My favorite part is Huawei is supposedly using our own law enforcement back doors. I hope that this is forever used as an example to fight the ongoing push for "good guy only" back doors.
The "good guys" (telco/law enforcement) have strict criterias to access it, like court order. Thus it is regulated by the local government.
Meanwhile Huawei is supposedly actively created a workaround:
> U.S. officials say Huawei has built equipment that secretly preserves the manufacturer’s ability to access networks through these interfaces without the carriers’ knowledge.
> The "good guys" (telco/law enforcement) have strict criterias to access it, like court order.
The good guys have a non-transparent approval mechanism for permission which no one can audit. In reality, you have no basis for claiming it's an effective overall control mechanism because none of us can see most of the data. Further, there have been numerous documented cases of abuse like intelligence officials spying on their significant others, parallel reconstruction on cases where secret data shouldn't have been used, etc.
An administrative policy control where application of the control is handled by the people holding the data with 0 auditing by anyone outside the system is not a strict control. Do I trust American intelligence more than the Chinese government or Huawei? Definitely, but that does not let American intelligence off the hook or justify what they are doing with mass data collection.
Do I trust American intelligence more than the Chinese government or Huawei?
Why would you trust American intelligence/law enforcement more than a foreign government (unless you have something to hide from that government, like if you are fostering unrest from abroad)?
There's not much reason for China to be interested in me, but there's lots of reasons I wouldn't want US law enforcement spying on me, since they are in a better position to make trouble for me.
This take is essentially the "I have nothing to hide" argument except applied to China. Moreover, even if China is not interested in you in particular, it is interested in the executives, politicians, and decision makers that use our telecom infrastructure along with you. And you should care if those people are spied on by the Chinese government, probably more than about yourself being spied on by the US government.
While the US is not perfect and has executed a number of immoral/illegal projects, the world order under the US seems far superior to what a world order under China could be.
> While the US is not perfect and has executed a number of immoral/illegal projects, the world order under the US seems far superior to what a world order under China could be.
Which specific part of the Middle East are you thinking of with that little gem? I'm looking at Iran on a map and they are the last stable center amongst a sea of catastrophes from Syria to Afghanistan that all have the sticky fingerprints of American influence on them. The entire Arabian peninsula is a mess hold together only by US support and stands as a real-time embarrassment of all the rhetoric out of Washington in my lifetime.
Compared to that, what exactly is China likely to do that could be worse?
The US has a bunch of stuff they can be proud of, but nobody is going to (indeed nobody is) take them seriously when their ambassadors hand-wringing about the risks of foreign spies or foreign influence. The US has been doing whatever they feel like for decades with little regard for anyone else and they have not shown themselves to be particularly honourable when there are real stakes, like oil, on the table.
One place where China could do worse than US (or in the case of Syria, Russian) influence is internet access. In the Middle East there is some filtering and blocking on internet connections, but it remains trivial to circumvent and many computer-savvy teenagers already know how. China has already shown that it is interested in exporting its Great Firewall technology -- which is very challenging to circumvent -- to nations with which it establishes close ties.
FISA courts have a high acceptance rate because prosecutors don't put anything in the ring unless they're very sure they'll get approved. This has been affirmed by many ex-FISA court appointees, lawyers and those in the intelligence community.
Please let the "FISA court is a rubber stamp" myth die already.
This doesn't mean that there's not widespread abuse of secret warrants/NSLs.
It could easily mean that they've developed a formula to ensure that they meet* the standards set by the FISA court.
Maybe every single one of them has some kind of magic phrasing that's technically true, but kinda bullshit if you're able to view it from a wider viewpoint. Maybe all it takes is to say that this person has a connection to known terrorists. The connection could be incredibly distant, but hey - there's a sworn statement from some analyst/agent/whomever saying that there's a connection.
Because the courts are secret, there's no opportunity for those outside the intelligence community to review things and see whether there are routine abuses or other questionable situations.
I don't know if the FISA system is abused or not, but I certainly would not take the word of anyone who made a living off it to tell me it's all good. I submit I may have a very different definition of reasonable use. I know the opinions of regular police and courts and I disagree with them too.
