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!
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 :).
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.
Are you qualified to make that statement? No. Just before every major hacking revelation someone like you victoriously claimed we're totally safe.
I'd expect our security people to have a very good idea of what backdoors are or are not present.
People actually think like this now? We just collectively rolled over and accepted mass surveillance?
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.
(Not to say that I personally am ok with any of it, but from a societal perspective it makes a little sense.)
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).
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.
What I like is that the NSA actually hacked Huawei, and yet it's the Chinese company that we're fearful of being hacked by.
"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."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/15/how-exce...
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).
And this was for a company of lesser world-stage significance than a mosquito bite on a giant's lower leg.
Trump wants a 25% tariff on every EU car, he is going to welcome such a suicidal move by the EU.
BMW largest car factory is located in Spartanburg, South Carolina, US.
China didn't allow free unrestricted access of Nokia and Ericsson in China either.