Targeting Huawei: NSA Spied on Chinese Government and Networking Firm | Hacker News Reader

Targeting Huawei: NSA Spied on Chinese Government and Networking Firm

spiegel.de

So they got a taste of their own medicine. Huawei has spied on and stolen from US companies. For example, Huawei copied Cisco's iOS -- including source code comments and bugs -- and even copied their user manuals verbatim. [1, pp. 8-10,12; 2]

Besides, the facts that non-Chinese employees cannot own shares in Huawei; [3, p. 23] that the Communist Party appoints an anonymous "Party Committee" within Huawei; [3, p. 30] and that Huawei was involved in selling US network-monitoring equipment to Iran [4] -- makes them a legitimate target for NSA, in my opinion.

[1] Cisco's motion for preliminary injunction http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/Cisco_Mot_for_PI.pdf

[2] http://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-co...

[3] Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/f...

[4] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/08/us-cisco-zte-iran-...

Sorry, in my opinion spying on China's president, tracking source code on product lines and deep infiltration of a company is clearly crossing the line. IPR skirmishes differ from mass surveillance and are not a taste of their own medicine. Or did I miss something?

For starters, this isn't "mass surveillance" on China, so maybe you should use the right buzzwords. :)

Also, "IPR skirmishing" is actually worse I would think. Military/strategic intelligence-gathering is as old as Caeser (and for that matter, Sun Tzu...) and is well-recognized as legitimate (if distasteful).

However even that doesn't directly affect the economy of either party. With "IPR skirmishing" it's possible to go almost straight to the acquisition phase of a particular tech without having to do the R&D, which can have substantial effect to the groups who actually did have to pay for that R&D.

Stealing technological secrets is older than you might think. China lost its monopoly on silk production and trade with the West after Byzantine monks smuggled silkworms out of China using their canes, defying an imperial edict forbidding such a thing.

! Great point, I'd quite forgotten that since high school but you're right, that was an incredibly big swing in geopolitical affairs of the time.

Basically, tu quoque? I personally believe both NSA and Huawei's actions are morally reprehensible.

It's also a very out-of-date take of what Huawei is. It is an Ericsson-sized infrastructure gear maker now. Not that that should make Ericsson complacent. They've been a target since the Athens Affair at least.

Not really.

The first paragraph is essentially gloating. Not necessarily commendable, but understandable.

However, he's not using the "they did it too" as justification, which is what tu quoque is all about. He outlines reasons beyond "taste of their own medicine" for why this would be justified.

Maybe the Chinese just wanted to find out whom exactly to thank for getting a bit more than they ordered from Boeing [1]?

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

> Huawei copied Cisco's iOS -- including source code comments and bugs

Didn't Fujitsu Automated Computers (Facom) copy IBM's MVS source code in the 1980's? Will the US deal with both offences in the same way?

> So they got a taste of their own medicine

You're assuming they did it first.

Isn't spying on the Chinese government and Huawei exactly what we pay them to do?

Yes.

I want my money back.

Could someone please explain to me why it is justifiable for Edward Snowden (and by extension, Glenn Greenwald) to leak this information?

Could you explain to us why the US government is partaking in exact same tactics that they tried to drag the Chinese through the mud with?

Hypocrisy seems to be the name of the game here: spying on attorney-client communications, pwning sysadmins to get access to infrastructure and rifling through trade secrets of companies. The last two of which the U.S. has put on their outrage face and publically shamed the Chinese for doing.

Regardless, the Snowden cache was bulk, and was given to Greenwald, Poitras, and Gellman. Snowden isn't giving marching orders in the background, he left it up to journalists to decide what gets published. While they probably still collaborate, Poitras is in Berlin and is most likely one of the primary journalists behind this story and not Greenwald.

It's realpolitik: doing and saying anything and everything to get an advantage over a perceived opponent or rival. This includes intentionally making misleading statements and convincing people you care about moral standards when you don't.

Before Snowden changed things, it was readily apparent that everyone was ready to believe the US and nobody was ready to believe China. So the accusations were a rational thing to do.

The US isn't the only country that does this, obviously, and people are divided over whether or not it is the 'right' way to conduct international relations.

> This includes intentionally making misleading statements and convincing people you care about moral standards when you don't.

Another possible is that several groups within the US government aren't on the same page. Elements of the State Dept might work to end torture in S. America, while the CIA secretly trains S. American governments in torture.

This sort of, hack everyone/steal everything isn't in the long term interests of the US government because the US has the most to lose in terms of IP/infrastructure, but engaging in this damaging behavior may allow some agencies to "get the job done" in the short term. Makes sense that groups tasked with grand-strategy would oppose this behavior, whereas groups tasked with short-term results would ignore the long game. A predictable result of a failure of oversight (left hand plays against the strategy of the right hand).

It's not the same tactics. The NSA is being accused in this article of hacking Huawei and stealing their source code in order to develop better exploits for Huawei equipment. Huawei was accused of:

1) using stolen Cisco source code to gain a competitive market advantage by not having to spend money on R&D. So far, no one has shown evidence that the US government has given any stolen Huawei code to private companies.

2) Huawei was owned by people with close ties to the Chinese government and military. Members of Congress raised concern that if they were allowed to provide equipment for large portions of the US telecommunications infrastructure, it would give ample opportunity for the Chinese intelligence services/ military to put backdoors in.

Cui bono?

It makes me sad that Huawei may now be driven to an even greater distance from the US market—particularly the consumer market. The phones that Huawei makes are quality enough, and cheap enough for me to consider them a staple of the Maker movement (at least that involving android smartphones). If I'm gonna tear apart a phone or at least put it in harsh conditions (like we do at http://rfcx.org), I at least want it to be reliable and expendable, financially. It's now hard enough to get Huawei phones in the US, and I fear it's now only going to get harder. I know that's not really the point—this article is really about spying, and US is not alone in doing so, by any means, but this news affected me on another level.

> NSA workers not only succeeded in accessing the email archive, but also the secret source code of individual Huwaei products. Software source code is the holy grail of computer companies.

We need to open-source everything (soft/hard/firmware) and modify these business models.

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