back to article Spyhunting US pols to crawl up Huawei and ZTE's ass

US lawmakers have launched an investigation into the threat of cyber espionage from Chinese telecoms firms operating in the US, singling out Huawei and ZTE. The House of Representatives committee on intelligence said yesterday that it was focused on the threat to America's security and critical infrastructure coming from "the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The usual US protectionist argument.... With the amount of debt, doesn't China owns the US anyway

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    since at least http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/267027/Histiaeus

    everybody is spying on everything - get over it

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I wish I could feel sorry for the US, but...

    After decades of the US doing corp spying against European companies it seems kind of like they're getting their own back and funnily enough they don't seem to like it when others do it to them.

  4. Arctic fox
    Flame

    Pardon my cynicism but........

    ...................whilst I am certain that Chinese intelligence (like the equivalent organisations in just about every country on earth) is certainly "out there" I cannot help but feel that the fact that both Huawei and ZTE are major industrial competitors for certain major American companies might also have a little bit to do with this (a little bit of lobbying by "BigCorp" been going on perhaps)? Of course all countries want to protect themselves against espionage both conventional and industrial (just as they *all* carry it out themselves), its just the self-righteous way these things are dressed up that I find a bit much to stomach.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Unfortunately, there are no real private enterprises under Communism, no matter how hard they try to make us think otherwise. It is easy to compete and win when your government is providing funding and willing to accept short term losses for long term gains (backdoors into every ones networks), which in turn gives them unfair advantage in trade; as well as politically over their competition).

      Anyone who manufactures anything in China is a fool, if they don't think it is going to get copied and re branded and resold.

      .

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yes, yes. Cyber-espionage, PROTECT THE US INTERESTS, etc.

    It's all so very trite.

    If the US hadn't outsourced this stuff in the first place, they wouldn't be having this problem. It's trying to save face after stupid policies and ideas put forward by stupid people who didn't understand technology.

    Oh, wait, this new idea itself has also been put forward by stupid people who don't understand technology now.

    Robert Gates was in his 20s when the ideas of "networked" machines was a gleam in the eyes of visionaries. Leon Panetta is even older than him. These people, these "intelligence experts" and "defense experts" and indeed our aging political elite in general, shouldn't be allowed near fledgling technology, because they are for the most part doddering old conservative fools bopping along, disconnected from reality in their old gentleman's club.

    They made your bed, now they should have to lie in it instead of wasting taxpayer money on the farce that is "national security". No one will ever invade or attack the US in any form other than, at worst, incredibly infrequent guerrilla terrorism, because the US has the bomb, so frankly, all of this fear-mongering is a joke.

    A cruel one, made at the expense of a public that lives in fear and impoverished nations that are no longer receiving the aid they need or worse are being "occupied" by US troops bringing "democracy" (no mention of the side effects like destruction of their infrastructure).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Yea, big bad America, should have stayed home during WWI and WWII.

  6. taxman
    Gimp

    Hang on a mo'!

    Just where does the telecommunications infrastructure start?

    Without naming specific companies, just how much of a particular popular handset used by Americans - and others - are produced in China? Yet that company is not named, just homegrown Chinese ones.

    If they were that worried surely they would make that company manufacture and produce in the US?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      That company has on many occasions complained about dangers to its intellectual property, but to be fair, that company has a history of stealing ideas and rebranding them.

      That company's operating system = NetBSD/FreeBSD with a new DE tacked on.

      That companies handheld platform is actually their second try, their first one being a massive flop until, again, the BSDs were repurposed and after others ironed out all the problems.

      mp3 players? DEC's idea originally.

      I could go on, but I think they're a bit of a joke in the intellectual property department.

  7. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge
    Alert

    The New Klondike .... Virtually Intelligent Gold Mines with HyperRadioProActive IT Memes

    Settle down a moment and have a little ponder and wonder.

    Here ….. http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=65739 …. one can read a News Article alluding to Department of Defense, Cyber Command abilities/facilities/requirements entitled "Doctrine to Establish Rules of Engagement Against Cyber Attacks" with a provision to offer comment, which advises and informs "Defense.gov seeks to engage its visitors, so we invite you to submit a comment for this story. We require a valid e-mail address to complete the process. However, we do not store or publish that e-mail address.

    We hope to receive submissions from all viewpoints, but we ask that all submitters agree to the following Terms of Participation:

    Post only comments directly related and relevant to this story.

    Refrain from posting comments that contain threats, obscenity, material that would violate the law if published here, abusive, defamatory or sexually explicit material.

    Submissions containing the following will be deleted:

    Obscene or threatening language or discrimination (hate speech) based on race, sex, gender, religion, national origin, age, or disability

    Promotes services or products (not including non-commercial links that are relevant to the topic)

    Includes any personal or sensitive information (phone numbers, emails or postal addresses)

    We look forward to receiving your comments."

    It is probably only fair to point out to any and all who play any sort of part in any sort of power game in the Cyber Realm, that whenever a comment has been shared for universal viewing and which would have been shared because of its particular and peculiar relevance to the subject matter, and which would then not appear as would reasonably have been expected in the thread/string/comments section provided for that very purpose, would it invariably reveal a systemic vulnerability against which there may no guaranteed defense or viable attack protocol.

