Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Political Opponents
wsj.com
wsj.com
Governments with resource wealth don't need large public services that would operate a sophisticated intelligence service, so they outsource it. So far these governments have been doing point targeting against dissidents w/ mercenary surveillance companies, but it's possible these companies are about to be steamrolled by one that implements their products as a free feature of their entire infrastructure.
The bargain will be, we'll support your campaign/coup and modernize your infrastructure for your people, while giving you intel we collect on your dissidents and opposition. Then, once Huawei infrastructure is ensconced, no government will get into power who does not have support from China. A very "harmonious," cycle. Want be be elected again? Secure our rights to extract rare earth minerals. Etc.
The company is a projection of Chinese state power, not unlike western telcoms with 5EYES and the ITU has been. The difference is the Party lacks the sentimentality of western countries when it comes to issues of total surveillance and intervention to maintain control. (Albeit, we have never been above supporting butchers either, so YMMV.)
My prediction is that once the Huawei gear is in place, a country's political class will turn to face east on policy and resource questions. It's pure leverage. Western tech companies can't make the same promises to those governments either. It's not like Google can promise to prop up the next Idi Amin, but Huawei doesn't have that constraint. So far, the world has been content to deal with the devil it knows.
Anyway, I'd say this article is an anecdote of a larger geopolitical shift. Containing Huawei should be a national security priority for everyone, but tbh, it's looking more and more like our respective mere leviathans have become oversized, slow moving prey for their hydra.
I wish this were the case, but western companies are constantly supplying both software and hardware to repressive regimes. Hell, weapons!
Though the fact that we believe that western tech companies can't make those promises means that there's at least public support for making this a reality
It’s fair that US wants to contain China’s leverage in Africa and maintain its own, but this is a national security priority for US , not “everyone”.
Unless we don't have a majority that is https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-vetoes-congres...
Since it's been going on for a long time, you either cannot, or you don't want to.
Democracy is a messy and flawed process, but it is the best we have. The fact still remains that no matter how much you bemoan the current state of affairs that there is a framework for changing things.
At this stage for us Africans the Chinese seems like a more dependable and friendlier lot.
Just wait and see, the loans you are getting ( not investments) are for Chinese workers. The loans are at 4-6% if the work isn't executed by Chinese workers.
That's not an ally
The US has no concept for Africa, because unlike China which uses infrastructure projects and investment as a way to offload its export surplus the US is an overwhelmingly domestic economy.
There will never be an American 'Belt and Road' because it just doesn't make much sense for a country that has so little international economic exposure, whenever the US forms alliances it is towards purely political ends. In that sense one could indeed characterise the relationship with China as more stable. No Chinese leader is suddenly going to go isolationist over the next two decades just because they feel like it.
I question how stable the relationship is when that stability rests on the assumption China fails to meet its economic goals.
And also quite importantly as China climbs up the value chain it will increasingly seek to outsource to cheaper countries, as it has already started doing in Pakistan, one of the major hubs of the Belt and Road initiative. And given the quite authoritarian system, it will probably do so quite effectively without facing the political backlash that workers in the United States have caused.
It's not because of a domestic economy. It's because a freight/boat is much more economical than a train and a train doesn't make any sense.
It's only here ( now ), because it's heavy subsidized by China and an excuse for modern colonialism.
PS. A lot of ( sane / healthy) infrastructure works are happening in Africa with Europe / US though. But if it's not feasible, it ain't going to happen. That's where the Chinese come in to burry them in debt.
No, the difference is hypocrisy, and of course tons of daily propaganda from the Western media / Corporations / Governments / intelligence agencies.
I think this misses the point. Countries like US or Israel are perfectly capable [0][1][2] of offering such systems. And they do because it gives them another solid "string" attached to the regime receiving it. Their problem is that now the string (and all the knowledge, power, influence that come with it) could go to China. Hence the campaign to discredit them simply by suggesting this behavior is limited to them. Putting the facts in perspective would undermine this.
[0] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-israel...
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/report-saudi-arabia...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/17/how-us-sur...
China on the other hand has almost 8 million people for every country on Earth. Imagine how many people they could assign to messing with each country around the world if they wanted to.
These are totally different players.
There is news here. But its not about spying.
https://greenworldwarriors.com/2019/03/06/ugandas-main-asset...
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2134438/chin...
So we just ignore that Israeli companies sell spy tech to every corrupt government on the planet and instead focus on demonizing Huawei giving Africans cheap 5G?
Trade war inspired reporting, not surprising coming from the Murdoch rag WSJ.
People draw the line somewhere that puts them in the “non-appressive” camp, and justify it in so many ways (“you can’t compare because the other side does really bad things”), but it tends to hide how the lines are much more murky, the “oppressive” side is supported from the other countries, which also look at it like a live experiment to see how far they could get away with it.
Before Huawei it was european or US companies that where eyeing the market, and I feel like Huawei just happened to win the bids so we can now point the finger at them.
"The Journal investigation didn’t turn up evidence of spying by or on behalf of Beijing in Africa. Nor did it find that Huawei executives in China knew of, directed or approved the activities described. It also didn’t find that there was something particular about the technology in Huawei’s network that made such activities possible."
There were activities that infringed privacy, but (I believe) not attributable to Huawei hardware or anything. In the article it mentions Huawei employees helping the govt get malware/insider onto the Whatsapp group chat.
Listen to the Acquired podcast for a more thorough history of Huawei. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/huawei
I suspect that most countries would try to intercept the communications of an opposition candidate that was openly backed by a foreign power.
