[dom2]

I'm not familiar with 5G infrastructure at all really, but a friend of mine brought up that they were worried about China beating the US to 5G deployment because if China did so, other counties would be more likely to use Chinese tech to setup their own 5G networks. This in turn would pose security issues as there seems to be concern over whether or not China could be trusted not to use their tech as spyware. Is anyone familiar with the issue who can speak more on this?

[mping]

I'm not familiar, but it was US's own NSA that was caught red handed. China has an aura of non compliance and state sponsored hacking but I trust them as much as the US.

[henryfjordan]

I wouldn't trust the US govt (where I live) with my personal secrets, but I would trust them to protect the trade secrets of a business based in the US (yay corporatism!)

I don't think China cares about my personal secrets nearly as much as the US does, but they are pretty actively engaging in state-sponsored corporate espionage.

[SkyMarshal]

The CCP is compiling a database on everyone in the developed world, from sources as disparate as their Chinese visa info, to hacked/leaked data from various websites, to social media posts, to surveillance video/audio/images.

Eventually they’ll be able to analyze it with AI, and use it to advance their own agenda. Whether you consider that a good thing, or a less bad thing than whatever the NSA does, is in the eye of the beholder.

But make no mistake, the CCP does not ‘not care’ about your personal info.

[noja]

> I wouldn't trust the US govt with my personal secrets

> I would trust them to protect the trade secrets of a business

Would you trust a US business to protect your personal secrets more than the US government? Why?

[henryfjordan]

You misunderstand a bit. If I were Coca-cola, I would trust that the NSA would never ever reveal my secret recipe. But at the same time I wouldn't trust them not to read the private messages of my employees for other juicy stuff.

America cares more about corporate rights than human rights.

[ptx]

That's nice for the American company, but why should companies and individuals in the rest of the world trust this American private/public conglomeration with their data? Foreigners have no rights under American law, from what I gather.

[muratsu]

Public distrust of American companies doesn't serve the USA when top tech companies have approximately half their revenue generated outside the USA.

[henryfjordan]

They shouldn't? I don't think I ever made that point. I was only speaking to the motivations of each Government. If I don't trust my own gov't to respect my private data, why would I tell anyone else to trust them?

Foreigners have basically all the same rights as citizens under US law. Maybe you're thinking of the NSA's mandate to only collect foreign-bound US internet traffic, not domestic?

[SkyMarshal]

Foreigners living/operating in the US have almost all the rights US citizens do, besides citizen-only things like voting or running for office.

[redisman]

> I don't think China cares about my personal secrets nearly as much as the US does, but they are pretty actively engaging in state-sponsored corporate espionage.

This is only scratching the surface. Don't forget their extensive tracking and imprisonment of ethnic minorities, political "dissents", etc. Seeing how they treat their own people, I can only imagine what kind of pressure they'll be able to exert on small(relative to China) countries that gave them control of their communications systems.

[henryfjordan]

Oh yeah, they certainly are using the data of their own citizens. I meant my data as a US citizen.

[sifar]

Until you become a PersonOfInterest to them.

[ClumsyPilot]

The solution is to have proper technical assesment of critical infrastructure/ equipment, both source code and hardware.

UK security services inspected Huawei course, and found it messy, but otherwise unremarkable. This should be standard procedure and we should be good at it.

[frequentnapper]

the issue is much bigger than just spyware. If a nation allows Huawei or any Chinese company to build its future tech infrastructure such as 5G, they are basically signing over their national security and interests over to the Chinese govt.

E.g. your nation has someone who speaks out against the Chinese govt or something as dumb as making fun of the Chinese president. Hand him over or else we flick a switch here and the power grid in your city X goes down and there's nothing you can do about it.

Why do yo think China is pushing Huawei so hard and vowing trade punishment against any nation in the EU or elsewhere if they stop Huawei? They want to control the future of those nations. This will give China every leverage they can get in terms of trade, compliance, security, etc. basically making each of these nations a vassal state to China.

[cesarb]

> Hand him over or else we flick a switch here and the power grid in your city X goes down and there's nothing you can do about it.

The issue in your scenario is not who built the infrastructure, but who has remote access to it. Why would the manufacturer of (for instance) the PLCs controlling a substation have remote access to it? Wouldn't they be isolated in their own subnetwork, firewalled so that only a few hosts in the substation operator's network can reach it?

[rusk]

You do understand that this is managed infrastructure, right? Logging in and managing it remotely is literally part of the deal. It’s not even a secret.

[rusk]

Makes sense to me ... I just cant get over how people are being labelled cranks for voicing what are pretty common sense concerns. I guess in the public mindset wireless network != critical infrastructure.

[JohnFen]

> This in turn would pose security issues as there seems to be concern over whether or not China could be trusted not to use their tech as spyware.

That's not special to China. No nation can be trusted in that way.