Tie my kangaroo down sport, that's good news. Now we just need the sleepy EU to wake up so we get their spyware removed from our Mobile Operators infrastructure here!
Take it your mobile phone is built in Germany, with German components. ;)
It's just a matter of picking your poison. You think your Cisco router has no backdoors? Your Intel CPU? Your Windows OS? Your Gmail account?
This isn't about making you safer, it's about removing competition (as crappy as it may have been). And they eliminate competition both economically and in the spying game. The more companies there are that want to spy on you, the more you pay attention to security and you make life hard for everyone.
But phew, the spies were banned so no need to worry anymore :).
Even not looking on the democratic/dictatorship spectrum - outside interference will always be worse than what you get from insiders. Insiders at least depend on the country welfare - outsiders just don't give a fuck.
And the US is an insider for AU... how? Because if the NSA brought any revelation it's that the US backdoored even their allies without them knowing.
I get choosing the least evil but this is a defense only as much as burning dows a building and saying "at least this little piece survived" is a defense.
Nope, FVEY was conducted very much with cooperation between the involved parties. We (Aus) have very close structural and cultural ties to the US, but China is approximately as foreign as it gets. The US may not be an insider per se, but in theory we share at least some core values.
(Not to say that I personally am ok with any of it, but from a societal perspective it makes a little sense.)
I like the idea I've seen proposed elsewhere, that I'd rather be spied on by a government entity that's no allied with my government. Less chance of being black-bagged.
Luckily I'm an exceedingly boring person, so it won't happen either way, but it's still an interesting, and valid, point of view (pending ones travel plans).
Maybe I have it wrong, but I'd prefer to have equipment from a rival of the 5 eyes.
If Huawei put a backdoor in the 5 eyes are incentivised to announce it and have it closed. If the 5 eyes want a backdoor in they're incentivised to not involve Huawei or their kit lest it be used against them.
A bit like sharing cake with my brother as a kid - one cuts, the other picks.
That's exactly what I meant. Too much competition in the spying game means they'll all try to take each other out, or that people will start paying even more attention to security. Remove the competition and you can give the impression all is good and safe now.
An external country spying on you is not doing it for YOUR best interest, rather for the best interest of their own country and sometimes not even that much.
The US doesn't really have a working legal system for things happening outside its borders. In fact as a non US citizen outside the US you don't have much protection at all.
And as you can see by the downvotes, people are even ignorant of the fact that e.g. the bill of rights doesn't apply to people outside of the US. Which means no one in the US will even fight for you, which is even worse. This is exactly what you see happening today with the large tech companies where people working there are ignorant of effect of their own actions. The US already wire tapped much of the EUs financial transactions. Which they could do because it simply wasn't illegal by US law.
"It's also worth noting that as long as the agencies are focusing their activities on the actions of foreigners then there's not even anything illegal happening by our domestic laws."
Accessible to a one-man dictatorship in Australia’s back yard? No. In any case, any backdoors in a Cisco product will be available to Canberra, a Five Eyes member.
considering all the downvotes maybe I haven't really explained the problem properly or maybe I deserved it idk. Here some points that I should probably have made clear instead of writing a snappy one-liner without substance.
Banning Huawei isn't going to increase the security or reduces the backdoors. I've been working many years for NEVs and later started a recruiting firm that did OSINT in this domain. First of all Lawful Interception is (as the name implies) legal. Despite the legality and the standardization in ETSI/3GPP the actual implementation of these black boxes is extremely shady & obscure. Siemens COM (now part of Nokia since some years already) for example has outsourced the implementation to their Milan site, where it has been further outsourced (using 2 intermediaries in a cascading supply chain) to a tiny Italian firm that does contracts mainly for the OEMs but other than that has zero vetting of their people (no security clearance etc). Code isn't reviewed and in fact the OEM didn't even have access to the code. I'm bringing this up because the problem isn't only because it's China and as I said has anyway no positive impact on increasing security (just because the company is European or US doesn't make it more trustworthy). Nevertheless if I get spied on (illegally) then I'd much rather have it done by my own jurisdiction which doesn't come after me and my family than by some thick-face black heart dictatorship in Asia.
How Huawei became so successful in EMEA?
#1) access to unlimited funding from Chinese gov. Huawei is financially backed by the state and able to cut out competitors with aggressive pricing in RFP/RFQs (even it doesn't financially make sense - "as long as it hurts the competitor it's a win")
#2) willingness to bid for projects in highly corrupt countries where a suitcase of cash changes hands using shady consultants, and ability to satisfy questionable requests from war-lords & repressive regimes (tailored Lawful Interception & DPI etc)
#3) bribing is illegal for companies located in US or EU (Nokia, Ericsson, ...) but pretty much a non-issue in China. It goes hand in hand with conducting business with the regime.
#4) Stealing the IP of competitors: Either by placing sleepers in other firms or (the easier way) by coercing and leaning on employees of Chinese origin working for competitors.
#5) employs workers under despicable conditions (complex outsourcing layers to ensure bad-PR never directly hits Huawei - questionable supply chain is also bad security)
Again I'm not anti China and I'm happy to rip into CISCO, Juniper, Nokia & Ericsson (and I have done so in the past on plenty occasions).
Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi sold almost 2 million cars in China in 2017. Surely most of them can be replaced by Non-EU cars in case Huawei/ZTE are not allowed free access in EU.
Trump wants a 25% tariff on every EU car, he is going to welcome such a suicidal move by the EU.
It's just a matter of picking your poison. You think your Cisco router has no backdoors? Your Intel CPU? Your Windows OS? Your Gmail account?
This isn't about making you safer, it's about removing competition (as crappy as it may have been). And they eliminate competition both economically and in the spying game. The more companies there are that want to spy on you, the more you pay attention to security and you make life hard for everyone.
But phew, the spies were banned so no need to worry anymore :).