ahead, Iran and Cuba seem to be doing okay. Personally, I think the safety concerns against GM corn are enough to block it and I think they should continue along that line of reasoning -- what economic conspiracy do you have for keeping GM corn out?
... yeah, like you sell networking gear in China and you can say that? Please.
This hearing was open and is completely available on YouTube if you want to rebut more specific claims by the committee. I like listening to the Huawei guy, he's pretty humorous, he says that they will not under any conditions jeopardize the integrity of their networks for any third party or government
Is the free trade not so fun anymore?
Oh, give me a break. Free trade? Are you serious? It's not fun when the most populous country in the world is artificially manipulating its markets, controlling what its currency trades at internally and creating its own companies that are traipsing around claiming to be private companies ... christ, the tariffs and tax laws surrounding international business are so complicated, there's no point in calling any of this "free trade" in any sense of the words.
My work here is dung.
Thought I'd throw this out there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_Symantec and this http://www.huaweisymantec.us/ and this http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/technology/symantec-dissolves-alliance-with-huawei-of-china.html?_r=0 Is the alliance is over?
Bullshit. They read the bible, which is how they know the Earth is only 3,000 years old and Jesus buried the phony dinosaur bones that we dig up.
They think it's ~6000 years old. Are you republican by any chance?
To be fair, the DOJ blocked them from buying sourcefire (the commercial part of Snort) for that very reason in 2006: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6399/1
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Apple didn't want to tangle with them in a predatory lawsuit that even if they won they'd never see a dime, so they simply lobbied Congress to keep them out.
The worst my Chineese-made toaster could do is burn down my house.
Anybody here evaluated Huawei equipment, or otherwise know more details about the reported issues of it sending "beacons" or "relaying data" back home, or the "anomolies" that appear to be backdoors? The real good stuff seems to be locked-up in that "classified" section we don't get to see...
http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/China-high-tech-firms-deny-spying-before-Congress-3861472.php
I'm assuming there's something more than just the bugs exposed at defcon:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229785/Hackers_reveal_critical_vulnerabilities_in_Huawei_routers_at_Defcon
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
60 Minutes covered this story on Sunday night. The House Intelligence Committee is right to have suspicions of Huawei.
I believe the video is the same that aired on TV.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson