Chinese firm Huawei controls net filter praised by PM
m.bbc.co.uk
m.bbc.co.uk
1) The UK willingly submits all of its net traffic to monitoring, snooping and supervision by a Chinese firm. This is mindboggling. Why worry about NSA's ECHELON or PRISM now, when the government has just passed a law requiring every packet to be inspected by a Chinese system.
2) Let's learn from those who are best at censorship. Obviously China has significant experience in that area. UK has a lot to catch up, but they're working on it.
Think about it -- if somebody told you 10 years ago that the United Kingdom will outsource country-wide Internet traffic monitoring, policing and censoring to Chinese companies, you'd call them a nutjob.
This is not just a one-off. It's a trend. They all seem to want what the Chinese government has (full control over its population), while still "pretending" it's a democracy and everyone's rights are unharmed.
Obviously that's only part of the story but the discussion certainly becomes more "interesting" than it did in the 80s when democracy seemed to give better results across the board having the moral and economic high ground.
Not for a moment endorsing the Chinese approach, just saying that there is a more interesting debate than there used to be.
China will get killed by it's own politicians much quicker than any western democracy. They're still growing, today it's easy for them because China is growing at 7% per year. It will get hard soon and things will change. Fast.
Politics is a mucky business full of self interest the world over, let's not pretend that's a problem for China alone.
The government is proposing that they may bring legislation to Parliament if the industry doesn't do something to thinkofthechildren, but what shape that might take is not yet clear.
It was a court order imposed by a judge for a specific case brought by the recording industries against the few largest ISPs individually. Part of the case was basically that the ISPs already had filtering systems in place (in that case for the IWF child abuse blocks - again, not required by law but installed "voluntarily"). So the industry essentially said that adding TPB to the existing blocklist wouldn't be too much of a burden.
(I believe that similar orders have expanded it to cover a few more sites since, but not sure whether those cover all the same ISPs again).
It's "you do something 'voluntarily' now, which there'll be absolutely no democratic oversight over, or we force you". So instead of getting a nasty filtering system subject to freedom of information queries and parliamentary inquiries, we get a system where we are subject to the whims of these businesses, who will all point to the government and say "ask them", while the government will point to it being something the companies added "voluntarily".
Frankly, "voluntary regulation" like this should always be a massive warning flag.
Is Huawei one of Lynton crosbys customers?
Cameron just thinks it's awesome and would be happy if it was all of the traffic. Which actually is probably even worse.
Ofcom (an independent regulator) reports (http://media.ofcom.org.uk/facts/) that TalkTalk has a 17% market share at the end of 2012. So not all of the UK's net traffic is filtered through a service provided by Huawei.
And today we call them Prime Minister. Fuck.
http://huaweihg612hacking.wordpress.com/about/
BT own the monopoly on the copper infrastructure and they are the only company providing high speed ADSL. If you want 80Mbps broadband, you have no choice but to use the Huawei modem.
The device is reasonably hackable (and, in fairness, complies with its open source obligations http://www.huaweidevice.com/worldwide/technicaIndex.do?metho...) - but there's no real way of knowing what secrets the silicon holds.
So, the UK has sold off the line equipment, monitoring filters, and mobile infrastructure to one company. What could possibly go wrong?
The UK absolutely and fundamentally should trust the US over China -- after all, the UK and the USA have no-holds-barred sharing of intelligence and spying, while the UK and China have literally no pact at all and are adversarial in that regard.
USA equipment would be orders of magnitude more safe for the British people, as by forming a pact with the US, the US has responsibility to the British government for the intelligence gathered (and vice versa on the mass amounts they collect on us through GCHQ!)
But to pretend that the US is guilty and the UK innocent is absolutely, egregious biased and false. They dragnet over 200 fiber interconnects and literally copy all internet traffic for analysis. They are not our victims, they are our brothers in arms. Don't forget that!
Well this is highest-level political commentary. Let's ignore the wars the US and UK fought against each other, and the times they allied with other countries. That one time the US and USSR fought a war together made them BFFs too...
The relationship is somewhat akin to ancient Greece and Rome, but closer.
With that said, I don't want anyone copying all internet traffic and sharing it with intelligence agencies. Of course, if I had to pick, I think I'd prefer it to be Uncle Sam doing it, but I fear the U.S. Government for drastically different reasons than I do China, in that the Chinese government is highly unlikely to be a threat to my basic freedoms and liberties, whereas the U.S. Government is looking more and more like they might be.
No offense, but it wasn't the US pushing for Chinese-sourced mass censorship of your internet...
See: Mao Zedong (Yale graduate) and Every US Ambassador to China is a member of Skull and Bones.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. :)
Citation needed, except that by definition there can't be one, because if there were such a public claim, and an un-shared piece of intel existed (that in theory would refute it), then that intel could not be used publicly to refute the claim. Since the claim is irrefutable, it is also invalid.
So it's probably more accurate to say 'extensive sharing...'
Is there something I should be concerned about with this thing? It is remarkably cheap and seems good quality so far. I'll probably put Cyanogenmod on it if they come out with it, though.
* Apart from in Hull[1]
>they are the only company providing high speed ADSL
* Apart from Virgin Media[2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_upon_Hull#Telephone_s...
2. http://mediacentre.virginmedia.com/Stories/Virgin-Media-boos...
1. You don't need 100% of a market to be a monopoly.
2. Your second citation contains nothing about Virgin providing ADSL, they are primarily a cable broadband provider.
Technically, some places do melt down the chips with acid layer by layer and dissect what is actually in them. It isn't easy, and tough to miss things, though, I imagine.
Will be interesting if we go back to the days when stories like the US managing to get back doored chips into Russia which blew up pipelines and stuff are actually happening.
In 2013, the UK is going to pay Huawei to filter all its Internet traffic.
In other words, when they screw up the implementation and it breaks something about your network connection (e.g. IPv6, TCP options, or dozens of other subtle things), there's nothing you'll be able to do to just get raw packets routed over the Internet.
This is going to break the network.
Whether you agree with it, like it, or want it, is an entirely different question (I don't want it), but it hasn't caused significant issues yet.
I'm genuinely surprised that it isn't causing at least minor problems with some sites for more technical users. I manage a virus-scanning web proxy for our company and this is enough to throw up regular little glitches with all sorts of sites which "just work" when going direct.
What are the glitches you're seeing?
You're probably right that this system isn't proxying everything, so its impact would be a lot lower. It all depends on what layer it tries to operate, which we don't really know. I'd love to see an investigation from someone on TalkTalk.
Something to consider when testing, or using, "hidden" sites and pages.
Of course it hasn't; It's only been 2 years. You won't notice unless you're trying to build or deploy something innovative that breaks some of the assumptions that the designers of the filters never anticipated.
Layered protocols exist to allow them to evolve over time with a minimum of complexity (and cost). When you break the layering, you make that evolution more expensive. Look at how expensive it is to write a basic app that has peer-to-peer conectivity, thanks to NAT.
How are we supposed to deploy the next WebSockets when there are transparent HTTP proxies everywhere that aren't aware of it?
Economically speaking, widespread deployment of these sorts of filtering technologies are exactly like pollution: they look fine at first, but eventually they end up being very expensive for everyone, even the people who never used them.
I expect my ISP to never, ever fuck with the application layer. Do your job and route my traffic, thanks.
There is no valid reason to pass traffic through the filtering system if a customer has opted out and won't be filtered. This costs real money to the ISP, so I presume they analyze that traffic. It doesn't matter if they pretend to do this to train the filter or feed some agency's data warehouse, this is madness.
I whisper to the other 5 people that live in Canada, "Do you think they see us?"
One person responds, "No... not yet..."
DUH DUH DUH - to be continued.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2013/07/internet-porn-o...
It's not a Chinese system, it's using Chinese technology, but then the PM uses Chinese technology, along with the entire government, every day. As do the US President and government presumably.
Yes there should be due diligence to ensure that data is not being collected and off-shored. The BBC seem to be going to pains to suggest that this is a massive Chinese espionage coup without actually stating as much.
What're the facts here. Chinese made technology is part of the UK internet. ZOMG! If the tech was from Cisco would it really make a difference.
>both Huawei and TalkTalk employees are able to add or remove sites independently //
Right so TT employ a UK company whose UK employees are able to do their job.
I'm not saying oversight isn't necessary but this seems so overplayed unless the BBC have more facts they're choosing not to disclose.
Yes but that doesn't make them a UK company. Facebook & Google are UK registered companies but you'd never class them as a UK company.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilent just that this story has a measure of "Starbucks could be poisoning monarchists to further the aims of USA".
"Summer of Surveillance"
Technically, censoring porn is no different from censoring anything else. It's only a matter of time for politicians to abuse this power.
Of course it's surveillance, you think this system doesn't log hits? At this point you have to expect a database query can return what porn sites you're visiting and when.
TalkTalk just ask you [ie the person who pays the ISP] if you want to be filtered or not. Perhaps they also filter illegal sites, use of a list from the IWF was mentioned, but who's going to know.
What if someone's researching classical art and searched for "nude"? Surely, that will cause a fair amount of hair-pulling to deactivate the filter in public access locations like libraries and such.
Good to see that Cameron don’t waste the opportunity and get the UK to use the same hardware platform as the Chinese. The Chinese are already one of the leaders in technology for censorship, with the great firewall and all, so it could be a lot of opportunities for synergy and cross border cooperation her…
What are we nicknaming this? Maybe "he Great Hadrian Firewall" after the Hadrian's wall?[0]
On the plus side, the message that the Internet is not a toy to be taken away at will would swiftly and surely be delivered, via the medium of being dragged out into the streets by an angry mob.
(I don't actually think they'll do this. Probably.)
Could Huawei maliciously use that data? Yes, like how the French/Russians can cut off our power. Or USA can poison all our coffee drinkers and fast-food eaters.
No, each time a UK resident visits a webpage, his ISP will send the URL to a server in the ISP's network running software made by Huawei (which could be backdoored), loaded with watchlists maintained by a UK entity.
It's unclear how that software will redirect the request, but it's probably just a DNS hi-jack.
- do we expect firewalls on books children read, on radio they listen to? No. We expect parental supervision
Lets get back to blaming the parents please
Schools purchase from book catalogues that are "censored" in this sense and [legal] FTA radio is equally censored. So why shouldn't we allow people to get their internet equally censored.
Parental supervision includes using commercial services that censor hardcore pornography.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23465992
It would be good to hear them explain what the process is for deciding which articles are allowed.
should I stop using it and start using US-made or North Korea-made phone instead? ...nah, it's not that much better over there.
The Green Dam project [1] which was advertised by the department of industry and information technology of P.R. China as protection of children from online pornography had been defeated after media exposure year ago. Now the authority in Britain wants to introduce essentially the same stuff!
Ever since the NSA story broke there seems to be a constant effort to post overly alarming headlines in the style of "look how much worse things are in places outside the US".
This is because we can't rely on the Internet as a business...
I don't see anything in the article that complains about Huawei because it is Chinese in itself, as opposed to because of concerns there might be political connections at play, or the generic issue of having such filtering under control of a commercial actor in general.