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Comment by wyuenho | Hacker News Reader

The connection is made from:

1. The Chinese National Intelligence Law requiring every citizen to "intelligence work".

2. Huawei had the potential to reach mass adoption outside of China.

3. Huawei is a company deeply connected to the PLA.

4. Therefore Huawei, not only is its HQ required to spy for China, but that it is very likely to work with the PLA to spy for China.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law

[2]. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/08/huawei-staff-and-chinese-mil...

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These are all valid reasons for concerns yet these do not qualify as proof of wrongdoing from Huawai. For 2) specifically, I'm not sure it would be helpful to declare all private companies started by veterans as "sharing deep ties to $Country's military operations".

There's no shortage of "guesses" and "plausible connections" around but the parent comment is specifically asking for actual proof in this instance.

People suspected the NSA were snooping and introducing backdoors and proactively places countermeasures against that. Why should the standard be different when it comes to China?

The standard shouldn't be any different and that's precisely the problem here:

* NSA is a governmental agency that by construction is tied to the state. Bytedance, Huawai and Tencent are privately owned companies in China and all "ties" to the Chinese governments are unsubstantiated. Blanket ban on private companies because of their country of origin and unsubstantiated suspicions results in clear discrimination and suppression of open competition in my mind.

* For my understanding, could you help by providing context on what specific counter-measures have been taken against NSA's intelligence effort based on people's suspicion?

People have been warning about BSafe and Dual_EC_DRBG for years before Snowden came along. Privacy advocates and security professionals had been placing out a blanket warning of "government" snooping for decades before Snowden. Richard Stallman, the guy who wrote most of the Gnu utils back in the days, had been signing his emails with M-x spook, which had been in Emacs since 1988. The Internet started out anti-spook way back in the days.

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