No, the NSA should NOT be doing this. It's not done to prevent any attacks on the US, it's simply economic espionage. It's economic warfare. It doesn't belong in any "democratic" country.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-ch...]
One of the frustrations I have with the Snowden leaks is that we see some of the process of intelligence gathering but we don't see the results. We don't see what the intelligence community found out about the relationship between Huawei and the PLA, for instance. It's difficult to assess tactics without knowing their effectiveness at answering broader questions. It's also concerning that because of these leaks, the US government may not be able to answer these questions. Understanding the Chinese military's capabilities and goals (not to mention understanding what's going on in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan) is a strategic necessity.
The answer is yes, they are able to. If we got into Huawei, the Chinese government could too (if they wanted to).
I really dislike the "we have to spy on them because they might spy on us" argument. Especially when we point fingers at how everyone else is doing wrong and then come back and while forgetting when we have committed the same wrongs and while we are still committing those wrongs.
We give billions of dollars in aid to Israel, who refuses to stop expanding their settlements into Palestinian territory. We condemn Russia for reclaiming land that was theirs not so long ago, land that has more Russians than Ukrainians living there.
The hypocrisy is starting to drive me insane.
This is the problem of utilitarianism. For any action of significance, there are both short-term results and long-term results. Some of those consequences, particularly the long-term ones, may not be predictable. Some of them may not be to your liking, even if you thought you were maximizing a utility function when you committed to the action.
Some of the consequences may be pretty fucking disastrous, in fact.
Hacking Huawei strikes me as one of those things that seems like a good idea when it's proposed in a locked-down SCIF at Fort Meade, and it may still seem like a good idea to some when it's disclosed in the New York Times. But I can't begin to imagine any long-term upside. I believe that if these people are left unchecked, their actions will lead to the mutually-assured destruction of privacy, or at least the sundering of the Internet.
Who is in the set of "these people" though? For instance, how do you think Huawei obtained much of their IP in the first place? If hacking will lead to the destruction of privacy then the U.S. is not the sole point of responsibility here.
In fact it's already the other way around completely; states hacking other states is a given, it's already happening and has been happening for awhile. Nothing NSA does or doesn't do will change the actions of the rest of the governments around the world.
I think you're right that the Internet will sunder itself, but if you're going to start pointing fingers then get ready to have a long list of pointees.
I agree: naive to think that the USA government is the only one doing such things. But now that we know at least one government or breakaway agency is doing such things, we can defend ourselves against them.