U.S. Tech Companies Sidestep a Ban, to Keep Selling to Huawei | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Tech Companies Sidestep a Ban, to Keep Selling to Huawei

nytimes.com

120 pointsDespegar81 comments

> Some officials feel that the sales violate the spirit of the law and undermine government efforts to pressure Huawei, while others are more supportive because it lightens the blow of the ban for American corporations.

It clearly does violate the spirit of the law and undermines government efforts, potential jeopardizing US national security. However, any corporations that legally circumvent this ban will have a competitive advantage, leading other corporations to follow.

This is all about the trade war. The espionage pretext is just that: a pretext. US wants to keep everybody hostage to its military, its technology and its economy.

This is not something new. The only change is that now the US admin uses a kind of zero tolerance policy and I believe it will fire back.

The free trade is replaced by America First trade: we have the biggest military power and economy so you do it our way or you deal with the consequences.

Personally I believe the policy reflects Trump's personality.

While I agree with you, I would also like to point out that to protect our economy President George W Bush’s administration came up with the ‘axis of evil’ to economically fight three oil producing countries who had announced willingness to trade oil for currencies other than the US dollar. I think this is close to the same thing, really. Using our military might and pressure on allies to maintain an advantage.

I personally believe that we must spend less on our military and more on education, new technologies, more efficient industrial systems, have firm but fair laws governing corporations. Capitalism can work long term if we have laws that are guardrails on what corporations can do and fight hard to be competitive with other countries on merits, not coercion.

North Korea produces oil? Iran and Iraq, I totally agree, but DPKR is a snub to China.

You're not going to get rid of espionage. NSA has been doing this for years. The ban is purely a battle for who has more power and control. In the end, the user loses no matter what. Someone will be watching.

Of course espionage will continue and international rivals will resort to dirty tactics, this is a given. The only question is whose side you're on. I am surprised when US citizens or people of nations aligned with the US are critical of the US defending itself against foreign espionage.

> Of course espionage will continue and international rivals will resort to dirty tactics, this is a given.

Those dirty foreigners and their dirty tactics. If only they could keep it all clean and above board like our good old fashioned home grown espionage.

There is playing the great game and taking the piss China is taking the piss.

You assume the intent is to defend itself against espionage, not as a tactic as part of a tradewar.

If the US is truly concerned about espionage, why is some Chinese electronics manufacturing for US export okay, while others are not?

All of these things are interlinked and the tradewar is absolutely part of it.

Certain types of technology will make espionage easier for China on US citizens than the other way around. They are just battling over rules of war.

Nations don't have friends only interests.

Shoring up the US economy is in everyone's interest up to a certain point ofcourse everyone is exposed to US debt- but when the US starts imposing tariffs to keep out other countries expect criticism.

> people of nations aligned with the US are critical of the US defending itself

As an european, I properly couldn't care less about US defending itself, there is no higher moral ground compared to say China (Russia is a special case). We know about all the dirty unlawful watching, how we are considered less than american citizens in many ways etc.

I mean we all get why you guys do it, it just has the same moral ground as Chinese doing it

I got a pretty good laugh out of you saying Russia is a special case (special because you're European). Different moral ground when it's a direct military threat in your own backyard.

Unlike most/all countries in Europe, the US has truly global security interests. As the sole superpower it is in long-term security / defense partnerships all over the world, including in Asia, which pertains directly to the China situation. As the most prominent example, the world's third largest economy - Japan - has no real ability to defend itself from China in a conflict and depends almost entirely on the US for military security (including the US nuclear umbrella).

Are the Europeans going to all rush to Asia to defend Japan and or South Korea in a conflict? No. They're not going to lift a finger to do anything (protest at the UN perhaps), and more realistically can't do anything even if they wanted to. So should the US abandon Japan re defense, pretend we have no security interest there at all? I don't think so.

So no, it's not just the same as China doing it. That's merely the perspective of a European with only regional (the Russian special case) security concerns.

North Korea and South Korea are also not on the same moral ground.

