by liberal japonicus
Well, maybe not, but my post about Akin and the Republican Mission Impossible disavowal somehoe moved to the perfidious Chinese, so in that light, this article on Huawei is quite interesting. The first grafs:
Chen Lifang is a bit flummoxed.
Chen is a board member and senior vice president at Huawei, the giant telecommunications gear maker based here. She's digesting news that broke a day earlier that the U.S. House Intelligence Committee has increased the pressure it's putting on the company to disclose details about its ties to the Chinese government. The bombshell came in the form of a letter, released to the media, from the committee's chairman and the ranking Democrat to Huawei founder and Chairman Ren Zhengfei.
Really, the letter was more of an 11-page laundry list of accusations, wrapped around questions about everything from funding the company has allegedly received from the Chinese government to queries about how board members got their posts. In the letter, Congressmen Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) said they were investigating "the threat posed to our critical infrastructure and counter-intelligence posture by companies with potential ties to the Chinese government."
If you still want to talk about China and whatever threat you think it may pose, Huawei might be a place to start the discussion!
I somehow smell rank hypocrisy here, don't know why. ;-)
Could be something about 'free markets' or 'corporate patriotism in telecommunications'.
Posted by: Hartmut | August 28, 2012 at 02:05 PM
The biggest threat China poses is economic: if they don't successfully make the transition to an economy based on consumption rather than one which is export-based, they are looking at a serious crash at some point. Which will have knock-on effects on everybody else, including us.
Could Huawei do something like insert backdoors into its software? Sure. Could they do it so that it's undetectable? Probably not. And unless the US goes to totally relying on commercial software for our critical military functions, it isn't clear what it gets them. (So they can sneak into our system and see which of us is saying what on this blog. This helps them rule the world how exactly?)
Posted by: wj | August 28, 2012 at 05:14 PM
Iirc the US government demands* built-in backdoors for US made software (legality rather murky) and has been implicated in large scale industrial espionage in the past. As I said, smells of the usual hypocrisy.
*a bit too much for just using 'request'.
Posted by: Hartmut | August 29, 2012 at 05:20 AM