I think if your proof is "I don't trust anyone in government" that's a pretty weak argument, no? Also, isn't it true that every warrant is just opinions about whether someone has done something warranting investigation? I don't see what any of these objections have to do with FISA.
Article 1 section 9 isn't an amendment and is still just a bunch of restrictions :P
The first one, for example, is
> 1: The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.
The constitution is all about checks and balances. There was implicit trust in the government from the very outset of the founding of this country. It was a documented designed to guarantee trust. If you don't trust the checks and balances that the government provides, then the constitution is a worthless piece of paper. Warrants are by definition, a check and balance of sorts, although I understand it doesn't feel that way. Police (executive branch) comes to a judge (judicial branch), who approves or rejects the warrant. The judiciary has the final say over whether the police can search a home, for example.
I think it's interesting how many people point to how we need to get back to the roots of constitutionalism, but also say "I never trust anything governments do or say".
If that's the case, why do you think the constitution will help you there? The document itself requires huge levels of trust.
Well sure, if I took the extreme position of arguing to never trust the government you'd be right.
That's not what I, or the person you are originally replying to is doing. Rather we would say something like "you are asking us to trust the government when it is bypassing or ignoring the checks and balances put into the constitution precisely because of issues like this". For a few examples:
Checks and balances are why the 6th amendment requires to a "speedy and public trial". Which the FISA courts are not providing. They are why the 6th amendment requires the accused to be informed of the "nature and cause of the accusation", which is regularly being violated by these secret proceedings by way of parallel construction.
You bring up the topic of warrants, but warrants (by the 4th amendment) must "upon probable cause [... describe] the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized". From what little we have seen of the FISA proceedings, neither of those conditions are being respected.
You bring up the judicial branch, but the judicial branch is required (by article 3 section 2 of the constitution) to hear only cases and controversies, one sided proceedings that aren't even released publicly after the fact to be challenged are neither. This clause exists (I believe) precisely because one sided arguments lack the necessary checks and balances to reach a fair verdict
What were your thoughts on the police and court system while Black Lives Matter was making all the headlines? Or if that's not your cup of tea, how about when the court let Epstein go free when he was raping children?
I'm expressing a mainstream opinion at the least if not the majority. Being a more secret court doesn't make me feel more trusting.
Most Americans only experience small parts justice systems eg: traffic tickets, civil courts, the usual things in our daily life. But the US justice system is huge and has really varied uses and applications.
To extrapolate all the abuses of the wider justice system to a highly specialized court whose only purpose is national security would be a mistake, in my opinion. It's such a specific purpose and such a specialized role, it's hard to say for certain.
The only thing we have to go off is the testimony and opinions of those who have experienced it. We have no other barometer or metric, everything else is hearsay.
You're not wrong, it's just not a strong argument.
The state regularly tortures, murders, starts civil wars, provides weapons to genocidal allies, etc. I have literally the entire history of the world on my side. You have, as you admitted, hearsay. The sane position is that they will be at least as bad in private as they are in public.
The state is not a monolith. It’s barely top-down. It’s a collection of people in many different departments with their own ideals and relations. The people who decide what dictators to arms are NOT judges, nor come from the domestic judicial branch.
"They" are the people requesting those FISA warrants. "They" are the people who put you in prison forever without a trial. "They" are the people Snowden revealed to be flaunting the law with illegal domestic surveillance programs.
People requesting FISA warrants are in agencies like the NSA. They’re not in the White House determining international policy. Hell, with this president, most of what they say is ignored!
What prison forever without a trial? Are you talking about the few captured during war in Guantanamo? Again, this is not the judges running secret courts that ok FISA requests.
If you’ve ever worked in a large company, you’ll see the diversity of opinions, dominions, political battles, and generally chaos. And yet the public sees the output as unified, when the input was anything but. Now just imagine the government, far bigger in size, full of people that came from all kinds of backgrounds and ways — thru elections, normal job applications, the military, etc... from a variety of political backgrounds and moral standards.
I encourage you not to paint with such broad brushstrokes.
If the state is as unethical and as shady as claimed, why bother with FISA and warrants? Why not just do whatever you feel like, because as you say, anything goes?
" I submit I may have a very different definition of reasonable use."
