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Huawei staff CVs reveal alleged links to Chinese intelligence agencies
- oil25 7y agoCan someone share the cited research? Twitter appears to be blocking Tor these days - what a disappointment: > 403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it.
- __sy__ 7y agoThere you go: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3415726 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3415726
- StudentStuff 7y agoTwitter has also been refusing to load tweets in Firefox for Android (on T-Mobile USA), instead showing "Please wait to refresh". Its like they think I'm DDoSing their infra, rather than trying to view a tweet every few days...
- thewhitetulip 7y agoSame here, firefox android with disabled cookies They put me on rate limiter Same for logged of chrome on android But if I login then everything is fine. I stopped using Twitter that very day
- aw3c2 7y agoThey do it because you should let them spy on you.
- markus_zhang 7y agoHowever with the same logic you can pretty much prove none if the big companies in the world is independent.
- geezerjay 7y agoThat does not contradict the finding that Huawei is a front for Chinese state security. It's just textbook whataboutism.
- cf498 7y agoIt gets especially funny for any company hiring Israeli security experts. Or even the US for that matter, college is expensive and there seems to be an array of people who get their degree financed that way.
- MiroF 7y agobut in the US they usually aren't simultaneously employed
- hatsunearu 7y agoSo how long do you think he'll last until he magically disappears?
- rasz 7y agoWho? You mean Author working for American Literary Historical Society in New York City?
- powerapple 7y agoso the take is do not have a job before working for Huawei. If there is someone working for American company before joining Huawei, American government is linked to Huawei :D
- powerapple 7y ago#BREAKING# :John SUFFOLK (Huawei CSO)- former British goverment CIO ，Andy PURY (HUAWEI VP )former US Defence contract. It abviously means Huawei work with UK/US government.
- threezero 7y agoThe take is to not simultaneously be employed by the Chinese government and Huawei.
- est 7y agoSo if a Chinese telecom wants to do business globally, it has to exclude all CCP members and avoid state intelligence personals all together?
- habnds 7y ago> ...goes well beyond Huawei making normal hires and some happen to come from military backgrounds. For instance, Huawei employees list representing or working for Chinese state security or military agencies at the same time as they work for Huawei
- plandis 7y agoThat seems like a good way to build trust with citizens outside of China. I believe that a wide portion of people in Western Europe and the US are distrustful of the Chinese government so excluding those individuals is a positive.
- mathnmusic 7y agoSomeone should tell this to MongoDB which took funding from CIA.
- Proven 7y agoWell, from the customer perspective, it shouldn't hire them in the first place. They don't have to do that. But then they may end up being less successful, or entirely banned from doing business in certain places.
- badrabbit 7y agoTons of former NSA persons work in the US private sector,especially within infosec.
- filoleg 7y agoThe keyword here is “former”. In the Huawei scenario, a lot of them seem to be active intelligence officials, not former ones.
- mrtksn 7y agoHow do we know that "former" is not just on paperwork? When I hear the arguments against China and their tech companies, I don't have a problem believing them, however I do not expect anything less from the USA. Remember Snowden? I'm simply assuming that Facebook, Google, Apple, Cisco or any other US tech company are tapped by the US 3 letter agencies. There were some reveleations on that(PRISMA) but it's probably just tip of the iceberg. And now the Chinese. So what?
- darawk 7y agoI think the big difference is that US companies can meaningfully resist the US government if they choose to, and they often do. Chinese companies cannot.
- qaq 7y ago"meaningfully resist" are there many examples of that? I remember Qwest CEO meaningfully resisting did not work out too well.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mrtksn 7y ago>US companies can meaningfully resist the US government That doesn't seem to be the case but the narrative. There were enough leaks, document dumps, and whistleblower revelations to dismiss this narrative. Sure, for the US having competition is a problem but sometimes the US citizen should zoom out on Maps and Google some labels they see. Literally, most of the people do not live in the USA and you can confirm that by Googling labels in the maps, things like "France", "Germany", "Turkey", "Azerbaican", "China", "Japan". You will notice that these are lands that are somewhat similar to the USA but are not the USA but using the stuff made or operated in the USA. For people looking from that part of the world, the "Chinese are spying on us" panic is met with "Oh really, that's so bad. Poor thing" level of simphaty.
- user00012-ab 7y agoI find it hard to take anyone seriously who posts their "breaking research" as a series of tweets; find the correct platform that fits your message; if you are a 10 year old girl, then a series of tweets might be fine.
- whyenot 7y agoIf you have a lot of followers, twitter can be a very effective loudspeaker even with the character limit. By the way, 10 year olds don’t tend to use twitter — boys or girls (why is it so often young girls who are held up as a negative example?)
