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Comment by lsh | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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

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!

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