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Huawei Using NSA Scandal To Turn Tables On Accusations of Spying
Nerval's Lobster writes "Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecom giant banned from selling to U.S. government agencies due to its alleged ties to Chinese intelligence services, is trying to turn the tables on its accusers by offering itself as a safe haven for customers concerned that the NSA has compromised their own IT vendors. 'We have never been asked to provide access to our technology, or provide any data or information on any citizen or organization to any Government, or their agencies,' Huawei Deputy Chairman Ken Hu said in the introduction to a 52-page white paper on cybersecurity published Oct. 18. Huawei was banned from selling to U.S. government entities and faced barriers to civilian sales following a 2012 report from the U.S. House of Representatives that concluded Huawei's management had not been forthcoming enough to convince committee members to disregard charges it had given Chinese intelligence services backdoors into its secure systems and allowed Chinese intelligence agents to pose as Huawei employees. But the company promises to create test centers where governments and customers can test its products and inspect its services as part of an 'open, transparent and sincere' approach to questions about its alleged ties, according to a statement in the white paper from Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei. Can Huawei actually gain more customers by playing off the Snowden scandal?"
The bigger a nationally sponsored corporation becomes, the more obviously it becomes an asset. It's like choosing between corrupt police and the mob.
Just because the NSA spies doesn't prove Huawei doesn't. This line of reasoning is guaranteed to fool a few morons and nobody else.
Imagine you had told someone 25 years ago that China offers you a safe haven from being spied on by the US and possible repercussions because of it...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There was a Snowden brief a short while ago that showed that one of the major switch vendors had given NSA a direct backdoor into their products. One of the people covering that story said something like, "I can't tell you that it's Cisco, but it's Cisco". The real problem with this situation is that we really don't know which of these things is true.
Back when the USG banned the use of Huawei products, most people assumed that it meant that there was spying functionality in it that had been discovered. However, in light of Bull Run, it's definitely worth asking if what might have happened is that they refused to install spying technology and the USG report was meant as a way to discredit the company and prevent its market penetration.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm an I.T. manager for a non-western company that has non-western defense contracts, one of those sort of conglomerates that does every activity under the sun. I doubt their ploy will actually work, we don't trust the US or the Chinese. It's a matter of "pick your poison". Still, anyone foolish enough to buy Huawei (Their firmware universally sucks, from modems to enterprise/service-level network and backhaul equipment) might be foolish enough to believe they're safer. In reality though, you're more at risk from the security exploits from Huawei's lazy half-assed programmers. I fear their coders more than any possible shadowy relationships.
Dear Huawei chairman,
open source all of your drivers and firmware, then we'll be forced to agree that your equipment is safe for use.
Of course they can. In fact, I suspect they already have.
One of the Cisco et al. selling points was "you can trust us with your data, can you trust Huawei ?" Now that is gone. Loosing a selling point like that, in a competitive market, means that sales will go to the companies it was directed against.
Banned from USA, on instant-arrest watchlist at every airport, etc. You used to be cool USA. I actually used to respect NSA. Not now. There is doing things "illegally" within reason, then there is just straight-up abusive levels of illegality that they are presently doing. Now that China are finally growing up, I actually respect them far more.
Why? Because at least they never claimed to be the land of the free? However bad the US is, China is worse (or if not, they're working on the tech). It's just that I hold my own country to a higher standard.
People think China is potentially some bastion of openness because it's better than when Mao ran the show. That's a pretty low bar. And heck, the Tiananmen square massacre was 24 years ago. They've changed so much - might as well be talking about the Qin dynasty, right?
If only they got that whole censorship nonsense away.
If only the Chinese government wasn't the Chinese government.
China would benefit hugely by opening up more since they are a huge influence in many markets.
The same is true of the US, and we've actually had experience doing that. It's just that things have been retrograde for the last decade or so.
Perhaps, but I still count on the saying: "A thief thinks every man steals".
The US assumes there are backdoors in Chinese equipment because they themselves put backdoors in all American equipment.