- yorwba 7y agoSo this research is based on a subset of 590 million or more CVs that were leaked by Chinese recruitment platforms. The author uses keywords like "华为", "Huawei", "People's Liberation Army" and "PLA" to identify people who worked for multiple institutions. That seems like a great dataset for some statistical analysis, but unfortunately we aren't even told how large the subsets are. (The figure of 590 million is from a news report about the leak.) So it's hard to tell how large the problem is, and how it compares to other companies or countries. The results are presented as three profiles based on three CVs from the leak, but edited to obscure their identity. It's only mentioned in the conclusion that the profiles are actually composites, which I take to mean that they combine information from multiple CVs each. That's unfortunate, because many of the claims rely on one and the same person being involved in multiple activities. We'll have to trust the author that those modifications do not embellish anything. The three profiles are: 1. A software engineer in Huawei QA since 2011 who from 2012 on also held a research and teaching position with the PLA's National University of Defense Technology, working on signals, remote management and scripting. The paper claims that this places them within a branch of the Strategic Support Forces (who are responsible e.g. for cyber warfare). It's not clear to me whether that's something specific to that person, or whether any similar research at NUDT is classed that way. NUDT also does civilian research, e.g. Microsoft was criticized for publishing a paper on beauty estimation co-authored with NUDT researchers: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1077&context=cps_fac_pub https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=107... 2. A Huawei engineer who was responsible for building lawful interception capabilities, working on roll-outs in multiple countries. He served as a representative for the Chinese Ministry of State Security on one project "likely guaranteeing project specifications". The author tries to imply that this was to grant the MSS access to other countries' networks, but alternatively Huawei simply has product managers responsible for communication with the law enforcement agencies doing the intercepting in their own country's networks. The author also tries to link that person to a "backdoor" in infrastructure of Vodafone Italy. However, Vodafone has denied the allegiations in the Bloomberg article he cites: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48103430 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48103430 3. A network engineer who developed civilian and high-security military communication systems at CASTC, then worked at China Unicom for a year and then went to Huawei to lead network expansion projects. At CASTC, he gained expertise using Cisco and Nortel switches. The author construes this to imply that he assisted in espionage attempts involving fake Cisco routers. Of the three, I'm going to classify 1. as harmless research (otherwise Microsoft is just as implicated as Huawei) and 3. as "person with security clearance changes jobs". 2. however at least supports this part of the paper's conclusion: "the institutional relationship between Huawei and Chinese state security services directly contradicts Huawei claims that they have no relationship with these services." Huawei should probably clarify those statements to mean that the relationship doesn't grant Chinese security services access to other countries' data.
- MiroF 7y agowild - this thread appears to be brigaded by pro CCP posters
- fit2rule 7y agoI think a lot of people are just sick and tired of American hypocrisy. The country that gave us the oppressive 5-eyes regime has not in any way gained moral authority to declare other nations' intelligence agencies involvement in industry to be immoral, or a 'security risk'. Until the NSA is disbanded, there is no security on the Internet. To explain the perspective and avoid the inevitable "you must be a shill for the CCP if you're so anti-America" accusations, I don't live in China, and choose not to, because I am very much against the actions of the CCP. But I do live under the imperial shadow of America's decisions to usurp sovereignty and privacy around the world - I did not choose to be subject to this oppression. I, like so many enlightened individuals who make up this community, am extremely opposed to America's usurpation of the technologies that held so much promise for peace. American hegemony over the tools of peace in order that it can maintain its power is one of the worst circumstances of the modern world. I'd like to see ALL telecom companies swept clean of ALL repressive spooks who once served their nations intelligence agencies and can therefore never be trusted with the open communication lines of the world.
- imiric 7y agoMostly agree with you, but on your last point, you wouldn't consider that ex-intelligence people might not be related to their respective agencies anymore, and that they abandonded them because they stopped believing in their cause or for another legitimate reason? Choosing to distrust them for life because of their past experience would be to ignore their talent and skill, which are very valuable in the private sector.
- fit2rule 7y agoNo doubt, subterfuge and intrigue are valuable skills in the private sector, but I really do think that people distrusting a person for life is one of the liabilities that must be borne when a person decides to work for a clandestine agency - especially one that has a long history of covert usurpation of institutions for its own purposes. Intelligence agencies cannot, ever, be trusted by private citizens. The corruption of government begins with its secrets. That's the nature of the job, and its one of the reasons why there is a very strong motto prevalent in the spook industry: "you can never leave the company".
- ulfw 7y agoThis is such bullshit. Head of an American online travel company based in Bangkok is Ex-CIA. Large rest of the C-suite is all Israeli Defence Forces. So now what?
