Of course US corporations are just as beholden to government directive. e.g. https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/04/how-american-companies-...
And due to the five eyes agreement between US and commonwealth countries there is a lot of espionage data changing hands there. European telephone networks were compromised a long time ago to my understanding
But from a geopolitical ourside vs. their side standpoint Huawei from US point of view is on the wrong side of the fence.
A certain level of spying is always expected. Did Huawei actually breach some unacceptable level, or is this just a manifestation of the US vs. China tradewar, I don't know.
I only got my girlfriend a little pregnant; not like Joe over there, who got his girlfriend fully pregnant.
See I can name meaningless aphorisms too.
In America they spy on dissidents too. It's just a matter of calling them terrorists.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/privacy-and-surv...
It'd be a real court if there were a sort of public defender, and the judges simply mediated between both sides. You could see it working in the warrants rejected.
In fact the court is adversarial, though not like you seem to be envisioning. There are many courts in the US, in fact most where no litigation happens because it's inappropriate for the task. So the idea that they are playing "both sides" is a non sequitur.
The role of the court is to ensure that requests are legal and there is sufficient evidence to pursue the task as requested. It's exactly the same as when a judge issues a warrant.
And even within the US, FISA warrants are only applicable to data collected which is intended to be presented in court. The CIA and NSA have no mandate whatsoever to gather data suitable for presentation in court, and investigatory agencies such as the FBI/DEA/ATF, which do have such a mandate, have lots of ways to launder evidence. In practice, FISA warrants are often issued long after the data has already been collected, and the FISA warrant is only requested as a means of laundering the evidence via one of the exceptions to fruit of the poisonous tree (parallel construction, inevitable discovery, or the good faith exception).
As it applies to this situation, I don't see any reason to believe the US is any less likely to spy on anyone than China. If you don't have the means to produce needed technologies yourself, then I'd choose the US or Chinese manufacturers based on other factors, such as cost, or which nation has incentives to use the data they collect against you.
You mean the secret court, with secret rulings, where only the government's case is heard, and 99.9% of requests are granted?
Most criminal indictments are also end in the state's favor, but that doesn't mean the jury system is rigged, it means that prosecutors don't bring cases that they are likely to lose. Similarly, the FBI doesn't apply for a FISA warrant unless they are certain its well warranted and the court's decision will be easy.
A warrant is a warrant. An expression of the governments investigative powers.
The police aren't required to inform you and give you a chance to argue your case in court for why thy shouldn't raid your house for the drugs they're pretty sure you have.
Cops don't need your written permission to point speed radar at your car.
Interestingly, I think this would often mean that Americans who are engaged in illicit activity would probably be better off using Chinese services and vice versa.
I don't understand why people feel the need to defend Chinese mega corporations.
edit: I managed to offend a few people with this comment
I personally think it's something worth mentioning when it's the most common reason cited for avoiding a chinese company.
Except they aren't. Just the fact that you mention "both" sides shows your ignorance. The alternative to Huawei, as I have mentioned, is not an American corporation it is a European one (Ericsson or Nokia). This isn't a case of the American government forcing allies to abandon Huawei so an American corporation can profit.
Samsung and LG are both Korea-based, and Sony is from Japan.
Ericsson works on 5G with Fujitsu, so that looks more like US-free option.
I mean, from dslams, to routers, olts, cpe etc
If wanted to set up an ISP could I without buying non-eu vendors?
If it came to a war, the US and China are both going to shut down whatever communications channels their “enemies” are using. This is just one of the reasons that US DoD is so interested in SpaceX’s StarLink.
Having your shipments intercepted en-route by spies is very different than directly cooperating with those spies. None of those interceptions required cooperation by Cisco.
Cisco complained to the government about the interceptions: https://www.recode.net/2014/5/18/11627004/in-letter-to-obama...
Apple has also famously resisted government demands to develop a backdoor for its hardware. IIRC, all indications were that the government's demands would have been rejected by the court system had the case progressed far enough to provide a definitive answer.
What really happened: Intelligence Community: "So, we'll demand you backdoor devices, we'll intercept a few and modify them, and then you'll public complain and resist, and then after the media frenzy has died down..."
