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Comment by throwaway4good | Hacker News Reader

I bet the attitude would have been very different had spying been done by China, Russia, Israel, or even the Netherlands itself.

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It would have turned into one of the hundreds of articles about Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Ukrainian, North Korean, etc. hackers meant to solidify people's world view that we have a "good side" and a "bad side" of the world. The reality is that we have a "bad side" and a "worse side" but that's a hard pill to swallow for the regular person. Hence the deluge of articles meant to "straighten up" the view.

You’re mistakenly assuming that everyone sees intelligence services as bad, because as much as many people are concerned, “an enemy of an enemy is a friend.”

In as far as news editors and journalists believe this, they have lost their way.

Nah - it is assuming they should be seen as bad actors and we would all be better off if they were all shoved feet first through a wood chipper but alas there is a tragic lack of identified targets, chippers, and people to shove them in.

We might get a couple or ten good years out of that, but it would leave an ecological void in human affairs to be filled in by bad actors. "Better the devil we know" is an unfortunately potent argument supporting the West's intelligence community.

Better legislation to restrain their abusive tendencies, and an endless global push for human rights, liberty, and human well-being is a solid long view, I think.

Depends on whether they see it as competition. Given their market share, I don't believe they do. They're aimed at a western market.

They are quite active in Asia including China.

Lol you'd be suprised. Recently one large dutch newspaper published a scathing report published by CapGemini (large consultancy in NL) that researched the security setup at the largest telco in NL (KPN). They found that Huawei was able to listen, read and do pretty much anything they'd like with the data. But this was quickly swept beneath the rug. So no, I am pretty confident that the attitude wouldn't be different if either of those state actors seem to be responsible.

Here's a link: https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/huawei-kon-alle...

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Bert Hubert publicized this event a year ago. And he is one of the most influential bloggers in Europe.

The problem is muuuuch larger.

For every newspaper article that covers actual US espionage, I can show you ten that speculate on the potential of espionage by Huawei and other Chinese companies.

I think we in western europe are kind of embarrased by US surveillance and the fact that we cannot do anything about it.

That is why we try to ignore it and not talk about it.

As an example, Belgium gave up its root CA in favor of Digicert-privided certificates. We could have avoided that.

Archived version: https://archive.md/z3t8O

Note that it uncritically accepts report from 2009 which according to company was meant to be risk modeling exercise. Authors outright dismiss everything either KPL or CapGemini has to say themselves and does not even try presenting mitigations that presumably have been put in place, changes in infrastructure since 2009 and other more contemporary reports.

It depends on if the Chinese/Russian/Israel troll farms are working that day.

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