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Why Huawei Gives the US and Its Allies Security Nightmares (technologyreview.com)
Perhaps the most insightful piece that sums up why the U.S. and its allies are apprehensive of using Huawei's products. Six reasons, we are just highlighting the pointers, click on the source story to read the description:
1. There could be "kill switches" in Huawei equipment.
2. ... That even close inspections miss.
3. Back doors could be used for data snooping.
4. The rollout of 5G wireless networks will make everything worse.
5. Chinese firms will ship tech to countries in defiance of a US trade embargo.
6. Huawei isn't as immune to Chinese government influence as it claims to be.
1. There could be "kill switches" in Huawei equipment.
2. ... That even close inspections miss.
3. Back doors could be used for data snooping.
4. The rollout of 5G wireless networks will make everything worse.
5. Chinese firms will ship tech to countries in defiance of a US trade embargo.
6. Huawei isn't as immune to Chinese government influence as it claims to be.
7. It's competition to US products.
8. People with Huawei equipment can be spied upon by the Chinese government and not as easily by the US government.
Every point made here is just as true from the other side too. I know China is investing heavily in developing high-end microprocessor designs and manufacturing capability, but shouldn't it make strategic sense for them to also spend as much money as it takes to purge their country of Microsoft? Windows Update could be easily repurposed for espionage, and even if the US government doesn't control it yet, they could surely do so if they situation was desperate enough. I'd expect China to be throwing huge piles of money into transitioning away from Windows entirely for all military and government functions, and all major companies too. They even tried with Red Flag Linux, and that ended badly. China is striving for hardware manufacturing capability, but seems to be unconcerned over software.
That's why we are to be afraid. Guess what, your mobile mandatory location identifying device (as required by US law) is a leash.
1. There most likely are "kill switches" in $USBRAND equipment.
2. ... That even close inspections miss.
3. Back doors are already being used for data snooping.
4. The rollout of 5G wireless networks will make everything worse.
5. US firms will ship tech to countries wherever the fuck they want regardless of anything else.
6. $USBRAND isn't immune to US government influence, period.
I fail to see a problem with Huawei in particular.
pretty much, everyone in the intelligence industry worry about the stuff they are doing to other countries being done back.
Look at what they are saying that other places are likely doing, and you get a pretty good list of what they are doing to other places.
7. Huawei phones lack the backdoors that allow the US intelligence community to spy on its own people.
That's it, really. They don't trust us, not at all. You really have to wonder why? Why do they feel the need to spy on us and know what we're thinking? Our elected government made this illegal, and the intelligence community promptly broke the law and lied about it.
On March 12, 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress that intel officials were not collecting mass data on tens of millions of Americans. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden soon revealed material that proved Clapper's testimony false: The government had been gathering and storing data from ordinary Americans' phone records, email and Internet use.
They don't feel any obligation to us at all. It's OK if they break the laws we passed with our elected government and lie to our faces - they don't feel safe if we can keep secrets from them. Fuck democracy, they have wars to start. If we all started buying Huawei they would feel very unsafe indeed.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I set it's a bunch of "possibilities"...
"Could be"..."Could" and so on...
Chinese firms will ship tech to countries in defiance of a US trade embargo.
Why should foreign entity obey US law is I may ask?
. Huawei isn't as immune to Chinese government influence as it claims to be
Let's remember we have the NSA that has done more or less the same, even in defiance of US law...
That's a nice piece of fake news, on par with the oft told story about the Soviet "peace" tractors that allegedly "destroyed" a million-strong Chinese invasion force in the 60s with megalasers from low Earth orbit.
I'm sure, however, that had such a thing as you described happened, it would have received ample coverage by the Indian press.
Care to find some links?
Huawei / Chinese meddling is not in any way more or less suspect than Cisco / US meddling. Everybody is a suspect. Why would/should it be otherwise?
If you're the average American (or European, for that matter), you're living paycheck to paycheck, your perspective of retiring at the end of your useful shelf life (~65, give or take) is practically zero, your children's chance of a useful education is degrading (...if you're European; it's already essentially zero of you're US), and the only perspective your offspring have in their life is to live through & possibly, maybe, try to clean up the mess the big winners of your generation are creating for all of us.
In that case, China is not your primary enemy. Your own government is, together (or better: led by?) those who Have. That's what you should be worrying about primarily.