That's fine - you can go ahead and vote. There's an election coming up. Collectively, most Americans probably agree with the current use, and there are actual control and oversight by the Judicial system. Which is unlike China.
What's the alternative to high approval rate = rubber stamp? Low approval rate > prosecutors wasting time on shit that won't get approved > prosecutors figuring out what shit will get approved > prosecutors do that > high approval rate?
This is on the money. All the overreaches of the US government can be viewed as what happens when the world's hegemon actually is constrained by people, and has limits to its authority. Its what a country with its power and influence does, when its restrained.
Imagine the overreaches of a hegemon without those restraints. If the CCP were to replace the US/western alliances, as the dominant power - the catastrophe would be unimaginable.
Chinese officials say that the NSA tapped the phone of an allied nation's Prime Minister without their knowledge.
If you remove yourself from the current spat between USA and China, how can we take for good what "US officials" say, when we all have PROOF, post-Snowden, of what US officials were actually doing?
The previous sentence is a direct quote of a top-3 executive of Huawei I've witnessed personally at a press conference.
He was absolutely right.
My point is: if you isolate statements like these, the discourse is going nowhere. Also, for the tapping of Merkel's phone we have proof, for most of the things "US officials" say, we have not, we're just asked constantly to trust what they say and take it at face value, but American institutions have squandered that luxury in the past 20 years.
This is also why telco companies in allied countries that have invested billions in 5G infrastructure from China are not really willing to cancel their plans only based on take-it-or-leave-it and trust-based intelligence.
How does proof that the USA did something affect or change the risk that Huawei devices can pose? That's literal whataboutism.
The alternative providers aren't even USA owned, they're European.
Discourse is going no-where because some people have a fundamental misunderstanding that this is some sort of trial that requires proof, when in actually it's simple risk analysis.
Discourse is going no-where because some people somehow think it's unfair for Huawei to be banned from networks, when China routinely bans Western companies based on domestic security/market risk alone.
Discourse is going no-where because some people expect backdoors to have giant identifiable red flags, when instead they look like the openssl CVE's from 2006 that disappear and reappear in Huawei's firmware.
Discourse is going no-where because some people seem to think this is some attempt by the US to maintain some surveillance hold on telecom networks, when they can just compromise Huawei gear anyways.
Anyone sticking to Huawei hardware is doing it because it's extremely cheap, and they're either blind to (willingly or not) the risk or have factored it in (see UK's 35% deal).
Discourse is going nowhere because people think that it's fair for the American Government to enact restrictions on global companies based in America, in a way that makes it impossible for a company from another country to operate fairly on a market (Europe) where American Institutions have absolutely no jurisdiction.
How is that even legal in a country where the free market is basically God? Free market as long as it's in the American interest?
There is no "fair" here. China routinely puts soft pressure on foreign companies for making statements that it dislikes. That will likely expand in the future as China's soft power grows. See anything Taiwan, Tibet, or Hong Kong related.
Clearly some other countries are still sovereign anyways and have gone against the US's wishes.
People often use "capitalism" or "free market" interchangeably with "laissez faire economics." What you're referring to is laissez faire, not "the free market." Laissez faire occurs in a capitalistic society but it's a subset of capitalism. Really it's an ideology more than anything, usually called names like "libertarianism." It also sort of defeats the point of the economic growth.
Economic growth is for national security, specifically to fund and produce supplies for our armies. This is why we talk about economies in the context of nations. This is why nations frequently subsidize businesses or full-industries. This is why Alexander Hamilton sent spies to Britain to steal factory blueprints, or why Xi Jinping subsidizes Huawei, or why the PRC exists at all.
America wrote the playbook that china's following. That's why you can trust what America says about China. That's why it's good if america does something but bad if another country does it. Nations are all just horses in the same race. You're supposed to pick one.
What are we racing towards though? What is the goal? Nation vs. nation competition seems great up until the point human wellbeing becomes secondary to the ambiguous goal of 'national advancement' .
In this imperialistic "horse race" nations improve the wellbeing of humanity because nations are incentivised to take care of its citizenry since the citizenry is their military. Back in the day either you were either a soldier, or you paid your way out of service by funding the army and paying the salaries of the rest of the soldiers.