The US do a pretty bad job of being world police and have a bad habit of invading countries, changing the regime, then leaving the country to rot into anarchy.

Yes the US defends its allies, don't you think that China defends its allies too? The real test of a nation is how it treats nations for which it has a grievance with.

> don't you think that China defends its allies too?

This made me curious: what nations could be considered allies of China? North Korea, possibly maybe?

And Europe does have interests in that area

The claim that dealing with Huawei "jeopardizes US national security" has little factual support. It is a political propaganda initiated in the Trump circle. Shame on those who perpetuate it, and shame on those who believe in it.

There is so much evidence Huawei are a bad actor, and probably marching in lockstep with the Chinese government, that it has it's own very long Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei

You should read this wiki in its entirety bef you use it as evidence to support the claim. It cites patent infringements, IP thefts, and then allegations by China's political enemies about the possible backdoors in its equipments. Huawei equipments may have vulnerabilities, but that doesn't constitute evidence that it has malicious intention to spy on its customers. Many Western telecom make unsafe products with different degree of vulnerability. How come they don't raise the same degree of concerns

Many US vendors have been caught implementing backdoors for the NSA.

So from a europerspective the questions is: which one do you want to spy on you?

Both have very likely interests in doing so and for one we have definitive proof that they did that also towards nations they call “friends”.

If the US warns about Huawei it probably does so because that is what the US would do in China’s place.

Yeah, this was the gist of my comments the last time I posted re:Huawei on HN. You can either have the US backdoor your network, or you can have China backdoor your network. Which you chose is based on your risk assessment of which state actor poses the greatest threat to your operations (whether those are business, personal, or even military in nature hardly matters).

If Huawei delivers good products for less money I have no doubt many will go with them.

Meanwhile US companies can raise their prices thanks to the monopoly the US government just handed them.

I would think a European wouldn't want either and something else will take over that market.

Great job at side stepping the question!

I’ll answer for myself - if I had to choose between a Chinese or US Blackfoot, I’d choose the US every, single, time.

Well there is evidence that Chinese spied on African Union's members through the servers they installed. Tangential, i know, but would it be that crazy to expect them to do the same if they had full access to a 5G network without fear being caught? Especially with US or EU were the secrets they would be able to gather would be far greater. I mean I trust the Chinese less than US on their espionage standards, yet US still spies on its allies and enemies.

https://qz.com/africa/1192493/china-spied-on-african-union-h...

And yet the British vet the code and hardware of Huawei components used in UK networks and, apart from sloppy coding, haven't found anything that backs up the "state sanctioned espionage" claims so breathlessly made by certain quarters.

It may be a bad actor in the sense of an aggressive tech giant employing unconventional means to make profit and take market share. But there is zero evidence in the wiki that Huawei is a national security threat. The only evidence it's a national security threat is that it is a Chinese company.

That doesn't mean there isn't evidence that is non-public or classified, though....

I disagree

The fact it is a Chinese company is all the evidence needed. Huawei is subject to China's 2015 National Security Law, which grants the Chinese government the power to force Chinese companies to provide assistance in matters of national security. In other words, if Chinese intelligence wanted Huawei to secretly introduce a backdoor, it would be a legal order and unlawful for Huawei to resist. What makes you think the US needs to have evidence beyond that when this impacts critical infrastructure and national security? Why take the risk?

That would be an argument for not allowing Huawei to supply equipment for the US 5G network.* It is not, however, an argument for banning American companies from doing business with Huawei.

As the American head of the US-China Business Council said, it's one thing to ban Huawei from the US, but banning American companies from selling equipment to Huawei is more like "murder": https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/06/11/trump-trying-to-murder...

* An analogous argument could be used, of course, by other countries to justify banning American hardware in their own critical systems.

I am curious. Would the same be true for CSIRO? Considering that Austalia has introduced laws requiring any company to provide them with a backdoor that does not notify the user and the developer is essentially under a gag-order?

Australia is not a national security concern. This is political wargaming.

