Comment by fc373745 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fc373745 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a lot of accusations against the Chinese and their tech is being force fed down our throats lately. Not surprising, since we are currently within a trade war and any opportunity to drive out Chinese competition would be taken - especially since Huawei would have been a huge competitor in the smartphone market (I heard their camera quality is currently the best).

I"m skeptical, as some of these accusations are not that far-fetched. What I'm more concerned of, is whether or not this is driven by some higher entity so that mass-hatred for the Chinese and their tech is accumulated, which would mean state driven media.

Despite all of these accusations of being one step behind, Huawei seems to be on the forefront of a lot of things - especially in the field of 5G, so it would seem possible that the US would pull some propaganda antics to make us reconsider Huawei and Chinese Tech

Its tough trying to read and discern for yourself anything on the web nowadays - as for this matter, I'm putting my thoughts on Huawei and Chinese tech on hold since I think both cases are true - That there are some concerns with tech theft against the chinese, but its also being extremely exaggerated.

Well, according to the US Department of Justice, China is behind 90% of espionage and industrial theft cases that it has handled over the past 7 years [1]

To use a less biased source [2], SCMP (which is a HK newspaper now owned by Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba) mentioned:

John Demers, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s national security division, said that by stealing trade secrets through computer intrusions and the co-opting of company insiders, China had “turned the tradecraft of its intelligence services against American companies”.

Between 2011 and 2018, Demers said, more than 90 per cent of his department’s cases alleging “economic espionage on behalf of a state” involved China. Among such cases are the recent prosecutions of Chinese national Xu Yanjun, suspected of trying to steal trade secrets from US and European aerospace companies, and 10 other Chinese intelligence agents suspected of similar offences.

“The playbook is simple,” Demers said. “Rob, replicate and replace.”

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/china-involved-90-percent-economic-...

[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2177727/fb...

If you try to treat every Chinese scientist and engineer as a spy, and prioritize the handling of cases related to China, 70% is not surprising. 100% is possible.

If 70% of robbery cases handled are by black people, is it because the black robs more, or is it because the DoJ is racist?

If 70% of espionage case handled are related to China, it must be China's bad. Huh.

The passive voice here is fascinating. Huawei did something! What did they do? They got accused.

Who is accusing them? AKHAN Semiconductor (and the FBI), a small company in Illinois whose primary product is these diamond-coated screens. Past their founder, the second person on their about page is their "Vice President of Government Affairs;" the third person listed on their about page is their "Global Security and Intelligence Advisor," a former senior CIA officer who joined the company in May.

If the roles were reversed - a small display-tech company in China that recently got a senior Party member and intelligence officer to join made accusations about America with the help of the Chinese national police organization, and Xinhua was reporting on it - I think we would be very skeptical!

We would be very skeptical because the Chinese government is very untrustworthy. If the BBC reported that a British tech company found out Samsung was spying on it, I doubt anyone (except maybe Samsung and the South Korean government) would dismiss the accusation out of hand.

Did you miss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure... ?

I had a friend at Huawei about a year ago tell me how they had lawyers come in and prep them on the exact procedures they should follow in the event of an FBI raid. This was well before I heard anything in the news about China, Huawei, etc tensions.

Knowing this, I personally give quite a bit of weight to any accusation against the company. I have a hard time justifying in my mind that a company operating legitimately in the US would prep their employees on how to respond during an FBI raid.

Uber prepared their employees for this:

"At least two dozen times, the San Francisco headquarters locked down equipment in foreign offices to shield files from police raids."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/uber-s-se...

Uber, the paragon of virtue when it comes to following the law.

Actually instructing employees how to interact with government officials is on its own a quite reasonable training. Unless they were instructed on destroying evidence, there is nothing wrong with that. I work at an American company, and we get annual trainings which also cover legal aspects. Most of them are of course just the standard trainings about proper legal and ethical behavior.

The friend referenced gave the strong impression that things did not appear above board. This was a late career individual and stated that they had never seen anything like it.

They didn't provide any details beyond that. It's possible that the individual had just never experienced any legal compliance training, but based on their role I certainly expect they had.

The Economist reported on the "techno-nationalism" driving fear of Huawei in their August 4, 2012 cover story. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2012/08/04/whos-afraid-of-... This has been a long time brewing, though there's been a significant uptick in recent months of worries about China, e.g., Bloomberg's October article where they made up lies about Supermicro.

It makes perfect sense to me that Huawei would prep its employees on how to deal with a raid, and being prepared for the police is not solely the action of the guilty. It tells us that Huawei is afraid of the FBI. It does not tell is that Huawei is afraid of the FBI because Huawei are bad guys.

Of course Adam Khan is is "willing to talk" per the article. They were dealt a second hand given recent events and their brush with Huawei, and will play it for all it's worth, starting with their interview in February. These guys, after 5 years of failing to find a single willing phone maker, are trying to pivot into US military sales. Anti-Huawei publicity is certainly good for them.

For comparison, Corning got Gorilla Glass onto multiple companies' phones within a year of announcement in 2008. I've said before that Corning is a juggernaut in glass with a longstanding reputation, but I still don't see how those partners could agree to just buy the glass without multiple rounds of testing, and even trying to break samples, given a major selling point is durability. Huawei can't have been the only phone maker to have received AKHAN glass for testing, and it would be interesting to know what the other companies did to it before turning them down.

I also feel there is something suspicious here. This thread is bombarded with one group people asking for citations of claims and another group of people refusing to provide anything but hearsay in response. Can we just see some facts in here?

If you look at the reports, it’s been out there for a long time. It’s not some new thing. I heard the anecdote I recounted below (about copying routers down to the silk screening) more than a decade ago. If you’ve worked in telecom/networking, this is common knowledge.

The near daily feed is reminiscent of the propaganda campaign in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.

To be honest, it's getting to the point where even if most of the accusations are true (and I'm quite willing to believe they are), they don't _feel_ true. When (seemingly) everytime you open Hacker News there is a new accusation against Huawei, it starts to not feel plausible.

I'm starting to think it is getting kind of absurd how it is always mentioned that Huawei is way ahead on 5G. This is a message Huawei is of course also pushing very hard to put out there. I'm working in the industry and I haven't seen anything that supports that claim. It is hard to say who is in the lead but I don't think the difference between the top companies is that big.

I agree that the all out media blitz is ‘interesting.’

I read that out of 35 close European and Asian allies of the USA who have been pressured to not do business with Huawei, only 3 of them are cooperating with us. I am all for having secure infrastructure but the flip side is that we seem to be conditioning our allies to not cooperate with us. Long term, this is not good.

There is no evidence of “mass hatred.” There is plenty of evidence that steals IP. If there is some evidence that Huawei doesn’t steal IP, then let’s hear it. Corporate espionage is a real thing, suggesting that Huawei never engages in it is ridiculous. Suggesting this is propaganda has no basis in fact, considering that they do steal IP, they do engage in corporate espionage and they are affiliated closely with the Chinese MSS — an agency that makes the Stasi look like Boy Scouts.

Would you please stop posting political, ideological, and nationalistic flamewar comments to HN? We've cut you a ton of slack about this over the years, but you're repeatedly violating the spirit of this site as well as its guidelines. This comment is bad even by the low standards of this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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