Comment by Hongwei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hongwei | Hacker News Reader

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If you read the story, the major event is the case against Huawei CFO Wanzhou Meng. She was arrested in Vancouver per a US extradition request back in December. Most of this new article is providing background on the charges against her and then talking generally about potential cyber risks of Made-in-China silicon.

Here's the Bloomberg article dated December 5th. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-05/huawei-cf...

That has since ballooned into a huge diplomatic crisis for Canada, which has had it's citizens arrested in China and subjected to sleep deprivation interrogation and who knows what else (can't find source. read somewhere). There are active calls for our national telco's to ban Huawei's tech in our 5G infrastructure. The latest round of controversy was when Telus, one of the three major cellular providers, publicly endorsed Huawei and confirmed it will be moving ahead with their hardware purchase.

So yes, for us it is old news.

As I said, this is the first release of the details of the charges.

I'm already familiar with the history of the case, I've been following it closely.

Nothing in the article is substantially new, as someone who's been following this story closely. Perhaps coverage of this story for you as (presumably) an American is lighter than it has been for us up here. That's okay, and I wasn't speaking for you when I meant "us Canadians." Sorry.

My understanding (perhaps wrong) is that this was the first instance of the US issuing a formal charge. Previously, the executive was arrested and prevented from leaving Canada. The new development is that the US has specified what they are accusing this executive of, whereas previously that was not public.

The significance is that before they formally charge her, there is room for face saving maneuvers. For example the US could have agreed to press lesser charges as a result of a backroom deal with China. After this new development, that is not an option for the US.

> Nothing in the article is substantially new, as someone who's been following this story closely.

The stuff on the filing of formal charges is new. The (literal) date-stamp on the indictment is from Thursday: https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rIz2tT7h...

Since there's some redaction (and the flurry of posts on this exact same topic), I'm guessing it took until today for them to be publicly released.

Another thing that's new (to me at least) is that they indicted Huawei itself, not just Mrs. Meng. A lot of the previous reporting that I read focused on her actions exclusively (probably due to extradition hearing).

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