There are "Criticism of" articles for a lot of tech companies:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft_Windows

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_eBay

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Myspace (surely an important page in this day and age)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google

And the whopper is this: there is an entire category devoted to pages criticizing Google:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Criticism_of_Google

And let's not forget the funnest Wikipedia "Criticism of" page:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia

Trump has openly stated that he's using Huawei as a bargaining chip in the trade negotiations: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/24/tech/donald-trump-huawei-ban/....

The "evidence" against Huawei always seems to be two cases that it settled 15+ years ago, plus the "Tappy" robot a few years back. They also may have indirectly done business with Iran, but they're a Chinese company, so doing business with Iran was legal under the laws of their country.

Your response to a list of evidence was to attack lists of evidence and then provide your own straw man list of evidence to then argue against?

Respond to the strongest version of the argument, not a straw man. My meaning was obvious.

The above commenter pointed to the existence of a "very long Wikipedia page" criticizing Huawei as evidence that Huawei is a "bad actor." These sorts of "Criticism of" pages exist for many companies. Many of those pages are far more extensive than the page for Huawei. Are all those companies also "bad actors"? The existence of such a page in itself means nothing.

If you actually look at the "Criticism of Huawei" page, it contains no evidence that Huawei has installed backdoors in its equipment. There are the accusations of the US government, and various vulnerabilities that have been discovered over time (and patched), but vulnerabilities and backdoors are different things.

Then there are the various IP disputes. Tell me: which major tech company has not had multiple IP disputes over the past 20 years? The disputes that Huawei has been involved in are pretty minor, and the largest ones were 15+ years ago.

We're in the middle of a moral panic, in which suddenly, were being bombarded by messages that Huawei and China are the worst things in the history of the planet. Huawei is a "bad actor," whatever that's supposed to mean. Google stole Oracle's copyrighted Java API? Samsung violated Apple's design patents and has to pay half a billion dollars? Small potatoes. But Huawei copied Cisco's implementation of strcmp 15 years ago? Bad actor!

From a google search, this is the first hit.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/17/18264283/huawei-security-...

Some quotes

"This may help to explain why Western governments broadly agree that Huawei poses security risks,..." Note the word "risks". A risk is something that may or may not happen.

Quote of CEO of OpenVPN

"The US is right to treat Huawei as a security threat, but I don’t believe any ban on any equipment is the right solution. No matter what equipment we use for 5G, there will be security risks." Again the word is "risks".

Honestly the US gov is playing with fire here. This sort of behavior will only lead to global corporations avoiding doing important business in the US. This is clearly a step in that direction.

Isn't the main weapon that China uses in the trade war to lower import duties for competitors of US-companies?

That's a desired effect for the decision makers. They want to have selfsustained economy. They were pretty explicit that they want to have production back, I assume they didn't mean it for export.

Also it's easier to control local companies because you have a jurisdiction over them. Look at europe, they don't have any major high tech companies, so they can only choose which threats and risks they want to deal with us or chinese. Can't avoid it, unless they drop particular tech at all.

Ericsson and Nokia

Also Philips

Yip, also off the top of my head: Siemens, BASF, Bosch, Aibus, Leonardo, ARM, Bayer, Sanofi, Saab, ABB, Schneider, BAE, DSM, Infineon, ASML, Thales, Alenia, Aixtron.

You have to wonder where some HN posters get educated.

ARM is a major tech company based in Europe.

This is the 2nd hit from a google search

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/us-huawei-ban-op-ed,news-30132....

"There seems to be something different about Huawei that makes the U.S. government regard the company as a global threat, but government officials need to explain why. Otherwise, without proof, the American government will be able to just ban any company it wants."

It's because Huawei is poised to take over the 5G market ahead of Qualcomm and Ericsson and refuses to give back doors to the NSA or any other US intelligence agency. It's presumed that Huawei will give access to China only.

That's what this is all about.

Oh, absolutely. That's precisely why US is so upset!