    Such a scenario would then require a fundamental rethinking of base premises upon which systems and operations and networks are built.

    Here is a simple example of such a situation, a comment in limbo somewhere rather than being dealt with fairly and squarely, with all of the difficulties to then later deal with whenever one is even more seriously disadvantaged, when studiously ignored. Such shenanigans will always invoke and provoke ever more intrusive exploration of dumb systems in search of ever more valuable intelligence that may simply reveal that necessary intelligence to counter intrusion is missing and not readily available to the probed host …. which then would indicate a golden opportunity to supply what would then be immediately required. Every cloud has a silver lining and in cloud security systems would chaos and Clouds Hosting Advanced Operating Systems provide an infinite stream of Virtual Order Solutions to every problem imaginable, and delivered as imagined in a Mad Application of Programming rather than something ESPecial.

    [blockquote]"Extending that logic to cyberspace, Alexander said, it remains unclear if it includes authority to shut down a computer network, even if it’s been taken over by a malicious cyber attacker intent on destruction." …. http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=65739

    Any such malicious cyber attacker would be deeply embedded within one's own vital computer network, making shut down practically impossible. And that is the abiding enigmatic dilemma which will defeat all present SCADA Command and Control systems which have sensitive secrets that admin would prefer to remain generally unknown because of the unfair and inequitable advantage they may deliver to disadvantage everyone else. [/blockquote]

    And such is the case across every spectrum of applied thought which has implications and consequences because of transfer into direct and indirect controlled actions.

  8. dephormation.org.uk
    Holmes

    Huawei. Spying....?

    Posted in Networks, 1st December 2010 12:00 GMT

    Chinese telecoms giant furiously scrubs links to Phorm

    Senator Sherlock, this one's for you.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Show me the Money

    Seriously poor effort on accusing them ,like the legal system ,guilty until proven innocent.

    1- Show the proof

    2- China has been the source ( whether accurate-doubts) of the last 12+ years of scanning.

    3 -Dont doubt but show some integrity and the firmware algorithms built into the IOS's.

    4 -Dont doubt it ,gbyte brough out a windows bios exe that would auto install in 98 & xp in the 90's.

    5 -Hard to stop them with the current internet .

    6 -Maybe they have rootkits in our tv''s also ,lots of CN tv's with in built webcams now ....

    7- Please ,it will be WMD all over again ,remember there were none .

    8- Fix winbloze , cisco routers & other OS's so they are not owned as soon as they connect to the net.

    1. IT-SEC
      Mushroom

      Show me your brains

      Comment #8 is plain stupid! Microsoft has made HUGE strides in security. Keep in mind any poorly secured network can be easily owned, so due diligence is also in play here. Microsoft is only a victim of its own success during a time period where security was not so important. They paid their dues already.

      Clearly MS OS's can be EXTREMELY secure, otherwise your cash registers, Automated Teller Machines, Banking Systems, and Point of Sale devices would not use Microsoft Windows Embedded ID10T.

      Educate yourself on security before jumping in the freaking SHARK POOL!!!!!

      The real problem here is the food chain, but you are what you eat. If you consume some hostile countries hardware and software, it's your own countries fault!

      Problem with that mindset is few people are truely aware of the REAL problem because the truth stays locked up away from the public. You cannot fix problems by hiding them under a label, but that's political and another issue altogether.

  10. mhenriday
    Big Brother

    It is rumoured - on good authority, of course -

    that both Huawei and ZTE are cooperating with Emmanuel Goldstein, which about clinches the case as far as I'm concerned....

    Henri

  11. asbokid
    Big Brother

    Agent Mega Redux

    Nothing new under the sun. More often the enemy is within.

    Remember WJ Clinton and his nubile White House intern, Miss Monica Lewinsky? Remember her lil' black dress that gotten itself spattered with baby juice?

    Remember those compromising phone calls between young-at-heart Bill, 63, and Miss Monica, 22?

    Those calls were intercepted within the White House itself.

    By coincidence, the official residence had just been kitted out with new telco equipment from a certain telco kit supplier.

    Of course, noone believes those outrageous and not-to-be-tolerated conspiracy theories, but.......... those from the lunatic fringe do say that the telco kit had a backdoor installed on the orders of a certain foreign intelligence Agency.

    And, so the ludicrous fairytale has it, the recordings of those sexy calls somehow fell onto the desk of that Agency. The Spy Agency quietly filed away its red hot tapes, just in case they were needed some rainy day. And for her part, Monica carefully folded away that dirty dress, leaving it deliberately unlaundered, on the strict orders of her shadowy handler from the Agency.

    Bill's naughty little secret of the Oval Office may well have stayed under wraps, had he been making smoochy noises towards the Palestinian Authority. This peeved the Foreign Intelligence Agency greatly. In an act of extreme malice, the ruthless spooks dug out their trump card to bring Bill down.

    The tape recordings of luved up Bill sweet-talking his "baby pumpkin" were leaked to the world media, and Miss Monica, for her part, conjured up her spunky old dress for forensic analysis.

    Bill wound up subpoenaed before a Star Chamber to unconvincingly tell the US nation that he "did not have sexual relations with that woman.."

    His fate as President alas, by now, effectively sealed.

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