[ranger47]

ELI5: The US and China are not very good friends, but Chinese goods still get sold to US markets. China's gov't has a hand in every company in its borders, or so it is suspected, since this is routinely denied by the companies and the Chinese gov't. Some of those companies make computers that can watch and listen to us, whether we ask them to or not. The US is no longer comfortable with that arrangement.

Of course, it's a little more complex than that...

[somenameforme]

The way you're framing makes it sound unique to China. PRISM [1] hasn't gone anywhere and has certainly only expanded since the leaks. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many others were all participating companies. If China starts stooping to the same level here they would be obligated to ban products from these companies and more. If they want to make a spectacle of it, they could even have a kangaroo court committee hearing where they ask these companies about their relationship to the NSA and other alphabet agencies.

Any country operating in any country anywhere is going to subject to the whims and influences of the government in their home country. Some make it more or less overt, but pretending this is some discovery or "them vs us" thing is absurd. This whole affair is another step in the apparent goal of escalation with China, to what purpose - I have no clue.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

[bnjms]

Doesn’t PRISM work by splitting fiber for “monitoring”?

…Somehow that makes me feel better.

[somenameforme]

Nope, that's from yet a different set of spying programs - MUSCULAR, INCENSER, TURMOIL, and others [1]. PRISM does it in coordination with companies. One of my favorite leaks was this [2] which is a support manual for NSA agents engaging in real-time Skype spying.

It even includes a technical FAQ with all sorts of troubleshooting issues, like agents wondering why messages they're intercepting might end up getting repeated. The reason there is that when a secondary device (e.g. going from your phone to a computer) syncs, everything is resent to the user, which is in turn also gets sent right on over to the NSA. There were also promises to help agents upset that on occasion the audio and video of whoever they're spying on (again in real time mind you) would get out of sync. It's a tough life being a 21st century spy.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR

[2] - https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/Guid...

[bnjms]

This is much worse than I had imagined. Thank you for correcting me.

[chitowneats]

It is absolutely them vs. us. We can choose to respond to their provocations or not, but they will continue them.

The more the techno-libertarian crowd denies this, the more irrelevant you become.

[saiya-jin]

One can argue that PRISM was in place long before China was doing anything real. So US and allies set the tone of this global topic decades ago. China decided they will go their own way, because they could.

This is all just a theatre as mentioned, long term planned escalation with some form of conflict inevitable. Not judging, it makes sense for each side to act as they do, but these congress hearings were a farce with decided outcome long before they were even announced, not some fair public discussion.

[selectodude]

Two decades ago, the Chinese military was actively raiding Nortel's IP directly from their servers. Regardless of when and what the US government is doing, Huawei and ZTE's tech is built off of rampant state-sponsored IP theft and shouldn't be used and can't be trusted.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...

[mtrovo]

Even if they stole IP 20 years ago so what? US industrial revolution was famously started by copying ideas from Europe https://www.history.com/.amp/news/industrial-revolution-spie....

There's no way to deny that Huawei was years ahead of competition with their 5G offerings, so it seems this is much more a story about telecom becoming patent trolls rather than R&D focused companies, something something creating value to shareholders.

[chitowneats]

> 20 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_intellectual_...

[skorpeon87]

> China's gov't has a hand in every company in its borders, or so it is suspected

Not merely suspected, it's a matter of Chinese law that the Party is represented in any company large enough for them to take notice of.