Is there any actual evidence that says that Huawei is selling nefarious (in terms of providing a hidden backdoor to a third-party which the buyer is unaware of) devices? Is there a continued pattern of them doing so?

How do you prove that a vulnerability is intentional? It could just be bad engineering. Lots of it:

https://www.channelnews.com.au/huawei-more-vulnerable-to-sec...

https://www.crn.com/news/security/british-watchdog-finds-ser...

https://fortiguard.com/zeroday/FG-VD-18-017

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/03/nsa-inspired_...

https://www.huawei.com/en/psirt/security-advisories/huawei-s...

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-5979...

There's evidence strongly suggesting that - for example - Juniper Network's use of the NSA's backdoorable Dual EC random number generator in their VPN hardware is an intentional US backdoor. Not only is Dual EC slower, more complex, less random, and worse in every possible way except for the fact that it allows for a backdoor that can only be accessed by the person who has the matching private key to its public key, they also introduced a bunch of other changes at the same time across several levels of their software stack to make this exploitable in practice: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/376.pdf

On top of that, when an attacker broke into Juniper's systems and replaced that public key with their own, they simply changed it back without fixing the "bug" introduced at the same time as Dual EC which meant the countermeasures that they'd claimed prevented this attack never actually ran. (They moved the index variable of their existing PRNG function, which was meant to post-process the Dual EC output, from a local to a global, overwrote it in the Dual EC code so the other PRNG never ran, used the same output buffer for both, and added a hidden on-by-default setting which ran the Dual EC code on every PRNG call. The whole thing stunk.)

I don't think anyone has found anything even remotely comparable to this smoking gun in Huawei's hardware and software.

How do you compare this with Cisco's similar situation and repeated hardcoding of backdoor passwords that they swear are just accidental despite having a decade of time in which they should have figured out to stop doing it?

No.

The ban will only come into force mid-August for current product. (https://www.snopes.com/ap/2019/05/21/us-delay-to-huawei-ban-...)

At the beginning of the article they state: "It’s not clear what percentage of the current sales were for future products.", so 0% can be a valid answer.

Frankly US press is really in a bad shape if even NYT is just a clickbait agency.

How is Amazon selling Huawei products? https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/34F6034C-1D34-4913-9648-3...

I don't know what you think has been banned?

There is a ban on the sale of American technology to Huawei.

There is not a ban on selling Huawei technology to Americans.

There are no bans of Huawei consumer products in the US.

I wonder if the DoJ investigations against Google and Facebook will now become leverage against them in this context.

The discussion in the article is mostly around Micron and Intel and their selling of Semiconductors to Huawei.

Even then though the title is contradicted somewhat by the article...

`American companies may sell technology supporting current Huawei products until mid-August.`

They're not so much side-stepping the ban as they are continuing normal sales after confirming they are allowed to.

I really hope this sets enough of a precedent / whatever is required so that Canada can not be stuck in the middle of dealing with the Huawei / Iran controversy.

I always wondered that if everyone broke sanctions then sanctions lose their utility. This includes US financial sanctions, only problematic if most financial entities obey. If most don't then the US would be sanctioning itself.

The US still follows a might is right approach ignoring transnational rules and regulations, breaking their sanctions is extremely dangerous for other countries let alone companies.

Idiotic tariffs and bans, trade will always find a way. Just ask drug dealers.

This is article from techcrunch, a fairly reputable SV publication.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/26/is-huawei-a-national-secur...

Title : Without proof, is Huawei still a national security threat?

The title gives it away : there is no proof of this allegation.

Looks like a win-win to me. POTUS will continue to claim at his rallies that he's crushing Huawei, while US corps exercise simple loopholes to continue doing business as usual.

USG issued an arrest warrant for Huawei CFO alleging sanctions violation. It is only fair to issue arrest warrants for Intel and Micron executives based on the same charges now.

Where does it say that what they did was illegal? The article talks about them breaking “the spirit of the law”, which suggests that the didn’t break the letter of it.

Words are cheap. We will see how many patriotic people will gray import Chinese products to avoid the Trump tax.

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