The high, high cost of sanctioning Huawei

Asia Times ^

[FarCenter]

...

Asked if he has seen any hard evidence of Huawei using its 5G equipment for purposes of espionage, Evan Anderson, CEO of information service INVNT/IP (Inventing Nations vs. Nation-Sponsored Theft of IP), told Asia Times by email:

“While I am not aware of a case wherein Huawei was caught directly surveilling foreign citizens outright, they retain the motivation, capability, and government support to do so. As with any company in China, they cannot say no to the government or Communist Party, by law.

“They are a de facto arm of the Chinese state. Conversations about backdoors and evidence of direct surveillance therefore miss the point: surveillance could be achieved in myriad ways by using third parties and leaving the front door open.”

There may not be any publicly-available hard evidence, yet, but national security concerns center on the preemption of potential threats, not about being innocent until proven guilty. Huawei’s rebuttal of the allegations against it can be seen here.

5G network vulnerability is a two-way street. The Sydney Morning Herald article said, “To be sure, China would also be vulnerable to attacks from the US and its allies.”

In 2014, as reported by The New York Times, documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the US National Security Agency had already hacked Huawei servers to conduct espionage of its own.

The Five Eyes (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) intelligence-sharing network are losing, or have already lost, their previous monopoly on telecom espionage – and clearly they don’t like it.

The economic argument for continuing to use Huawei equipment and the national security argument against it are irreconcilable. But telecom equipment is both critical infrastructure and key to the development of an advanced economy.

That, of course, is why Japan, South Korea and China have devoted decades of effort and heaps of capital to developing their own first-class telecoms technology.

All three countries have eliminated excessive dependence on foreign suppliers and created domestic intellectual property and supply chains that generate returns far outweighing the initial costs of development.

The US, Canada, Australia and Europe now intend to do the same. How long it might take and whether they can avoid the temptations of oligopoly and protectionist destruction of price incentives remains to be seen.

[FarCenter]

What's never said is that US corporations generally have a large book of business with the US government managed by a federal services marketing division.

They also generally have a high level regulatory and legislative affairs staff.

Any request from the US government that is not clearly illegal will be fulfilled with alacrity.

Large US corporations are not independent of the US government.

[canuck_conservative]

Huawei, like every Chinese company, is an arm of the government - that means spying

“Do not trust China” is a good rule-of-thumb, given their malicious history (and STILL ongoing - look at how they set up those “police” spy stations around the world!!)

[ConservativeInPA]

It should be the explicit policy of the United States to end trade with China. Period. There needs to be a huge on-shoring of many industries, beginning with tech and pharmaceuticals.

[Brian Griffin]

“Asked if he has seen any hard evidence of Huawei using its 5G equipment for purposes of espionage”

Chinese intelligence is smart enough to not generate such hard evidence.

It is easy to find the suppliers of a company if you have access to its web traffic.

From the suppliers you can pinpoint the company’s supplier-related trade secrets, such the key ingredients of a product.

If a big defense contractor starts communicating with the X Company, it would be worthwhile having Chinese intelligence investigate the X company. From the X company’s line of business, Chinese intelligence might figure out what the big defense contractor is trying to do.

[The Duke]

So we have more expectation of privacy and data protection with companies controlled by the Communist US government (?)

[Moltke]

There’s a number of alternatives to Huawei 5G tech. Just use one (or more) of those. Should be a no-brainer. I don’t get all this fretting over Huawei.