Hanlon's razor applies here. If there was truly something nefarious going on, why would FedEx update the tracking status to say that the packages were re-routed? Why not just say they were held up in the sending or receiving country?
We had a similar situation in Russia. A mobile operator was cooperating with government to hack into activists' Telegram accounts. They disabled SMS service for a user and then requested a password restore using SMS, intercepted it and got access. But they forgot to delete this information from their internal systems, so when the user called support, they told them that SMS service was disabled, and later even gave a signed confirmation about it.
I don't know whether the story from the article is true or not, but people tend to make such kind of mistakes. Imagine a typical accounting system, written on bunch of legacy technologies during last 20 years, and think how difficult it would be to remove all traces from all the databases and logs and not break anything. And tell every employee that would process the package not to scan it.
Why on earth would they do something so obvious to leave such a paper trail when you know they could pull this off quietly?
The ideal approach would be to have packages of the "interesting" kind automatically diverted to a scanning location, and then continue on their way...
Dont think of it as them being interested in a single package. They are interested in setting up a mechanism by which ALL packages of interest can be diverted with only very small effort on their part.
My impression from the prior accounts was that the interception was far more clandestine.
The obvious and most probable answer is usually the right answer unless you have evidence otherwise.
Not every weird incident is part of some conspiracy.
Check this: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/huawei-says-fedex-diverted-p...
According to FedEx’s website, the status “exception” means an unexpected event is preventing delivery of a package, for example a customs delay, a holiday, or no one being available to accept delivery. FedEx declined to give details on what the exception was in this case.
According to Huawei, a FedEx customer service representative in Vietnam replied to their inquiry on May 22 when two expected packages did not arrive on time, saying: “Please be informed that FDX SG received notification from FDX US to hold and return the package to US. Hence, the shipment is not deliver to consignee and now being hold at FDX station and under process to RTS it (return to sender),” the representative wrote in broken English, according to an email Huawei showed to Reuters.
In this age of fingerprints and occasional iris checks, sending intelligence personnel through foreign airports is risky.
Hanlon's razor isn't as strong of an argument if you already have evidence that something similarly malicious has been done by that actor before. Obviously we still need to be skeptical, but not blindly so.
[1]: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden--the-nsa-p... [2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa... [2]: https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/23/latest-snowden-allegations...
No. If they want quiet intercepts, that's what they get... even if it means "slow down conveyor belts and post agents to manually read every incoming package label before it hits the scanner".
This was either unrelated or an intentionally loud message.
that's like asking "why are there software bugs when programmers know how to code!"
of course, there's the other side of that coin, in that of you've got a big enough company and enough of a complex package network, the probability that you'll find packages routed erroneously or in bizarre directions approaches 1.
Given that we do not know the details of the packages, either their contents or supposed reason for rerouting, but we do know that Huawei has made a media story of this (a couple of packages rerouting is nothing to get in the paper about, and they could have kept quiet if they were genuinely concerned), about the only thing we can really take away from this is that is likely part of the public relations/propaganda jostling currently going on between US/China corporates.
(But I do agree overall that it's probably nothing)