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I agree, I have no clue what point the author's trying to make here. After criticizing the WSJ's reporting and heavily implying it's reporting is inaccurate, ev

I agree, I have no clue what point the author's trying to make here. After criticizing the WSJ's reporting and heavily implying it's reporting is inaccurate, even going so far as to suggest the WSJ article is unethically false and labeling it "fake news", the author then goes on to confirm the key accusations in the WSJ article but reframes them in a way that minimizes their significance. The author goes on to building a straw-man argument that all telco manufacturers/operators do similar things for law enforcement so we shouldn't be concerned about Huawei's practices but then goes through some mental gymnastics explaining China's authoritarian government surveillance and intel operations are sanctioned by Chinese law so Huawei aiding the Chinese government is no different than a US telco honoring a request from law enforcement. This article is disingenuous at best and comes off as blatant astroturfing. It's also interesting to note, the author mentions working directly with Huawei engineers in the article.

robertgraham 7y ago
> I have no clue what point the author's trying to make here You mean, you don't know the agenda. The "point" was data, namely: - the Washington game that leads to unreliable journalism - the fact that all Huawei's competitors have the same law enforcement backdoors, the same support contracts, and there's no evidence or even accusation that Huawei is doing anything different - my own personal experience watching Huawei support engineers using their "backdoor" "sidedoor" "frontdoor" access to gain intelligence information. > implying it's reporting is inaccurate Unreliable, not really inaccurate. It's clearly bad journalism violating clearly expressed ethical standards. That doesn't mean it's wrong, it doesn't mean the government official's accusations are false. It instead means that we can't rely upon them. > straw-man argument that all telco manufacturers/operators do similar things for law enforcement so we shouldn't be concerned about Huawei's practices I'm not sure you read the article. I make it clear that we should be concerned about Huawei even if their hardware, software, and support access are no different than any other vendors, because the Chinese government can lean on them in ways democratic governments cannot lean on their own vendors. > comes off as blatant astroturfing One of us does not understand "astroturfing". This is clearly an anti-Huawei piece that nonetheless tries to understand things from Huawei's point of view. I haven't worked with Huawei's engineers, I was working on a mobile companies systems when I saw Hauewei's support people log in via their VPN and gather national intelligence information. The point is that everything can be true: Huawei can in fact be no different any competitor, doing at least as good a job preventing backdoors, and yet still be a national security threat due to backdoors. I believe it's good policy to forbid Huawei equipment in 5G deployments even if I doubt they have any special technical backdoors.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  >"because the Chinese government can lean on them in ways democratic governments cannot lean on their own vendors." // In comparison with USA this is where you lost me, aren't NSA's national security letters just as much a way for the government, or whoever has weight at the NSA, to access so-called front-doors? Depending how you define democratic the NSA can "lean on vendors in ways democratic governments cannot". And you intimate that access "from China" might equally be being done on behalf of USA's secret agencies. That's fine if you trust USA, and it's leadership (covert and public). To me, in the UK, when USA are saying "don't use Huawei" the reason that seems to be most likely is 1) financial, 2) because then we would potentially be subject to Huawei's backdoors instead of USA's backdoors. And as a citizen I'm pretty certain Five-Eyes/GCHQ have every tiny bit of meta-data about my tech use for the last year: so China can know who I call and when too, giving up that as well in exchange for reliable 5G seems like it's not really losing me much. Seems in the UK we're more at risk from USA's financial meddling than from China's?

robertgraham 7y ago

> I have no clue what point the author's trying to make here You mean, you don't know the agenda. The "point" was data, namely: - the Washington game that leads to unreliable journalism - the fact that all Huawei's competitors have the same law enforcement backdoors, the same support contracts, and there's no evidence or even accusation that Huawei is doing anything different - my own personal experience watching Huawei support engineers using their "backdoor" "sidedoor" "frontdoor" access to gain intelligence information. > implying it's reporting is inaccurate Unreliable, not really inaccurate. It's clearly bad journalism violating clearly expressed ethical standards. That doesn't mean it's wrong, it doesn't mean the government official's accusations are false. It instead means that we can't rely upon them. > straw-man argument that all telco manufacturers/operators do similar things for law enforcement so we shouldn't be concerned about Huawei's practices I'm not sure you read the article. I make it clear that we should be concerned about Huawei even if their hardware, software, and support access are no different than any other vendors, because the Chinese government can lean on them in ways democratic governments cannot lean on their own vendors. > comes off as blatant astroturfing One of us does not understand "astroturfing". This is clearly an anti-Huawei piece that nonetheless tries to understand things from Huawei's point of view. I haven't worked with Huawei's engineers, I was working on a mobile companies systems when I saw Hauewei's support people log in via their VPN and gather national intelligence information. The point is that everything can be true: Huawei can in fact be no different any competitor, doing at least as good a job preventing backdoors, and yet still be a national security threat due to backdoors. I believe it's good policy to forbid Huawei equipment in 5G deployments even if I doubt they have any special technical backdoors.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
>"because the Chinese government can lean on them in ways democratic governments cannot lean on their own vendors." // In comparison with USA this is where you lost me, aren't NSA's national security letters just as much a way for the government, or whoever has weight at the NSA, to access so-called front-doors? Depending how you define democratic the NSA can "lean on vendors in ways democratic governments cannot". And you intimate that access "from China" might equally be being done on behalf of USA's secret agencies. That's fine if you trust USA, and it's leadership (covert and public). To me, in the UK, when USA are saying "don't use Huawei" the reason that seems to be most likely is 1) financial, 2) because then we would potentially be subject to Huawei's backdoors instead of USA's backdoors. And as a citizen I'm pretty certain Five-Eyes/GCHQ have every tiny bit of meta-data about my tech use for the last year: so China can know who I call and when too, giving up that as well in exchange for reliable 5G seems like it's not really losing me much. Seems in the UK we're more at risk from USA's financial meddling than from China's?