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Comment by iconara | Hacker News Reader

It's very important that we keep Huawei out of our 5G networks!

(what if they discovered things like this and told the citizens about it?)

As a european , i d rather have my surveillance camera phone china than the US. Google already knows too much about where and what i m doing, they dont need access to my camera. China OTOH doesnt have any kind of legal jurisdiction on me, we don't have some the kind of alliances that we share with US. Like during the cold war, arbitraging between spies was a safe bet.

What would you do if you were in a position of importance and China had some things you'd rather everybody not know? Don't be fooled that nothing can come of it just because the legal jurisdiction doesn't exist.

that can happen from both sides though. plus i m not in that position obviously

Couldn't agree more. So many people are so scared of China (the new red scare) but in reality if you did something illegal who do you have to fear more gets their hands on the data: The FBI or some PRC equivalent? There are hundreds of stories of FBI (and CIA) working in other countries but I have never heard of any PRC people kicking in the door of someone outside the PRC.

They are doing so certainly across Asia, their methods are just a bit different and it's usually focused on ethnic Chinese dissidents. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-r...

As a European I prefer having Erikson and Nokia build our networks than unaccountable Chinese companies. 5G is a unique chance to get some tech sovereignty back as the two leaders (outside of state-supportrd Huawei and ZTE) are European.

Please stop equating totalitarian regimes with democracies.

in terms of domestic espionage on private citizens they are pretty similar now days

Data collection and political system are VERY different. All governments collect data on their private citizens, but not all sell their organs for profit or do forced sterilization

As an European, does it really make a difference?

Is USA really much better than China?

USA has your data already (internet cables), why send it to China?

Not going to answer the 2nd question for personal reasons.

I guess as an Italian I don't see China as a bigger threat and probably China is less interested in harvesting my data for the reason that they are not selling me anything by targeting me whenever I do something on the internet?

I speak English, I don't speak Chinese, my continent is watching the US elections tonight, it doesn't happen with Chinese politics, my pears stay awake at night to watch the Oscars, I don't even know if the Chinese equivalent exist, basically what US does is much more relevant in day to day life, what happens in China stays in China, so they are not really trying to buy my attention, which is the most valuable asset I own.

I think the US is much better at collecting data. The US has been proven to collect data and plant backdoors, China has not, despite how much the US states that eg. Huawei has backdoors in their 4G/5G equipment. So either China is much better when it comes to privacy online, or just way more competent as they manage to avoid getting caught.

They both suck in their own way, that's for sure.

Answering to both responses to my post: as an European citizen I know that technically US is better at doing data collection, even more so because it's a "friend" country and we can't wait to give our data to them

But my question really is: does it really matter to me, provided that the data is gonna be collected anyway, who does it?

They're both, at my eyes, not doing it to my advantage.

Well, until that democracy decides you have something interesting they want to take away from you.

In that case, regardless of whether you're a grotesque dictator or a quasi-peasant just getting by with your life, better start counting the days before something bad happens to you...

Please stop giving totalitarian tools to governments.

Good point. Democracies are horrible because they gave us nazi germany. Or how about we stop with the silly propaganda talking points and deal with the topic at hand?

I don't want to be the wise guy, but you know that technically, the People's congress was elected correctly, right?

And yes, they had multiple parties until the republicans had two elections in a row, and managed to influence the supreme court so much that they could gain total power over new arising parties (declaring them illegal from the start if they do not represent the congress's opinion), up until there was no way to get elected because the media was controlled by the very same laws.

See any parallels regarding Fox News and the Republicans or say, Dick Cheney?

No? Maybe do some research on your own and sleep over this.

China is actually the only country I would compare US's democracy with, because a lot of candidates have no choice but to join one out of two partied to even get considered to be elected. And it's not the 1st vote that decides this, because democracy in the US doesn't differ between party votes and candidate votes (whereas most other democracies have moved on, for like hundreds of years, and fixed this).

Thr problem I see here is that the US didn't have a revolution. Europe had to be crushed a couple of times in order to learn how to prevent their architectural mistakes in future.

As a non-US citizen, how can I be sure that all non-Huawei equipment is free of back doors, data-exfiltration and forwarding capabilities excluding the lawful interception feature set?

Well, there was the case where the the NSA intercepted hardware shipments (I think it was Cisco HW) to install their backdoors.

I have listened tales about backdoors in unmodified Cisco switches and routers so, I expect any country can try to backdoor another.

So it's something between a slippery slope and futile attempt unless you have a multi layer security from different vendors or roll your own defenses.

Maybe they were just too cheap to buy the backdoor off the (black) market... ;)

Internet was too ethical, naive and immature when NSA did that. We were happily using unencrypted connections to connect to forums, telnet based BBSes and such.

NSA, OTOH, intercepted the switches which would isolate high security networks (red/black separation) and bleed sensitive information with these enhanced hardware.

>As a non-US citizen, how can I be sure that all non-Huawei equipment is free of back doors, data-exfiltration and forwarding capabilities excluding the lawful interception feature set?

Packet capture from the edge is where I'd start.

> It's very important that we keep Huawei out of our 5G networks!

Huawei isn't working on behalf of a Gov that can imprison me for exposing it's wrongdoing. NSA is.

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