They're making a comment on the HN/general paranoia around Huawei in the face of the actual privacy concerns regarding the US government. Does someone need to be a Chinese agent to find this paranoid behavior objectionable?
The us intelligence service probably does not have as good relations to Huawei as it has to Ericsson.
The original Huawei response to allegations was to open themselves up to external audits and encourage other suppliers to do the same. Of course that didn’t help them.
Huawei today is banned from providing network services in denmark.
This particular whistle blower is not alleging that the NSA or any US controlled entity compromised Ericsson equipment, rather that the US and Danish intelligence agencies collaborated but that collaboration ended up being used against Danish interests.
That’s orthogonal to whether using Huawei equipment is also against Danish interests.
But clearly it's never the equipment that's a problem (who seriously believes this can't be observed or worked around with simple isolation/reverse engineering/relocation of factory/firewalling?) but the elected officials collaborating with the americans.
When your telco buys Huawei, it's not to give an entry door to Chinese security services. It's because it's the best at that price point. If they can explain exactly how Huawei is supposed to backdoor their commercial partners, then fine.
Ironically I have a Huawei phone, without Google services, and after the initial withdrawal phase that was painful, I now feel better knowing Google isn't tracking me and maybe Huawei is. The simple fact is my government would never willingly give them the keys, while they do with little hesitation when the fat burgers come and ask.
Without knowing the specifics. I think one of the issues is that when NSA hooks itself into say a network router, it leaves trace behind (ie. an altered configuration) that can be spotted by the network engineers that maintain that equipment.
I would have guessed they would be a bit more sophisticated than that, perhaps flashing a new "evil" firmware that would look to be perfectly normal and unchanged to those without the correct key.
Objecting to abuses of power by a super power is totally reasonable. Using it as a reason to say "oh, but this other super power totally wouldn't do that" is at best naive and at worst shilling. Looking at gp's comment history I believe they are just a regular Chinese citizen, and not a paid astroturfer - but I do understand how someone might suspect the latter from seeing just this one comment.
> Using it as a reason to say "oh, but this other super power totally wouldn't do that" is at best naive and at worst shilling.
That’s not what they said though. They made an argument that it’s against the interests of Huawei to engage in spying because they would be caught and it would harm their international reputation, in juxtaposition to the confirmed fact that the NSA is engaging in international spying via non-Huawei devices.
The idea that those who aren’t dogmatically opposed to anything and everything Chinese might be plants is insulting. Am I a paid American astroturfer because I work for a US software company? After all, it’s public record that the DOD has thousands of paid social media astroturfers. How is this productive discourse unless your goal is to foment antagonism between our countries?
The us intelligence service probably does not have as good relations to Huawei as it has to Ericsson.
The original Huawei response to allegations was to open themselves up to external audits and encourage other suppliers to do the same. Of course that didn’t help them.
Huawei today is banned from providing network services in denmark.