1. There could be "poison" in Chinese food. ... That even close inspections miss.
2.
3. Chinese waiters could be used for snooping.
4. The rollout of Chinese restaurants will make everything worse.
5. Chinese restaurants will ship food to countries in defiance of a US trade embargo.
6. P.F. Changs isn't as immune to Chinese government influence as it claims to be.
Cisco does exactly the same.
aaaaaaa
"could"
There could be all that stuff in products from other countries, too. Heck, even American products could have these things. Maybe America should just stop trading with everyone and jump incestuously in bed with itself, and hope its own manufacturers are completely honest and transparent, just as they have turned out to be so far in history...
Could indeed... Or maybe you should do it the old fashioned way, and actually find the person guilty before executing them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Probably the best way to keep your network security is to neither use Chinese nor US Branded equipment. Instead, employ a little do it yourself mentality. I built my own and it's powered by OpenBSD. Still no guarantee but it's a lot more secure than all of the shitty stuff out there.
3. Back doors are already being used for data snooping.
Hell, FRONT doors are already being used for data snooping. Well you clicked "I agree", right?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
And still absolutely nobody has asked themselves how Turkey happened to end up with audio recordings of the Kashoggi murder... While everyone was busy saying "oh dear that's terrible", I was thinking "lol they're going to have to change the bugs in the Saudi consulate now".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
American ally
I believe the word you are looking for is "vassal". There are no more American allies. An ally is assumed to have some degree of independence and usually has equal status. A vassal, on the other hand, is one who never disagrees and always does as they are told. Kind of like that person we all know at work who is a complete idiot and yet somehow is always the boss's favorite and always gets promoted. That isn't the boss' friend - that IS your boss and if you cross him/her/it, you will find out pretty sharpish who is going to be transferred/fired. Hint - it's not them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
When you think about it, nowadays you cannot trust any high-tech gadget/piece of equipment unless you 100% control each step of its development and production which is quite expensive and complicated for companies/governments however if you are an end user you have to treat everything as compromised by default and work from there. You might feel quite unnerving and powerless but that's what it is.
Speaking as someone from western Europe, the problem with Huawei is that in geopolitical terms China is not an ally by any stretch of the imagination. The USA are. If there's any serious trouble, we do not have to worry about the USA shutting us off unless they decide at some point that we are no longer allies. The biggest worry is that equipment from the US has some backdoor (installed on behest of the government or whatever) that the Chinese can exploit.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Don't know about you, but here around (Austria), the news were full of speculation that Turkey hesitated to publish said recordings because it would give away the places of the turkish bugs in the Saudi Arabian embassy.
There seems to be a lack of interest in actually testing systems to see if the meet national security guidelines. Believe it or not these things are not black-boxes if people open up the cases, put them in Faraday cages. Monitor what its out put it, and traffic to see where things go, what ports are open....
You can take the chips off the board and be sure they are doing what the specs say they should be doing.
In case of Flash software, you can demand the source review it, and compile it at your country and flash it onto a device.
I know policy makers don't want to use specialists because they are these crazy egg heads who think they know it all, and will often go against their best instincts. But for national security, you probably should trust those people who have studied this stuff and understand the going on. Vs saying it it too technical let ban it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why are 1 and 2 the same reason broken up into two? And 4 doesn't really have anything to do with Huawei.
If you ask me, the Europeans would have to be crazy to allow themselves to be overly dependent on any of the US, Russia, North Africa, or the Middle East for fuel to keep warm in Winter. But they are capable of figuring that our for themselves I think.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cisco-backdoor-hardcoded-accounts-software,37480.html
Kinda says it all...
So no, the US are definitely no more allies of Europe than China is.
You have no sense of proportion. China lives by completely different rules. They have no respect for freedom of speech or democracy, quite the opposite, and they don't care if other countries do. The US has its flaws, but I'll take a flawed democracy over an oppressing dictatorship any day.
And beyond ecinomics... well, if you're European, it's not like China is out to burn your home, rape your wife, kill your dog. They're on a different hemisphere for chrissake, there's noting to gain for them from indaving another, regardless of whether that's Europe or US. (FWIW, the only country that has a habit of doing that post-WW2, regularly, is the US.)
