US Probes China's Huawei Over Equipment Near Missile Silos (reuters.com) 39
The Biden administration is investigating Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei over concerns that U.S. cell towers fitted with its gear could capture sensitive information from military bases and missile silos that the company could then transmit to China, Reuters reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Authorities are concerned Huawei could obtain sensitive data on military drills and the readiness status of bases and personnel via the equipment, one of the people said, requesting anonymity because the investigation is confidential and involves national security. The previously unreported probe was opened by the Commerce Department shortly after Joe Biden took office early last year, the sources said, following the implementation of rules to flesh out a May 2019 executive order that gave the agency the investigative authority.
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Good work (Score:2)
Probably hadn't occurred to them.
But seriously, my understanding is that Huawei gives its telco customers full control of the maintenance and source code etc in the equipment it sells to them, so this is paranoia.
Re: Paranoia? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's also kind of interesting how much effort they put into giving Biden credit for this. This is based on an executive order from 2019 but the commerce department actually started working on it right after Biden took office. Something smells funny.
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No, no, this is Biden so it's Security and Safety and Privacy. It was only Fear, Paranoia, and Racism when Trump was in office.
You say that as if only one is correct but actually both statements could be correct.
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Giving them the idea to do that. Probably hadn't occurred to them. But seriously, my understanding is that Huawei gives its telco customers full control of the maintenance and source code etc in the equipment it sells to them, so this is paranoia.
On top of that several EU countries sicced their intelligence agencies on Huawei equipment looking for backdoors and spyware. All they could come up with was warning about a 'potential risk' which essentially means they went looking and found *zip*. The US, however, has already been caught red-handed intercepting shipments and installing spyware on communications equipment and computers manufactured by US tech companies. Why should anybody trust them over Huawei?
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Not to mention the football field sized spy satellite the US keeps sitting over China.
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Roughly the size of a real football pitch, maybe knocking a bit off the corners. Probably a bit longer than an American one in diameter.
Re:Good work (Score:4, Funny)
Giving them the idea to do that.
Probably hadn't occurred to them.
But seriously, my understanding is that Huawei gives its telco customers full control of the maintenance and source code etc in the equipment it sells to them, so this is paranoia.
If you believe that in a country with a population of 1.4 billion, that nobody previously thought of that, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn that is for sale.
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Exactly. If you thought of it, someone else did too - there aren't many truly unique one of a kind, no one else has thought of this before ideas in the world. Doesn't even need to be China - I'm sure more than a few people thought about it in the US Government that maybe something should be looked into.
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Better: "...I have a bridge in Atlantis that is for sale."
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Until you can validate the entire signal processing chain down to the silicon, you cannot trust the system. This is one reason why DoD stuff (and aviation and NRC-regulated) is so expensive.
How do you know that you got ALL the source code in a Huawei (or Cisco or Nokia) base station? They could have masked ROMs that can't be accessed unless certain conditions are met, for example. It's a twisty maze of passages, all different.
Scaremongering (Score:2, Insightful)
This scaremongering is getting ridiculous and tedious. If "equipment near these sites" can gain useful information, then so can "equipment in the attic of a rented house" or "equipment shoved up a tree" or "equipment in the trunk of a car parked nearby on a regular basis".
This is just another "China is bad" news piece purely intended to foster discontent amongst Americans - gotta have an external enemy to hate because it means that you pay less attention to the NSA equipment embedded in your own telecoms i
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... This is just another "China is bad" news piece purely intended to foster discontent amongst Americans - gotta have an external enemy to hate because it means that you pay less attention to the NSA equipment embedded in your own telecoms infrastructure right next to that Chinese stuff.
I've commented a couple of times now that politicians and military types who were around during the Cold War would love nothing better than to revive it.
Good point about Huawei being used as a beard for the NSA.
We have always been at war with Eastasia!
Re: Scaremongering (Score:3)
And they'd have a point if the Texas state government was originally the federal government, now holed up in Texas after being ousted from federal power by bandits.
Re: Scaremongering (Score:2)
Hostility towards murderous bandits seems reasonable.
Nice Try, but... (Score:2)
The situations are not in any way similar.
China was America's ally in WWII, but after the war the communists arose on the mainland and mass-murdered MILLIONS of average Chinese. The actual numbers of people killed by chairman Mao will never be known, but it is far more than Hitler killed in the holocaust. The mainland Chinese government the world faces today is the full-on maximum evil government of Mao, whereas the people of Taiwan are the decent Chinese people who fled the revolution and massacre. The peo
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"equipment in the trunk of a car parked nearby on a regular basis"
Have you tried parking a car near a missile solo on a regular basis?