Huawei Trolls U.S. on Spy Claims with a Jab at Snowden
bloomberg.com
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The difference of course is that we implicitly trust US tech companies, of course we do, nobody else has such a monopoly on CPUs and Operating System production. Not to mention web browsers and all kinds of technology. Avoiding the USA in your tech stack is quite literally impossible.
And we permit the US government (by extension the NSA and 5eyes) to do what ever they want to us without fear of repercussion because what course of action could we take? As long as we are not a US citizen we have literally zero protections.
it’s to the point that my EU based company is applying US sanctions (to Crimea for instance, where no EU sanction covers telecommunications) because we would fall out of line in many of our contracts from US tech companies.
It is clearly a double standard. But the answer is to hold the US to account. Not bring more of this hostile crap in.
> It is clearly a double standard. But the answer is to hold the US to account. Not bring more of this hostile crap in.
I mean, I think it's the nature of things like this that they are justifiable but not pleasant to suffer from. This is weaponry, not poetry; if theirs is better we suffer, that's it.
It's akin to economic dependence. The thought of Europe depending on Russia (or the USA) for energy/electricity is unfathomable, yet we allow the US in particular to be the "holder" of an enormous part of our economy. IT is literally used by every industry and in some cases is very central to it. (IE; power stations make heavy use of automation and computers with CPU's and Operating Systems living at the very heart of that.)
It's troubling that we don't do more to offset this, especially if you're right, and holding this industry is a weapon of sorts.
However there is no strong dependence: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2018/07/19/how-depe...
tl;dr: 23% of German power comes from gas; that 35% of that gas comes from Russia. That's a power dependency of roughly 8%.
Personally I don't think that's the same as being held entirely captive by a monopoly country as is the case when it comes to IT.
But, it's a fair point, I'll take it. Replacing 8% of a countries energy input would be difficult, but I would argue that it's not impossible.
> However there is no strong dependence: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2018/07/19/how-depe....
> tl;dr: 23% of German power comes from gas; that 35% of that gas comes from Russia. That's a power dependency of roughly 8%.
> Personally I don't think that's the same as being held entirely captive by a monopoly country as is the case when it comes to IT.
> But, it's a fair point, I'll take it.
Dependence used to be worse, this is result of efforts to lower it because Russia was using it as a blackmail tool.
But I'm just nitpicking anyway, it's not the actual topic.
Maybe not, but it's a very good point.
We used to have a reliance on Russia but due to poor behaviour we took steps to remove their power.
I believe we should do that again with technology in regards to the USA.
Obviously in a perfect world none of the "bad" things happen, but I'd rather take the US government spying on me than the Chinese government spy on me.
Not everyone shares your opinion.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/chin...
Me, just like Uyghurs, would prefer to be spied on by the evil empire which DOESN'T rule me.
Uyghurs are ruled by China so they'd rather be spied on by us for sure.
I live in Europe so I'm ruled by US, and therefore would prefer China to spy on me.
The US on the other hand has replaced a bunch of democratically-elected governments in South America with dictatorships, taught torture classes to the people who tortured my grandfather in Brazil, and has taken the economical blockade of Venezuela over the course of decades to the current level of a humanitarian crisis and a disintegrated state, to which (surprise!) they'll have to "bring democracy".
> I don't like the false equivalence of what the US-lead western intelligence does and what the Chinese state does.
I agree, it's a false equivalence. The effects of US-lead western intelligence actions are objectively more perverse.
But it's a point that will continue to be made as long as the US diplomats continue to use Cold War cliches to describe the "enemy" while back-patting the US as a global sentinel for liberal values and human rights.
The USSR couldn't have dreamed of the kind of mass surveillance apparatus the US has.
This line of argument is all about moral blame, and not related to practical outcome. Correctly morally blaming the US for its practices won't protect you from Chinese malfeasance.
China v US dick-waving doesn't change the 'facts on the ground' for average people, which is that state surveillance exists, and many people don't know just how expansive it is. That's what people should be opposing, instead of cheering on two massive bureaucracies like they're sports teams.
The Chinese company is most likely right. But if you are a national carrier, do you then buy the product with the Chinese backdoors?
The only defense that wouldn’t kill their sales would be arguing for the opposite, that backdoors undermine the trust of their customers, and that they have the same incentive as Google, Apple or Cisco to push back on those requests.
There will never be a Snowden in China. You can guarantee their life, or their love one's life will be held hostage.
So not only does the "West" ( So to speak ) has a system in place protecting these people, they also have a system to vote them out and elect a new form of government should the ultimate worst come to play.