Things in the last 200 years have changed greatly and I don't know if the ideology holds up anymore. The American Civil War, WWI and WWII showed that nation populations are greater than any transportation system can physically move to the battlefield, so improving the wellbeing of humans has taken a backseat to improving technology since the bottleneck of war isn't how many soldiers you have, it's how fast you can move and how fast you can kill off the other side.
The other bottleneck during the last couple major wars (aside from transportation) was the supply of raw materials. If America wasn't mineral rich and shipping ammunition to both sides during WWI the war would've ended a lot sooner. Today I wonder what war would be like because there's a near infinite supply of people, and raw materials.
Also there's a seemingly infinite supply of money currently in circulation. Everything seems to be getting bought and sold as global investors frantically try to find enough things to invest in. It's an absurd world we live in and I agree that the meaning of it all has completely broken down.
The future is very uncertain; but dealing with the immediate past the US are much more likely to use their intelligence to drone strike somebody or invade a country.
I would personally rather be spied on by the US than by China, but I can see how a rational person would choose the reverse.
You would have to be adding that either US intelligence ops are so much more talented than Chinese ops, or that China is so much more principled than the US. Neither of which strike me as accurate.
If the US is doing it, China is at least TRYING to do it.
Why do they need a back door when they can walk right in through the front door? I used to work for a large company that purchased Huawei 4G gear and had a paid support agreement. A condition of the agreement was giving VPN and SSH access to Huawei support engineers, so that they could "debug" their products in our network.
The ideal strategy for an adversary is to not implement the backdoor while you have still front-door access and people are watching. Then you get 100% deniability. You wait to implement it until you think you're about to lose front-door access.
The people in the position to scrutinize likely wouldn't be the same ones to close the door, in this instance. Network carriers aren't going to turn down support for a support contract they paid good money for unless they have a good reason.
If you put the backdoor in too soon, you get caught and you never get your devices implemented in the first place. But once you're in, the money for alternatives have already been allocated.
Are we talking about Huawei or Cisco here? The well documented general stupidity of infrastructure hardware suppliers hardly supports the air quotes, or any of the nation state narratives here.
As someone who doesn't live in the US I'm not sure that that's not any different than the recent Crypto AG news, or the similar back doors that have been discovered in Cisco hardware over the years, including the ones provided for US 'law enforcement'.
The only real answer though is not to worry about this stuff, use the cheapest switching hardware you can find (sure use Huawei if they're the cheapest) and own your own privacy, don't trust anyone and do your own end-to-end encryption.
Both the American and Chinese governments have bad track records when it comes to abusing civil liberties, privacy intrusion. I would say that the Chinese government is worse, but that doesn't really matter from my perspective for this particular thing.
As an American, I expect that the US government, if it wants it enough, can obtain access to my communications (at least while using US infrastructure), assuming they're not e2e encrypted. Hopefully such access would be gated by a warrant, and I expect in most cases that's how it works, though I do expect there are abuses here and there.
The Chinese government, however, should not have any kind of access to any of my communications (unless I am visiting China, using their infrastructure; or perhaps am communicating with someone in China from abroad). In addition, if the relationship between the US and China ever sours to the point of war, presumably the Chinese would have no problem using any possible backdoors to disrupt US telecom networks.
Given this, I would much rather the US use US-built telecom infrastructure than Chinese-built infra. I think an argument over which government is more moral or trustworthy is just not useful here.
If I was living in America, I'd much rather have the Chinese government spying on me than the American government, and vice versa if I were in China. Obviously that's me as a selfish individual - it does indeed make more sense for America as a whole to not want other nation states snooping on them.
Real choices (if you live in America) are (1) American government only or (2) American and Chinese governments both. As a resident of Canada, my choices are (1) Canadian and American, or (2) Canadian and Chinese.
The scary thing about this attitude is that if it's widely adopted and results in Huawei being welcomed (or something that facilities spying), it puts the people who do push back against the Chinese government in the crosshairs.
Well, the reason I bring it (the moral judgment) up is that in the comment I replied to we see the usual "whataboutism" being invoked, and that leads naturally to the domain of moral judgments by implicitly strawmanning the opposing position that the Chinese government is bad and the American government is good so we should accept the latter doing shitty things but not the former.