No, maybe they'll just destroy all your infrastructure that's connected to the internet, including telecommuncations, power supply, and everything else that's needed in a modern society. Japan's being in a different hemisphere didn't stop them from starting an all out war with the US. If the western countries tries to do the right thing and stop China from taking areas from smaller countries in Asia then a war is not an impossibility. I assume you know that China is already doing that by creating artificial islands with military bases.
it's not like China is out to burn your home, rape your wife, kill your dog. They're on a different hemisphere for chrissake, there's noting to gain for them from indaving another, regardless of whether that's Europe or US. (FWIW, the only country that has a habit of doing that post-WW2, regularly, is the US.)
While I agree with your statement that the US has a nasty habit of invading foreign countries, China did a similar thing to Tibet "post-WW2".
Also, Russia shares the US habit of invading foreign countries, as demonstrated for example in Afghanistan and the Ukraine.
So, the basic lesson is: Don't trust any equipment that was manufactured or shipped through one of these aggressive nations.
Are you talking about User ID 14 in the Hicom 300/HiPath 4000? ;)
I am not making excuses for Huawei, and we shouldn't make them for Microsoft, either. A few months ago, my computer was one of the many that de-authorized by Microsoft because of the bug in their servers, only for a day, but Windows 10 appears to have a kill switch.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
LOL the USSR didn't buy that software, they stole it. And yes, the software was booby trapped by the CIA, who deliberately fed one of Russia's spies falty software, but it didn't do anything that you mention here. The software was built for industrial sabotage on a spectacular scale:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1455559/CIA-plot-led-to-huge-blast-in-Siberian-gas-pipeline.html
The USSR was all about stolen technology, and this is just one example of them taking more than they thought they were taking. Another one I recall was plans for a nuclear bomb that wouldn't actually work.
The US has secret courts, gag orders, national security letters, prison camps outside of court's reach, and the largest per-person incarceration rate in the world.
Go on, make my day, tell me more about Hungary. I've been there. Recently.
"isn't immune to US government influence" is a gross understatement (I assume you were being ironic!). We know that US companies up and down the stack have been clandestinely legally compelled to compromise user security in favor of national security goals.
Software: NSA-designed Ecliptic Curve encryption algorithm adopted by companies (RSA, Microsoft, Cisco) despite widespread suspicion that they were designed with backdoors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ...and then all the stuff Snowden exposed. Heck, even all of these 'transparency reports' are admissions that the government is forcing US companies to do things that they would prefer not too.
Meanwhile, the US have quite a history of computer hardware sabotage:
Deliberately faulty processors designed to destroy oil pipeline, resulting in huge explosion:
https://www.wired.com/2004/03/...
"Every microchip they stole would run fine for 10 million cycles, and then it would go into some other mode. It wouldn't break down, it would start delivering false signals and go to a different logic... It was a huge explosion. The Air Force thought it was a 3-kiloton blast."
so, yes, we should assume that Huawei is just as vulnerable to state manipulation and exploitation as any similar US company.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
There's no deflection here. He's merely pointing out the obvious. Your "discussion" is hinged on the childish assumption that "US has engaged in unconscionable business dealings" is somehow relevant to the discussion, as if there are other partners who don't.
When factor exists to same or greater level for everyone else involved, it becomes largely irrelevant.
Don't talk to me about "Freedom of speech" while you have people like Assange bullied and prosecuted for what they said.
Again, no sense of proportions. You have Assange, I raise you one million Chinese Uyghurs being incarcerated in "re-education camps" in China for their religious beliefs.
There is no "obvious" here. The talking point that Europe is "overly dependent" on Russian gas is just that - a talking point. The fact is that Russia is at least as much dependent on European money and tech that it gets in exchange for its gas, and that the gas trade has done much more for improving the strategic safety of Europe than, for example, the US military presence.
Either the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is built or the German economy will tumble. As will the economy of the Netherlands. Even the UK will be impacted. You know why? Because the natural gas wells in the Netherlands are drying up. As is North Sea gas. There will be a capacity deficit in the near future, like the next 5 years unless Nord Stream 2 is built. The alternative for the Germans, I guess, is burning coal. Since Germany has been closing all their nuclear reactors.
If you think the Germans will take the hit and lose economic competitiveness to satisfy some nebulous USA natural gas interests they have another thing coming. Fact is the USA does not even have the capacity to supply that demand over the next 5 years. To build those facilities, even if they were financed, would take at least a decade and it would still be more expensive than Russian gas.