Commentators who are only interested in critiquing rival states ought to be viewed as discrediting themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kyagulanyi_Ssentamu#Arr...
By this logic, if someone 'bad' does anything, that anything can be claimed to be sinister and unreasonable, and any statements otherwise are "defending someone bad".
We still haven't seen the Trump-Russia/KSA/UAE intercepts…
Except that the US is not in the market. US based mobile network infrastructure assets (Lucent Technologies and Motorola's wireless network infrastructure business) were sold to Europeans long time ago. Both of them are part of Nokia today. Nokia and Ericsson compete without government support against China backed Huawei and ZTE.
Huawei is most likely government owned/controlled enterprise:
Balding, Christopher and Clarke, Donald C., Who Owns Huawei? (April 17, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3372669 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3372669
China has SOEs. It has private companies. They operate quite differently from one another. Huawei operates like one of the latter, and legally, definitely is one of the latter.
But Huawei is a private company. It will probably have to comply if the Chinese state forces it to (just like American companies have to silently comply if handed a National Security Letter), but it's not an arm of the government.
There doesn't seem to be a Swedish Chamber of Commerce in any African country [1], whereas Finland does have one, but it's only responsible for West Africa, which doesn't include Uganda [2]. On the other hand, both the USA [3] and China [4] have Chambers of Commerce that also operate in Uganda.
[1] https://www.swedishchambers.se/swedish-chambers-of-commerce-...
[2] https://www.finncham.fi/africa
You're wrong. The paper's abstract says that Huawei is effectively government-owned, given the known facts. Read the last quoted paragraph carefully:
> * The Huawei operating company is 100% owned by a holding company, which is in turn approximately 1% owned by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei and 99% owned by an entity called a “trade union committee” for the holding company.
> * We know nothing about the internal governance procedures of the trade union committee. We do not know who the committee members or other trade union leaders are, or how they are selected.
> ...
> * Given the public nature of trade unions in China, if the ownership stake of the trade union committee is genuine, and if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned.
Also, ownership is just a specific cultural form of control. It's not synonymous with control, and lack of ownership does not necessarily imply a lack of control. The issue with Huawei isn't so much who owns is but who controls it. Hair-splitting arguments about ownership just distract from the issue.
That's the "they're Chinese, so obviously they can't be independent" argument. It not necessarily wrong, but also not terribly illuminating.
As you say, a more interesting question is that of control. Given the level of disunity within the Chinese government, a useful answer to that question would really need to break it down to the personal allegiances of the decision-makers. Unfortunately, those are unlikely to be recorded in publicly available documents.
In any case, Chinese government officials will extend their support even to Chinese companies they do not own, control or otherwise directly benefit from, so long as there's no competitor for whom that is the case.
What do you mean by that? China doesn't have independent trade unions, because the Chinese Communist Party doesn't allow political organization outside of its control, which independent trade unions would be. It's worth pointing that out because western misconceptions could cloud understanding.
See https://clb.org.hk/content/labour-relations-china-some-frequ...:
> Do workers in China have freedom of association?
> No. There is only one legally-mandated trade union, namely the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). All enterprise trade unions have to be affiliated to the ACFTU via a hierarchical network of local and regional union federations. (See simplified organizational chart right). The ACFTU is primarily under the control and direction of the Chinese Communist Party. Any attempt to establish an independent trade union movement is seen by the Party as political threat. The only time in the history of the People’s Republic of China that an independent union was established was the short-lived Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation in 1989. The BWAF was declared an illegal organization and disbanded in the wake of the military crackdown in Beijing on 4 June 1989.
See https://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/chinalbr02/chinalbr0802-01....:
> At no point over the last twenty-five years, despite widespread unemployment, serious labor law violations, and appallingly dangerous working conditions, has the ACFTU attempted to distance itself from the CCP leadership or to question its policies. It has not defended the principle of independent union organizing, and it has never spoken out against laws and regulations routinely employed to justify imprisonment of labor activists who organize outside its aegis.
----
> Given the level of disunity within the Chinese government, a useful answer to that question would really need to break it down to the personal allegiances of the decision-makers.
The Communist party is united enough to make that irrelevant to the question of who controls Huawei in the contexts where it's typically posed.
By that I mean that there's no need to trace ownership to the trade union and conclude that because independent trade unions aren't allowed, the company can't be independent either. You could just go straight to Article 17 of the Company Law of the People's Republic of China [1], which reads
"The grass-root organizations of the Communist Party of China in companies shall carry out their activities in accordance with the Constitution of the Communist Party of China."
So no Chinese company could possibly be independent, trade union or not. That's on paper anyway. In practice, Chinese companies undermine each other and government agencies all the time, instead of harmoniously cooperating to fulfill the CCP's grand plan. Similarly, membership in the ACFTU doesn't tell you anything about the actual power dynamics.
[1] http://english.court.gov.cn/2016-04/14/content_24532981_2.ht...
But who do you think trained the ugandan cyber-surveillance team in the first place?
You can piece it together from the article: They had pegasus and were trained by the israeli company (probably not an advanced version... the one that just parses unencrypted comms). But they even said it was simplistic and needed/wanted more. Of course Huawei trained them. When they were unable to "punch" through with the "pegasus-style" spyware themselves, they strolled up to their teachers and said help us senpai.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-...
I don't know if the Chinese firewall has been upgraded to Chinese hardware or if it is still running on US hardware. This kind of hardware often last for 10+ years so I would not be surprised if the hardware is still mostly from Cisco.