| > 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. |
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?