What can you do with the CCP?
Maybe, maybe not, but there is precedence in America for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
> Daniel Ellsberg... precipitated a national political
> controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers,
> a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-
> making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York
> Times and other newspapers.
>
> On January 3, 1973, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage
> Act of 1917 along with other charges of theft and conspiracy,
> carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years. Due to
> governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering,
> and the defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School
> professor Charles Nesson, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr.
> dismissed all charges against Ellsberg on May 11, 1973.
At the local and state level, you can strategically implement gerrymandering to create electoral districts that are strongly advantageous to you. How would a political challenger not belonging to the dominant party win there?
Authoritarian regimes frequently win elections with 80-95% of the vote. That tells me that the people "can" vote him out.
The reason there will be no Snowden in China is primarily that China doesn't hide its spying, and secondarily becaue China does not maintain the pretense of moral superiority on international scale. Snowden-type leak from China would not change the way Chinese citizens perceive their government, and nobody else would care, much less exert outside pressure to change things.
Leaks and whistleblowers will happen, though - they do happen even in most oppressive of regimes.
(Also excuse me, but I don't believe US wouldn't try to exert pressure on you through your loved ones in a case like this.)
Scooter Libby was prosecuted during the subsequent investigation and of course pardoned by Trump.
Because they don't have to, because they cannot be democratically removed from power and their people accept a high level of human rights abuses as status quo. US citizens do not.
For an accusation like that you should always provide substantiated evidence, otherwise you're just flaming the anti-Chinese racial flames. Because as terrible as you may think the Chinese government is, it still has the legitimacy and support of a vast majority of the Chinese population.
Not the best coming from the Guardian admittedly, but still. Top result in google.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/26/chinese-activi...
What is that supposed to mean?
It's one of the few "left" newspapers in the UK.
Since you have brought up the subject of the genocidal CCP having the support of the Chinese population, let me ask you this: isn't it true that the feeling amongst Han Chinese is that they are superior to other races and and cultures, and are meant to rule them? Isn't that the policy CCP is following now?
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/21...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/07/10/liu-xia...
It take's a rather famous case to make it into the Western news, but I have a close Chinese-national friend who's under the strong impression that dissident activity would be bad for her parents.
Has anything changed after Snowden revelations? New form of government?
Insane diplomatic incident.
You are right, USA wouldn't kill him if captured. They would only psychologically torture him for years, like they did with Manning.
Snowden would have been in a US jail if Russia hadn't found him to be a useful symbol of US hypocrisy. Snowden originally went to HK but the authorities were ready to extradite him, as were most countries that didn't want the US breathing down their necks.
The fight then ends up being a squabble over power and who should have it. The US government is only saying what it says because it simply wants more power in its hands—nothing more. Same goes for the China side, although they're just trying to sell something. There's no way China can win this argument since it's just about power (unless they bend over).
I have no problem telling you who I am; I currently seem to have the top comment here[0] which makes me probably the prime target of this message.
What about my English is broken? I am British[1], I have been around for a long time[2] and I currently live in Sweden. I have no obligation to any US or China based tech company and no affiliation with China at all (other than the fact I work for a games company that is 5% owned by Tencent[3], but I am definitely not directly involved and I consider their efforts an intrusion).
If you think I'm a troll then I've been playing the long game, I have GitHub commits under this name since 2011.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19261105
[1]: http://linkedin.com/in/jharasym/
[3]: https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/20/17144094/ubisoft-vivendi-s...
This just won't fly for anyone concerned with the ethical issues. The point is not that Huawei should get away with anything but no one should. This not only makes a mockery of concern with surveillance but also exposes globalization and free markets as self serving political tools.
Huawei is a perfect example of how ethical issues are hijacked by vested interests with zero interest in the ethics to encourage an empty culture of jingoistic finger pointing that serve to distract and deny while advancing their own financial interests at the cost of everyone else.
The scale of state crimes are vastly different here.
We should be critical of human rights violations of every country, at every point in time. Past US violations are not some kind of excuse to allow China to put millions of people in concentration camps. This is a fallacious argument, the tu quoque logical fallacy.
As a non-black person, it'd be like me criticizing black people for things they do. Since I cannot truly understand the black experience in America without being a black person, any criticism I levy against them would be wholly unfair.
Putting millions of your own citizens in a concentration camp is a crime on the scale of nothing currently seen in the modern world.
Excusing China's human rights violations because the US actions are whataboutism and is a completely bullshit argument.