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Comment by macchina | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that banning Huawei is sure to accomplish is choking innovation.

It's reasonable to worry about security in telecommunications, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any telecom that doesn't manufacture equipment in China including Ericsson, Huawei's biggest competitor. Huawei has too much to lose from spying, and I'd personally be more worried about these non-Chinese companies which rely so heavily on Chinese subsidies and subcontracting.

One legitimate concern about Huawei though is transparency. Because it is privately held and not listed on any stock market, it is not subject to reporting requirements and it's ownership structure is allowed to remain secretive. However, these aren't grounds for an outright ban.

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disclaimer: I work for Cisco.

I think there are some legitimate concerns. The other competitors aren't known to have the level of corporate espionage as Huawei has shown, the level of direct government influence, and telecom is gaining importance in national security.

Manufacturing equipment in China and producing Telecom equipment and software are different concepts for security. For example, all telecom equipment in the US has to allow "lawful intercept"[1], and part of LI is it cannot be detected whether it is enabled or not. I think if an issue was to escalate to the level of national security, both the US and China would be willing to make use of these features. I'm more willing to believe that China would build in their own form of LI without publicizing it, since the government is more directly involved in the decisions of ZTE/Huawei. If the next front of war is on the internet, this is a considerable risk.

From what I understand - the Chinese government has the ability to say "If you don't drop the suit against [Chinese Company] we will block your product sales in China". I can't find a source, but I remember hearing a similar incident.

This idea is also not new - India is on a similar path to locally source telecom equipment: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-08-15/news...

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception

and part of LI is it cannot be detected whether it is enabled or not.

Interestingly, I've heard that although the LI is supposed to be transparent, it's typically very apparent to network operators when their kit is actively involved in LI, as the CPU utilization shows telltale signs.

That is true if the CPU is responsible for data plane operations. For a lot of modern equipment, most traffic never hits the CPU (it's handled by a special asic or other packet processor) and so you wouldn't know if if LI is active.

"Huawei has too much to lose from spying..."

I think this assumption is pretty much incorrect. Corporate liabilities in China are not like corporate liabilities in the western world.

I figured powerful businessmen in China had more to lose than money if they refused to let the government do what it wants. The U.S. government compelled AT&T and Verizon to perform illegal spying, in the name of protection from terrorism, it's the same thing for China and Huawei.

The U.S. government could be a threat to China; it's obvious China will do what it takes to counter that threat. Of course China won't sabotage U.S. infrastructure without provocation, but I think the U.S. won't accept that they have the potential.

OK, but "70 percent of Huawei’s $32 billion revenue comes from outside China."[1] I think it's safe to assume that spying would be bad for business.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/business/global/15iht-tele...

It may be bad for business but that doesn't mean they will have a choice in the matter. And unlike in the US they may not even have the option of being transparent about how much they have to hand over. It's a very different world legally over there.

If you've thought so little about the subject that you don't even understand why there is a fundamental difference between who designs gear and who manufactures it perhaps it's not an ideal topic to make sweeping statements about.

Huawei is owned in part by the Chinese government. Network virtualization (e.g. software defined networking) may decrease the risks posed by foreign manufactures since the software can be developed in the US, but still, a backdoor is possible. The backdoor itself could be at the compiler level, thus not detectable even with source code review (except of the compiler).

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