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Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

What a treat to read a well written piece based on decent research. It's a long read but well worth your time. Kudo's to the journalists who helped uncover it.

And the 'coup of the century' is far from clickbait, it's definitionally warranted for what the CIA and BND did here.

It's a little ironic as well, especially since the US is so keen on blocking Huawei over espionage concerns.

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There's nothing ironic, weird, or surprising about the US wanting to stop other countries from doing to them what they do to other countries. It's hypocritical in some sense, mostly because the US tries to project itself as the good guys, but it's just basic international relations. That's how every country has always operated and will always operate.

People seem to take for granted that things like that will never change, but always is a very long time --much longer than modern history. I hope you don't just expect/accept that we should kill ourselves off as opposed to reaching some kind of sustainability.

Right, the decision to avoid huawei is totally justified, but the hypocrisy is something to behold. Even here on HN, where people supposedly shouldn't be falling for propaganda so easily, there is a lot of indignation when e.g. the Chinese are caught doing something shady. If someone then points out that this is in some sense normal and US agencies are doing the same or worse stuff it is instantly dismissed as whataboutism.

Even if something is "in some sense normal" it is still completely unacceptable.

The US mostly tries to project itself as "the good guys" to its own inhabitants, and secondly to the local and international media. But in most of the world you are often faced with the business end of a US-operated or US-financed weapon.

To be fair, it's a spectrum. The US has its share of bodies, but it also doesn't grind its citizens into a pulp with tanks when they protest.

The thing is, its subjects are mostly non-citizens, so it's enough to grind _those_ into a pulp. So far, the US has not seen a popular uprising which threatens the stability of the state(, excluding perhaps that of the native Americans, who were actually ground to a pulp, eventually).

The fact that the US has repeatedly succeeded in SIGINT capers like this makes their concern about Huawei kind of un-ironic, right?

Well, yes, but for third parties like the UK it makes it much more explicit that the choice is between the system that might be compromised by Huawei and the system that might be compromised by the US. Except the UK has its own little joint venture of security inspection of Huawei systems ...

please expand..

It's not a secret: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/huawei-cyber-secu...

(On the other hand, it's not a very positive report! Lots of basic issues with build reproducibility and updates)

Also, the UK is one of the Five Eyes nations, explicitly sharing intelligence data with the US and vice-versa. I'm sure they're not 100%open, but if there is any nation on Earth that would not overly fear US spying and prefer it to Chinese spying, it would be the UK.

The alternatives that the US supports are European (Ericsson and Nokia, IIRC) so I see little benefit for at least EU countries regardless of their ties to the US to choose Huawei in this case.

On the contrary. When you are a master of the dark arts, you can't help but see other practitioners around every corner.

No, this is not original research, this isn't being uncovered now, and I'm not sure why this is being republished now in 2020.

There have been detailed leaks since 1995 on cryptome.org and crypto mailing lists about CryptoAG, including details about the message format and the bits used to leak parts of the key (16 bit leak, IIRC).

The CryptoAG story has tainted all Swiss-based crypto/security firms since 1994.

[1] https://www.cryptomuseum.com/people/hans_buehler.htm

[2] Verschlüsselt, Der Fall Hans Bühler, ISBN 3-85932-141-2. 1994 - Book written by former CryptoAG employee Hans Buehler (1994).

Exactly. The piece does give a hat tip to the good article written by their rival, the Baltimore SUN, more than 20 years ago. But that's buried near the bottom.

The news is this:

"CIA owned CryptoAG in collaboration with the intelligence establishment of West-Germany"

I take this plainly without irony as evidence for the restriction of foreign government-controlled infastructure in series with trusted communication.

Hypocritical, not ironic. You mean to highlight that the USA does not treat other sovereign states like the USA expects to be treated. There is no ironic contrast between the USA funding Crypto AG and China funding Huawei.

I think it's pretty clear that the US expects to be treated exactly like they've treated other nations.

>based on decent research

The story was handed to him by the Agency, or agents of. The only "research" seems to be calling the names in the story for fact checking, and wapo couldn't even determine if some of them were alive or dead.

This story is dangerously close to being nothing but a CIA press release.

Ok, what so you think the purpose is?

Specifics? No telling...

But it is the CIA, so I'm assuming information was used as currency in paying off a favor to wapo.

Plus they get to brag about a huge success story in times where the public has... doubts ... About the competency and value of the intelligence community in general. Without revealing much that want already public knowledge.

Factor in the timing of FASA court investigations, the impeachment, and the AWS government cloud suit, and there are thousands of directions it could take.

> It's a little ironic as well, especially since the US is so keen on blocking Huawei over espionage concerns.

It's not ironic to play a game to win. Saying this is ironic is like saying it was ironic for the US to try to keep the North Koreans/Chinese from winning the Korean War because the US had just won WWII.

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