/tinfoilhat
Huawei says, in public, that it's important to their reputation to be known to ship un-backdoored devices. Cisco says the exact same thing.
I don't know much about China but the level of control the government has there is incomparable to any western country
In fact TLAs would want it to appear that they'd been rebuffed -- there's not much point in them having access to devices that no one will use because they know about that access.
Apple has a vested interest in being honest and transparent about this specifically because nobody would trust them if it was discovered that they'd been secretly cooperating with everything in private while denying it in public. A revelation like that would literally ruin them as a company, and that's generally not the end goal for most companies.
Grandparent is specifically talking about the US, where Apple has successfully fought against orders.
Whereas the U.S. government regularly meddles around the globe, no matter where you are.
But compare attacks on IP with politically relevant incidents like these:
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/08/nsa-tapped-g...
- https://www.thelocal.de/20160223/nsa-eavesdropped-on-merkels...
- https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/21/british-spie...
Maybe the world would be better off but unless that's reciprocated by those Chinese companies creating world class technology based on European work then it's just suicide for European industry.
If Chinese companies are able to steal industrial secrets that allow them to produce better cars cheaper than say VW or BMW that might be very good for the world but not so great for European jobs.
You might be fine with that but I, personally, am not.
You are right that I am against European intellectual property and intellectual property in general.
The industry should be open for or even leading modern lifestyle trends of rich modern free societies. In particular, I think these EU politics are insane and extremely costly and prohibitive and detrimental too a modern society:
- https://juliareda.eu/2018/08/censorship-machines-gonna-censo...
- https://juliareda.eu/2018/11/eu-council-upload-filters/
Poverty is detrimental to everyone and everything except slave holders and wage slavery.
A rich neighbor is better than a poor neighbor.
Technology removes poverty.
EU manufacturing has been transferred to China because of competition by low wages. As China advances, the people in China will hopefully demand a better quality of life instead of engaging in competition by low wage and low quality of life.
I am European and I hope that Europe will benefit the world by proposing a good lifestyle for modern wealthy societies and related products. I doubt that IP and keeping the rest of the world poorer and less developed is economically and technically and morally the right approach.
I like this note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdLRiaCjRkw&t=2015
Unlike most physical goods, information can benefit everyone at almost no additional cost.
The sooner China and any other country can advance science and world class technology, the better for everyone. Europe will then "steal" from them.
If Chinese companies can produce products like cars and solar panels that help to fight climate change and air pollution and destruction of the environment for fossil fuel then they deserve their profits even more while VW and BMW do not.
> The employee, Roy Jones, 49, who was let go by the hotel giant, has revealed to the Wall Street Journal handled social media accounts from his desk at a customer engagement center in Omaha, Nebraska.
> According to WSJ, Jones says he had no idea that he would lose his $14 per hour job after "liking a tweet".
> > Friends of Tibet congratulate global hotel chain #Marriott International for listing #Tibet as a country along with #HongKong and #Taiwan. pic.twitter.com/SXKWb20v3e— Friends of Tibet (@friendsoftibet) January 9, 2018
> Jones told the WSJ he wasn’t aware of any instructions on dealing with China. He also said he didn’t fully understand what the issue was about.
> “This job was all I had,” Jones also said. “I’m at the age now where I don’t have many opportunities.”
It's not the Iraq war, but it's also not something you would want to happen to you. Currently Marriott employees are on strike... because of wages, nobody gives a shit about that guy. He's just gone, maybe he has another job now, maybe not, who cares.
And for what, again? For liking a tweet, which China doesn't like because they're occupying Tibet so brutally for so long now and think that gives them the right.
Though that employee had no clue what it was about, it boils down to that they want to force you to look the other way. Oh, you can know that other people are being tortured and killed, but you can't speak out, at all. So either you stay ignorant of what you can't help, or you have this on your mind.
But this not just another thing in life, like being disallowed entry into one country of hundreds. A person who is denied the right to speak out against the brutalization of others, is being brutalized themselves every second of their life from here on out. The fact it's in a way we don't recognize and internalize instead, make part of ourselves, makes it so much worse to me. I can't accept that others accept it, their acceptance is futile. They can have the world, they cannot have me.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/07/technology/mercedes-benz-ti...
