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."

Comments

Don't panic

[Chrisq]

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.

Re:Don't panic

[Anonymous Coward]

If past actions are anything to go by this stance actually says "We know that our electronics cannot be trusted to be free from US influence and therefore we cannot assume that a foreign nations electronics will be."

Re:Don't panic

[javilon]

They are opening a can of worms.

Obviously, the US has been doing exactly that. There are documented cases of back doors introduced into US software and hardware. It could bite them back with other countries using exactly the same argument against them.

I do not fault the US for defending their interests. It is clear that China will use all opportunities available to them, exactly as US did. But they are going to face the same issues that countries like Iran face now. They can use foreign technology that is better than domestic products, or they can try to stop it from entering the country. The fact is that US is quickly becoming irrelevant in hardware manufacturing, so it is a difficult call.

What seems clear is that this won't be good for the economy since it will be interpreted as tariffs by the other side.

Re:Don't panic

[Anonymous Coward]

China practically invented the category of Gov't spyware in electronics

Whereas the USA is content with bugging the Chinese premier's aeroplane...

Perhaps China should have placed Boeing, Dee Howard and Rockwell-Collins on their "security threat" list.

Same applies to US

[Seeteufel]

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.

Re:Same applies to US

[scdeimos]

You forgot Cisco, who is so in-bed with the US government that they caused an ex-Cisco employee to be arrested while sitting in a Canadian court room. Glass houses, me thinks.

Re:Is the free trade not so fun anymore?

[DarkOx]

First off i have a very hard time believing backdoors are built in the large networks they sell

Really? After stuxnet, flame, you think that?

Fact is most of that network hardware gets a great deal less scrutiny than desktop software gets. A much smaller number of people use it directly, far fewer security folks get access to it.

Even if backdoors are not deliberately inserted its beyond reason to think exploits don't exist somewhere. Now what would the Chinese government's security arm do if they discovered a useful reliable exploit? Probably exactly what our own did/does and create things like stuxnet. Oh and if you could work something like that into the network layer it would be way way harder to spot than at the application layer.