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Pompeo Hints at Huawei Ultimatum to Countries Buying Equipment
- zorked 8y agoIs there any concrete evidence of Huawei backdoors?
- vkou 8y agoNot at this time, and you probably won't ever see any. The press coverage, of course, leaves you free to let your imagination run wild.
- eznoonze 8y agoYou mean the US pulled an "Iraq WMD" again?
- tylerflick 8y agoYou mean these WMD's? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...
- Someone1234 8y agoNope. That wasn't why the second Iraq war was declared as your own article says: > The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West. Nobody ever claimed Iraq had no WMDs, since that was in no small part what the first Iraq war was about. The claim was that Iraq was actively developing WMDs and that the US+allies had to intervene in the 2000s, a claim that has been debunked heavily. I'd go so far as to call it an established fact that no WMD program existed that required international intervention in 2003. Most of the evidence otherwise has been debunked, and no additional evidence was found during the war itself.
- basch 8y agoThey have before cloned Cisco Vulnerabilities. If in this case they modified an existing backdoor to point somewhere else, evidence of the backdoor would also expose the original.
- Jerry2 8y agoNo. The US wants tech and equipment from the US-based companies to be the standard across the world because it would allow more influence over those countries. They would also be able to intercept the equipment as it leaves the US. [0] [0] Infamous "NSA intercepts Cisco equipment slide" https://archive.fo/7Zosk https://archive.fo/7Zosk
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lamarpye 8y agoChina wants tech and equipment from the China-based companies to be the standard across the world because it would allow more influence over those countries. They would also be able to intercept the equipment as it leaves the US.
- _iyig 8y agoYes, as does China. https://qz.com/africa/1192493/china-spied-on-african-union-headquarters-for-five-years/ https://qz.com/africa/1192493/china-spied-on-african-union-h... I suppose what it boils down to is, which “silent partner” would you prefer?
- kyrra 8y agoIt's worth noting that none of the telecom providers for wireless gear are from the US. The top 5 equipment manufacturers for 5G gear are — Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE and Samsung.
- ataturk 8y agoMy take on this is that USA Orwell Inc. already has backdoors on all the things and now Huawei is exposing those backdoors and/or replacing them and/or have all their own. This is what has to be going on--you're watching two corrupt domination systems duke it out in real time.
- umvi 8y agoOther than the Chinese government's rabid obsession with controlling information? I guarantee you'll never see a story titled "Chinese law enforcement frustrated with high security/encryption of Huawei devices" like you do in the US with iPhones. Whether that's because Hwawei has backdoors in their phones that allow the government to check for dissension at their pleasure or whether they simply use the xkcd wrench solution to get into any citizen's device is still in the air.
- xiphias2 8y agoUsing the wrench solution just doesn't make sense when Chinese people care about privacy in general even less than American people.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rixrax 8y agoTelecoms equipment from Huawei and others are no different to desktop OSs and consumer IoTs in that they do require software and firmware updates from time to time. And given that these updates come in a form of binary blobs, in some risk scenarios it’s a fair argument that you’re ‘just’ one [‘security’] update away from backdoor running in your system. Damned if you don’t [apply patches], damned if you do [and get more than you bargained for]. Another consideration altogether is what is a backdoor to begin with? A hard coded password? Absolutely! Some other obviously nefarious code that can be proven to be left there for one possible reason only? Absolutely. But what about a buffer overflow kind of programming ‘mistake’ deep in protocol stack that just happened to be missed by QA? Most of the telecoms gear highly likely is running SW written in memory unsafe languages and runs on OSes lacking [many of the] modern protections such as w^x or aslr. I think it would be hard to definitively say if these were left in intentionally with someone possessing ready made exploit, or just because of mistake. So when we talk about evidence of backdoor, it’s as usual, not a simple black and white yes or no question. It’s more of a risk question, with a twist of international power plays.
- FooHentai 8y agoAlso fundamentally you can look at it like this: If I (as a nation-state) had the ability to embed a kill switch embedded into the telecoms hardware on which other nations depend, and over which I had exclusive knowledge and control, would it be in my interests to do that? Of course it would. Irrespective of which nation state we're talking about that's a Good Idea. Also, technically such a backdoor capability is almost undetectable (down to a sub-microcode analysis level), as per the Ken Thompson compiler hack.
- nneonneo 8y agoIt doesn’t even need to be a killswitch. If the hardware checks firmware signatures (as it reasonably should), then I can just hold a critical patch hostage. You can’t patch against some nasty bug until $DEMAND is met - and meanwhile I can sell the exploit to some other enemy of yours and let them have fun with your systems.
- burtonator 8y ago
- baylisscg 8y agoI forget who it was but I remember someone commenting along the lines of: They don't need to add back doors they just need poor security. Or, to double paraphrase. Any sufficiently bad firmware is indistinguishable from back doored.
- thisisweirdok 8y agoI can't imagine China wouldn't retaliate on such a ban? Maybe Apple will have to scale back those expectations on sales in China again?
- griffinkelly 8y agoDespite demands to other countries, the US telecom providers still use Huawei equipment. The US government has made demands for them to stop using Huawei base stations but ultimately the economics don't make sense. I don't see the US government ripping out domestic equipment anytime soon, yet alone being able to enforce any kind of demands internationally.
- Leary 8y agoPompeo's ex-CIA background coming to the fore- My way or the Huawei.
- endofcapital 8y agoThis guy just said yesterday that Hezbollah is in Venezuela, so reality doesn't seem to matter much anymore. Who knows?
- lamarpye 8y agoInteresting. Are you a domain expert in this area? Did you do some research before posting? http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/22/world/fg-cocainering22 http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/22/world/fg-cocainering... From Wikipedia: "There are small but influential Muslim, Buddhist, and Jewish communities. The Muslim community of more than 100,000 is concentrated among persons of Lebanese and Syrian descent living in Nueva Esparta State, Punto Fijo and the Caracas area." Is it hard to imagine a terrorist organization would expand it's operations into drug smuggling?
- drawnwren 8y agoFwiw, any vet will tell you the craziest firefights in Afghanistan were always when we went for the opium. Terrorism has been in bed with drug smuggling since the beginning.
- SampleBourgeois 8y agoThere's a lot of Lebanese immigrants in Venezuela. Do you think they're all members of Hezbollah?
- lamarpye 8y agoYes. That is what I was implying. Every single one. Or I was providing context, showing that Hezbollah connections to Venezuela are not implausible in this particular reality
- orf 8y ago> The administration has argued for providers of next-generation mobile gear to rely on U.S. companies such as Cisco Systems Inc. Please stop using their backdoored equipment, use ours instead! https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/08/backdoors_in_ci.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/08/backdoors_in_...
- _visgean 8y agoYes, but is officially an ally, (the states where Pompeo mentioned this are all parts of NATO imho). But still there are european providers such as nokia networks, ericsson..
- fatjokes 8y agoBegun, this cold war has.