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Comment by jobu | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is why the US government would point fingers at the Chinese for putting backdoors in Huawei devices when it was really the NSA all along. It seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot by giving pointing out the backdoors. My best guess is that they assumed someone would figure it out eventually and they wanted to spread misinformation to get out ahead of that.

Has anyone else come up with a better reason?

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I don't think they are referring to the same vulnerabilities.

The US government was publicly accusing the Chinese government of inserting backdoors in Huawei products, while at the same time seeking and exploiting vulnerabilities in Huawei products themselves.

Perhaps this was an attempt to cover tracks by pre-emptively blaming the Chinese government for backdoors installed by the US government, should these backdoors ever be discovered.

Personally I'm inclined to call Hanlon's razor on the hypocrisy of it all.

Why couldn't it be both? To me, the least-surprising explanation would be that both the Chinese government and the NSA were trying to exploit Huawei. Any finger pointing could be chalked up as typical "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing."

One of the best ways to distract others from blaming you is to publicly accuse them of doing what evils you're secretly doing.

And thus the war on terror was born

It's also a good way to drum up support; start by accusing the "other side" of doing whatever it is you want to do. You're basically coordinating with the other team with the full cooperation of the people you've scared.

You are assuming that the left hand knows what right hand is doing.

According to the article, it wasn't the NSA that put backdoors in Huawei devices, it was Huawei. It sounds like like any intelligence agency that can bribe a Huawei support engineer has access to any Huawei networking device. That definitely includes the Chinese and the American intelligence agencies.

The US intelligence agencies can simultaneously act to protect the information security of American businesses by warning people of the vulnerability AND act to exploit the vulnerability for their own intelligence-gathering goals.

I think an important part of the mission of the NSA is to spread fear, so that people are more likely to consent. This means terrorist (which of course isn't really a danger if you look at the numbers), nuclear Iran, cyber China, etc.

Two things.

First, if its fear they're trying to spread, it's working. No way I'd ever use a Huawei device, ever.

Secondly, do you think a nuclear arms race in the middle east would be a good thing??

It's a political way to keep the Chinese firms out of the U.S. market.

I imagine it's because they had already compromised the Huawei networks and knew full-well what the Chinese government were up to.

Protectionism.

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