Slashdot Mirror
US Tells Germany To Stop Using Huawei Equipment Or Lose Some Intelligence Access (theverge.com)
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the United States has told Germany to drop Huawei from its future plans or risk losing access to some U.S. intelligence. The U.S. says the Chinese company's equipment could be used for espionage -- a concern that Huawei says is unfounded. "The Trump administration has been pressing allies to end their relationships with Huawei, but Germany, moving ahead with its plans, has not moved to ban the company from its networks," reports The Verge. From the report: According to the Journal, a letter sent from the U.S. Ambassador to Germany warns the country that the U.S. will stop sharing some secrets if it allows Huawei to work on its next-generation 5G infrastructure. The letter, according to the Journal, argues that network security can't be effectively managed by audits of equipment or software. While the U.S. plans to continue sharing intelligence with Germany regardless, the Journal reports, officials plan to curtail the scope of that information if Huawei equipment is used in German infrastructure.
And, of course, you have proof of this?
The NSA project is called Tailored Access Operations: http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
Cisco got so pissed about it they went to visit the president to complain: https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
Warning of an erosion of confidence in the products of the U.S. technology industry, John Chambers, the CEO of networking giant Cisco Systems, has asked President Obama to intervene to curtail the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency.
So, why do you think it's a good idea to pay China for equipment that likely has back doors,
Again, that's a false premise. As of now, your question should be phrased: Why do you think it's a good idea to pay China for equipment that has no indication of backdoors or security issues except unfounded claims from someone backing a competing vendor?
Huawai would be in position to put a back door into any of their equipment with a firmware update, even if they don't exist now. Why take that chance? And how would you be able to know if they did? I seriously doubt they'd let you build the code from source...
They will if they want to sell it to Germany and if it is necessary to pass the security audit. And with no reliable information performing such an audit for ANY possible vendor is the only way to go.
Clearly Huawai would do as the government requires, and if that was to hide backdoors in their firmware updates, you can bet they'd do it. Cisco? Not so much.
Well, any american company also is no further than a NSL away from having to give the three letter agencies full access, too. So, again, Germany can't rely on anyone here and has to run their own strict security audit and include any possible vendor here.
bickerdyke
it's about preserving security on the networks that carry the terabytes of secret information passing between the countries.
By preserve security you of course mean maintain the US ability to slurp it all up.
Um, you do have to realize that the Chinese government are not the good guys. Saying "well, what about NSA spying??" is a whataboutism argument. Yes, the NSA is a spy agency, but that doesn't mean that Chinese spying is something we shouldn't worry about.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/whataboutism-origin-meaning