> Mercedes, which is owned by Daimler, (DDAIF) ran afoul of China's stance when it paired a quote attributed to the Dalai Lama with a photo of one of its luxury sedans on Instagram -- a social media platform that is banned in China.
> "Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open," the quote read.
> The ad was posted on Monday and garnered nearly 90,000 likes before Mercedes deleted it the following day, according to a screenshot posted by Chinese state media.
> The Global Times, a state-run newspaper that often strikes a nationalistic tone, criticized Mercedes, saying the company was quick to respond to the incident but shouldn't make such mistakes in the first place.
> Mercedes issued a statement in Chinese about the incident on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter (TWTR), offering a "sincere apology" three separate times.
They posted a "quote commonly attributed to the Daila Llama", without mentioning the name Dalai Llama, on their instagram, which isn't even accessible in China. And then they apologized three times after deleting it.
Don't just ask what X or Y are currently doing, ask what X and Y are. These two examples aren't the only ones, and I bet you, everything else staying as it is, they won't be the last. If you give totalitarianism the little finger, it cannot help but want the hand, just like a scorpion must sting.
> If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror.
-- Hannah Arendt
That's why the Iraq war "predicted Snowden and killbots", if you just squint right.
I think the opposite is also true, if you want to control your people completely, you need to control more than "your" people. That both elements in China and elements in the US (and countries in the EU and many others, let's say all countries for the sake of simplicity) want that is of no help to, uhh, decent folk anywhere. They don't benefit from being used as cannon fodder against this other battleship that uses "its" people as cannon fodder. All oppressive regimes can make an agreement before you can say "oh shit", and then focus on subduing their own populations with the means they built while having other nations as an excuse.
So the fact that "we" or "others" are "doing it too" should make the alarm bells louder, not more quiet.
> Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.
-- George Orwell, letter to Noel Willmett (1944)
And in this case, it's even fair to point out the hipocrisy of the US asking allies to drop Huawei for reasons smart allies should also drop US produced things for. But then again, we know all that, and we actually do have threads about that stuff as well, so why not also have one about Huawei.
At least American companies still reside in a somewhat democracy where they’ll actually protect our rights, even if we’re European. Sure it’s not for noble goals, they want to make money, and they won’t if they don’t care for data security.
Google cloud is the prime example of this. The European public sector is spending billions on Clouds these years, and none of that is going to Google, because Google doesn’t protect your data the same way Microsoft does.
I can physically visit the Azure instances that house our data, and nothing but our data, and it never leaves the union.
Maybe the NSA still listens in, maybe China does too, but it’s not legal for them to do so the way it would be in the Alibaba or google clouds.
What does Microsoft do that other cloud providers like Google do not do? If I store my data in GCP region europe-west3 (Frankfurt) are you saying that Google will leak that data to some third party or send it out of that region?
Maybe the NSA still listens in, maybe China does too, but it’s not legal for them to do so the way it would be in the Alibaba or google clouds.
What is the legal difference between the NSA intercepting European GCP traffic and European Azure traffic?
Yes. Every municipality around here goes with Microsoft or their own on premises installations for this very reason.
Corporations are like people - they don't change. You can put on different mask every day, but underneath its the same flesh and bones (or decision makers in this case). I would be wary of the notion that Microsoft is somehow a good moral company in one specific area, when it is amoral in others.
Though, morality is part of corporate culture, and I think different cultures can have different levels of toxicity. Cough Oracle cough. If the corporation is too affected, it may be foolish to even waste time evaluating their, on paper, decent and secure offer. If you have reason to believe they will find a way to throw you under the bus anyway later on.
Yes, Satya Nadella is the CEO of the company, but Azure and Windows are in completely separate organizations, with completely separate senior leadership. The goals of the two organizations are also vastly different, with one is focused on consumer products (Windows) while the other is focused on developer and enterpirse services (Azure). Because of this, the decisions made by one SLT is not at all indicative of another SLT's decisions.
Disclaimer: MSFT Employee working in Azure.
They were also extremely slow to adopt EU legislation required, and still haven’t for all services.