- fulafel 7y agoAlso, there are large numbers of people in companies like huawei and cisco working on clandestine eavesdropping and "interception" is a public feature of the products. These people have to have close ties with users of the features.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y agoIt seems that many of the commenters here forgot about the arrest of Huawei Poland's sales director suspected of spying: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46851777 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46851777
- geofft 7y agoWhat is a Western country arresting (and not even yet successfully prosecuting) a Huawei employee supposed to prove, besides that the West is suspicious of Huawei?
- navigatesol 7y agoAnd China has arrested Canadian citizens in China on allegations of spying. Do you that that accusations of spying between politically rivalrous countries might possibly be untrue and instead used for leverage?
- rdlecler1 7y agoA lot of people in this thread are complaining that the US does this to but does anyone seriously believe that having Huawei tech embedded in American infrastructure is a good idea?
- geofft 7y agoYes, I do. Here's a few reasons: - I genuinely think that the Huawei stories are by and large protectionist fearmongering and that Huawei products would win in a free and high-information (and high-correct-information, of course) market. I think better, cheaper products are good for the US. - If Huawei is actually using their products to spy, or there is even a belief of such, that incentivizes the use of end-to-end secure protocols that don't trust routers, open-source and verifiable devices for end users, etc. If it's just the US government, there's a strong pressure on US companies not to treat their own government as an adversary, which creates the danger that it's easy for the government to become an adversary (even if they are not today, it can change hands quickly). - I don't think China is any more evil than the US. So if I'm okay with using infrastructure from AT&T and its Room 641A, Verizon and its Quantico circuit, and the various PRISM companies, I have no logical reason to object to infrastructure that may be similarly compromised by the Chinese government.
- cheez 7y ago> - I don't think China is any more evil than the US. https://www.wired.com/story/inside-chinas-massive-surveillance-operation/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-chinas-massive-surveillan... Slightly worse, I would think. Another reason not to give up your guns to the benevolence of government.
- geofft 7y agoYou're right, the US government would never violently expand its borders and encourage settlers from the majority race, oppress the existing people with police brutality, and track people through their smartphones.
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- buzhidao 7y agoIt is clear from the author other tweets, that he is on a mission..
- magwa101 7y agoForsooth, who would have guessed??
- theautist 7y agoMy personal opinion is that I'm not at all surprised by this. The Chinese government is a one-party rule that controls all aspects of life. Criticize the government or the party there and you're gone. They would be foolish, with the things they're known to do, to not take advantage of such big opportunity to spy on many countries. I think it's very reasonable for western democracies to be careful before embedding Chinese (or any other authoritarian country) high tech in their infrastructure.
- MisterTea 7y agoArguing about which nation is spying on you better is like arguing about which cancer causing carcinogen is better for you. It all sucks and isn't going away anytime soon. China will spy on you just as much as USA/Russia/UK/Israel/ad nauseum... if given the chance. So enjoy staring at your shiney tech and remember that any number of nation states are most likely staring back at you. Enjoy modern life.
- tekkk 7y agoIt's sad to see these threads get quickly out of hand with emotions getting the best of some of the HN audience. I have been commenting from time to time in these threads, but it seems impossible at times to have rational discussion. I don't really feel strongly about China one way or the another, I just know they do not always uphold the same values as I do. (And so do many other things) Anyway, I think it's important to look at this issue as a whole from also the viewpoint of the Chinese - to understand how the Chinese society works and why there is such strong emotional response when people start accusing China. Because I don't really have first-hand experience, I found these very interesting videos that I think are enlightening: serpentza - How China stops Overseas Students Integrating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uXreGimP-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uXreGimP-o serpentza - China NEEDS an ENEMY to Survive! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg2fUGBQDMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg2fUGBQDMQ The author who is from South-Africa has been living in China for some time, and how he describes his life there is quite illuminating. In short: China seems to have mastered how to create an "us vs them" culture and blatantly aggravates their citizens to move their focus away from their internal problems. Well, I know it's a little bit tangential, but I thought it was quite interesting.
- yorwba 7y agoA single person's opinion won't help you much in understanding "the Chinese viewpoint". To counter it with another opinion, I don't think the citizens of any country can be said to have a unified viewpoint. Chinese people are just as capable of having nuanced opinions on political issues and disagreeing with each other as everyone else. Additionally, you can't just assume that emotional reactions to accusations leveled against China are all due to Chinese posters with an "us vs them" mentality. When I see accusations that are exaggerated, get the details wrong or are made up from whole cloth, I am prone to react similarly. Of course I feel the same about official party propaganda, but that doesn't tend to get posted to HN.
- chillee 7y agoI'm not sure I would consider these an unbiased opinion on China...