I mean, why else would you bring it up at all? No shit, governments are going to spy on people ... it's still useful and interesting to know which governments are doing the spying, and how, and who's accusing who of what (which is obviously not the same thing). It's newsworthy even without moral judgment. But the whataboutism drags morals into the picture.
I agree with your comment in the sense that it is a reasonably accurate description of reality and some notions of "should" in the (very fuzzy) [international] legal sense.
On the other hand, assuming that future people will have to live under both regimes, and given that "cyber-intrusions" are moves in a greater conflict that is likely to escalate and has profound implications for the future shape of human society and thought, I think it's quite useful to bring morals into the picture if one of our goals is to maximize good outcomes and minimize bad outcomes for other humans.
Not going to pretend the US is perfect. But in a world where the future is basically a choice between one of two super powers to throw your lot in with, imma go with the US.
The US is the one with a track record of hostile aggression outside its own borders. So far, China seems to focus more on domestic issues than on international assassinations. As a person not living in China, Chinese spying seems less dangerous to me than US spying, at least for now.
I think that my point above is that spying is bad, we're forced to choose between two evils and rather than choosing sides we should armor ourselves against evil
Which isn't that easy, since the world isn't black and white. And do I even care about morals, or mostly just about my personal data?
As an American it's probably easy to make a choice here, but as a 3rd party I'm not so sure. The US has definitely wreaked more havoc across the globe during the past century, from overthrowing democratic governments to bombing the shit out of countries. The Chinese are reckless whenever they see someone threatening their authority, but egoistically speaking, that 99% applies to Chinese nationals or people living in China. Not my problem.
If my country would go with US equipment, I already know they will get all my data because of things like the patriot act and all the niceties Snowden revealed the NSA et al have.
The Chinese probably have the same, but we don't know anything definitive, which makes it more scary, also they are evil commies. But then again, having access to telco infra only means they get meta data, since traffic is all encrypted nowadays, while the US still gets all my content thanks to Facebook/WhatsApp, Google/Gmail, Amazon, ..., no matter what the 5G equipment is. So is it safer to then say you better buy the 5G stuff from the US so only one party can steal all your data?
I don't think I implied it's easy. I commented because whataboutism drags us into moral territory, and having been so dragged we should attempt to form robust moral judgments rather than making do with hey, man, like, it's all relative, you know?
Didn't mean you said it is. Just wanted to go further with that thought from my perspective, because I assume the majority of users on here are from the US and thus might not immediately see why this whole situation isn't as easy to decide on for everybody. Thus I just tried to lay out several aspects you might consider as an "outsider", and hopefully I didn't make it look like there is a final conclusion to that.
It's wrong I think to imply the equivalence of the use of backdoors by the US and China because they would be used for totally different purposes, with only some minor overlap.
The other issue regarding 5G is China's leveraging of the IP system to protect its own agency abroad, while not allowing any meaningful competition within its own borders.
Additionally, they're using a massive financing scheme to almost bribe carriers into buying equipment on extremely good terms with super low-interest rate loans.
I think it's much better to 'worry about it'.
There either has to be some very rigorous inspection scheme or, equipment can only be made by certified players (like Eriksson) because there's too much risk otherwise.
The West should consider completely ignoring China's IP on 5G, and frankly, using their IP. When China complains about being 'ripped off' we simply use the same deferential language they use on us.
Certainly, government-backed financing should be banned within any kind of trade deal. The equivalent would be the US government using the Treasure and literally the Federal Reserve to fudge currency to, among other things, provide super-cheap financing to customers around the world. Or maybe the US should just do that? Invest $10B in a new equipment maker, and then print $100B at the Fed to provide cheap financing to said companies customers?
It seems like maybe I'm beeing 'tongue-in-cheek' by making such preposterous and radical solutions?
The thing is I'm not ... in fact, what I'm describing parallels exactly what China does as part of their national strategy.
Our policy towards China usually reflects the kind of actions modern states might take among one another, but they are playing a completely different game, and it's as if we're collectively naive to it all.
These are big, serious games that involve massive intelligence issues, massive industries, massive industrial and IP control.