Microsoft by contrast did so immediately, with Amazon doing so as well shortly after.
Still, when I ask our DPO which cloud is better, he’ll point to Azure, then AWS and directly advice against using Google.
Which is a shame, because I’d actually like to use firebase and flutter to up our production effectiveness on mobile. As one example.
It’s also why we solely rely on OpenStreetMap instead of using google maps, even though supporting OSM with server infrastructure to do so is more expensive. At least these days, OSM is a great map service, but we also used it when it wasn’t.
P.S. using non-U.S. and non-Chinese equipment won't protect you from a hack. Both countries are known to have successful vulnerability exploitation programs.
First, those are their neighbors with which they have territorial disputes, like every other country (as borders where not there when the Earth was created, nor where they god given). Not some colonial grab, just out of pure greed, thousands of miles away, and with no prior provocation or history between the two countries.
Second, Mongols invaded and dominated China. You got your facts reversed. Ever heard of this guy, Genghis Khan?
Third, if we considered the same for the EU/US for example, we'd add the genocide of native americans, the abduction and slavery of 20+ million blacks for 4 centuries in the US South, colonial grabs and wars all over the planet (at some point 2/3rds of Earth were slaves under European colonial powers, not the inverse), tons of wars, the land grab of Mexico (California, Texas, etc), Hawaii, Phillipines, and Puerto Rico, the genocide of indigenous people of the Americas [1], and so on and so forth, plus 2 world wars, the genocide of the Jews, and the only atomic bombs to even fall (and on civillians).
Yeah, tell me again how bad China has been?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples
Is that how it is called now?
But they are also, really, unpredictable lately. George W. Bush was reelected after(!) starting 2 wars. Donald Trump is...well... unpredictable. And I have yet to see him be ousted in 2020. Let alone what the next Donald Trump looks like.
Imagine if someone came along with the same ideas who actually knows how to get stuff done in Washington.
It's just better to be self-sufficient in anything relating to critical infrastructure. As the Americans themselves say: hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Trump seems like a wildcard but his actions are predictable.
Only if you belive in reparations, that children and those who had no say are somehow bound by their country and ancestors.
And don't count eastern Europe.
I owe gratitude for the American soldiers who fought the Nazis - because if they hadn't done that I would live in a very different world. Probably I would not exist. So I am grateful to those people.
Employees and officers of US corporations are not immune to government orders. Particularly, NSLs directed at information held by corporations can be, and often are, addresses to particular officers as orders to that officer, who is often ordered to deliver the requested material in person to the relevant government office.
> For example, the US government could compel Lavabit (the company) to hand over signing keys; but they couldn’t compel the employees/founders of Lavabit to keep working there,
No, but that doesn't protect them individually from government orders to provide information, the authority for which applies to any person, not just corporations (corporations are covered because they are juridical persons.)
> It’s not illegal to choose to dissolve a company in protest of a US government directive.
It actually is illegal to do anything (other than filing a sealed challenge in court to the non-disclosure provision) in protest of an NSL with a non-disclosure provision, since such a protest itself violates the non-disclosure provision.
And, yes, even aside from that, it would probsbly also be illegal to voluntarily surrender access to info you have been ordered to provide to the government rather than providing that info as ordered.
I mean, that was basically the extent of it though. There has been little-to-no actual systemic change.
His case was covered in the news, and he still went to federal prison for four years. And every other US telecom CEO knows it.
Another narrative, to my mind equally plausible, is that Nacchio was essentially a crook who got caught up in a wave of corporate crime enforcement in the wake of the Enron scandal for making somewhere between 32MM (Nacchio's experts' take) and 100MM (the USG's take) selling stock he knew, sometimes within days, would be worth a fraction of what he was selling it for.
But die by the sword, perhaps live by the sword: the NSA scandal provides Nacchio's best tool for rehabilitating his image.
I think a read of the case on PACER sort of bears out that narrative. You can just skip to the competing sentencing memoranda (note what Nacchio stipulates to) to get the particulars of what he's charged with, and get a sense for how sweeping the behavior was and how likely it was to have been tied specifically to NSA.
I don't like NSA any more than you do, but I think I like corporate crooks even less.