All of that said, maybe there is a nifty way to obviate the problem by using some kind of networking technique to render such back doors moot - that would be cool!
But what you describe (encouraging people to buy your stuff by making it cheaper to them) is, um, "capitalism", I'm pretty sure that "capitalism" is also still available in most western countries (except of course ones that are banning competition by banning some vendors, or by setting up trade barriers and tariffs)
'Dumping' isn't 'making stuff cheaper', it's illegal in most countries. [1]
Second, it's not 'capitalism' when the government intervenes with massive subsidies, or worse, leverages the financial system and central bank to support an initiative.
You basically can't have any reasonable kind of trade with countries that engage in these practices. This issue is fundamentally why trade deals take so long: nations go to lengths to make sure the other side doesn't 'cheat'. One area of constant contention is agricultural subsidies. Because food production is seen as a 'strategic issue', countries feel the need to subsidize, but those subsidies aren't the same in each nation, causing serious competitive issues.
China plays the game to their advantage, fair enough - but the West should not simply allow China to have arbitrary leverage. It'd be better in the long run if everyone played fair, but so long as they want to play with shenanigans, those shenanigans should be returned in kind
It isn't different without taking a moral stance on both China and the US' intelligence habits over the years.
The simplest answer to all of this, seems to be - when it comes to technology, international trust is at an all time low, and we need systems that are trustless.
However, these standards are intentionally kept weak, so that any determined actor can break a door down if they don't have their own. (ala stingray).
For "national security" reasons, and if that doesn't work, to catch pedophiles. Because both of those force politicians to not stand against whatever is being proposed.
You do agree there’s a difference between Enlightenment principles and authoritarian governments? Not that the US is perfect but they at least acknowledges the concept of natural rights. Relativism is a rather dangerous worldview.
Ask folks in Chile, Greece, the Philipines, Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, or Nicaragua - to start with a short list - how American "Enlightenment principles" played out with US support for various dictatorships in those countries.
What annoys me the most about the whole "Huawei fiasco" is the fact people were going to install proprietary product to run 5G, which meant that it ended in a strange speculation game. If only open and free hardware had to be used for such things, there wouldn't be any problems of putting blind trust into a foreign company.
Even open and free hardware needs a support contract. Your open and free 5G radio ain't gonna patch itself. Whoever is supporting it needs to have some sort of a guarantee that they will continue to be providing those updates for the expected lifetime of the device.
None of which can tell you that the hardware isn’t doing something different, for sure. Code audits don’t mean much if the code you’re given isn’t what you’re running.
Still don’t tell you what is inside of a chip. This is a known big area of concern, and is one of the reasons why the US military requires chips be made domestically for sensitive equipment.
1) With node sizes getting down to 5-7nm, it’s out of reach for standard X-ray technology.
2) Lets say you use some cutting edge technology like x-Ray tomography [1]. Now how do you read this back out and know what each circuit is doing? You could compare to a ref design, but maybe that ref design already has the backdoor in it?
3) How you get from VDHL/Verilog/hardware spec to chip is a proprietary, difficult, and computationally intense process that is anything but open and even if it were, require extreme computing and specialized technical talent to understand the final chip layout vs the input
4) Even if you could do that, the shear complexity of the code could have things hidden “in plain sight” by exploiting non-obvious features, such as all the side-channel timing attacks common on Intel chips these days.
5) Even if you had that down, you’d have to have someone like AT&T opening up hundreds or thousands of these machines, removing all the chips, hoping that no damage occurs and your imaging technology can read through the chip packaging, and imagine them one by one and ultimately compare to some reference.
Needless to say, this is not a realistic endeavor. We’re talking state-level espionage with resources and motivation. You have to control the supply chain, and hope your own supply chain isn’t compromised itself.
While reasonable, this is a pretty pessimistic point of view. With X-ray images, the attacker has much less flexibility to change the hidden backdoors. You do not have to check every single machine, like no one ever checks every single line of code. It is enough if people randomly check the X-ray images and whenever someone finds anything suspicious, it will get into the news. This is how open source works.
Yes, having a state as enemy is a loosing game, but if we take every possibility to make their life harder, it will shift the game significantly. Giving up never help anyone.
If x ray doesnt work, try some other stuff, infrared, led, radioactive, ect. Could even try something as simple as attach multimeter leads to the pins.
As a UK citizen, my general assumption is that the systems security of all telco equipment and the operational security of all telcos is so poor that both the US and China can covertly access our networks, no matter who made the equipment. Pretty much no complex software stands up to scrutiny if you're willing to put $100M into cracking it. Until some equipment vendor starts shipping a software stack that is both open-source and formally verified, it seems that situation will persist. Can't see that happening anytime soon.
There's always been such allegations about Huawei. Backdoors are no surprise. LI is standardized by 3GPP.
But if Huawei can do it, so would be the case for NSN, ZTE, Ericsson and even samsung.
Besides backdoor access built in, these telecom equipment come with advanced diagnostic capabilities that are not accessible by anyone other then their own RND department.
Everyone here is missing the real issue, which is money; it's not about US or China spying. It's about the trillions at stake for who owns the 5G patents. Currently 4G patents are mostly owned by Qualcomm, but if Huawei takes precedence, Huawei stands to earn trillions from equipment makers.
This is just nonsense, patents don't accrue much of the revenue and the revenue for the entire telecommunications industry globally is probably only a trillion.
> U.S. officials say Huawei Technologies Co. can covertly access mobile-phone networks around the world through “back doors” designed for use by law enforcement
I cannot believe they don't see the contradiction. Chinese law enforcement isn't supposed to have backdoors in equipment sold around the world but the US is? Seriously? I can't believe any countries would buy sensitive communications infrastructure from any country that openly includes backdoors.
The suspicious thing isn't the tool/technology, it's the actor and what the world would be like if they ran the show.
This is a good reason why Chinese needs to democratize totally and switch things up.
The issue is, when you live in China and luck strikes out, there's no choice but to conform, or face suffering, which if Xinjiang is any measure, includes deprivation of liberty. Take pity on the one who has disagreement with the system in PRC.
I don't understand a government lasting long without elections by the people. I don't get their end game on the world stage. They remind me of Kefka from Final Fantasy VI, or team rocket in Pokemon, because news often planning some conspiracy or trap that'd backfire on them in the end.
This reminds me of that case when Russia deployed its radioelectronic warfare gear in Syria, and the US complained that it interfered with the US's own radioelectronic warfare gear.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd be the last person to carry water for Huawei, but realistically each country that hopes to maintain its sovereignty should build their data infrastructure on their own. Especially first world countries who have the means and the technology to do so. Otherwise you end up with Barack Obama listening in on Angela Merkel's phone calls and stuff like that.
I don't think that's the real issue. The real issue is that Huawei can (maybe) covertly deny service. Or launch attacks on other pieces of infrastructure.
Really who cares except some jingoist defence industry neocon who still thinks the cold war is a thing , also the Chinese don't do drone strikes or invade other countries.
China doesn't invade countries; except Tibet, Vietnam, India and Korea. They also funded and trained the Khmer Rouge and clashed with the soviet union. They have also built and fortified islands in other nations territorial waters. That is from the top of my head.
The news here is that all telecom equipment is required to have back doors built into them, the "crime" is the manufacturer sometimes using this too.
I don't know if this is hugely revelatory or surprising, it has been common knowledge that all the telecoms are effectively government entities for a long time now. It's still just a bit surreal to see it all spelled out in black and white in the WSJ.
Some enterprise network gear even has CALEA modules built in to facilitate traffic intercepts. For example, here's some docs from both Mikrotik and Cisco:
Considering the anti-competitive, protectionist nature of the US backlash against Huawei, I think it's wise to be quite skeptical of these kinds of claims until they have been proven to be true by independent security experts.
It is more accurate to say that the US government has mandated law-enforcement backdoors that means any telecom equipment provider has covert access, Chinese or otherwise. And now that this is the case they would really rather that you stop using the Chinese ones (and use instead US companies, who also have access to the backdoors and are willing to share it with the US government).
As a practical matter, it all depends on your threat model: are you more likely to get into trouble if the US government knows your secrets, or the Chinese one? How much of a premium are you willing to pay to minimize this risk either way?
