Deplorable
The US still isn't getting that it's not the center of the universe?
US lawmakers are calling on the State Department to investigate whether or not Chinese tech firm Huawei has violated sanctions by supplying monitoring technology to Iran. Six lawmakers wrote a letter to the department just before Christmas, which has now been made public, citing an article in the Wall Street Journal in October …
If western businesses want to make money in China, they'd better be prepared to follow the local legal requirements and understand what 'kowtow' means. If Chinese businesses want to make money in the US... well, on the whole they can do that just fine. But they should expect to be reprimanded if they in turn do business with people the US disapproves of.
Oh, the Chinese don't give a hoot. They're Communists who embrace capitalism too.
As the Chinese don't exactly have the best human rights record and are famous for keeping their own population in check at every level (Great Firewall of China) they're not overly bothered about supplying "restricted" technology to despot regimes.
The bottom line is that if the sale took place, then it's already done and dusted. The technology is in place and there's not much anyone can do about it.
Rest assured the U.S.A. aren't going to ever embargo their biggest trading partner, if they did institutions like Wal-Mart would be doomed!
All they can do is deliver a terse statement to which the Chinese government will turn a deaf ear.
Footnote:
Huawei have been battling to gain a foothold into the U.S. market as the hawks don't trust the technology. They tried with the "Huawei Symantec" [storage] partnership but the Huawei branded comms and storage kit wont be taking up residence in any U.S. government or financial data centres just yet or for the foreseeable future.
Rest assured there are many countries that do buy this cheap as chips, but functional kit
If you want more info on the state of play with content filtering you might find the talk "How governments have tried to block Tor" from this years Chaos Communications Congress http://youtu.be/DX46Qv_b7F4 there are plenty of name drops of the guilty party's, like in a round about way Intel being responsible for filtering the Tunisians governments internet, it well worth watching.
Oh and if you have that damn Orange mobile Safeguard adult filter on your phone it appears it doesnt work on SSL connections, so just add that s and fill your phone with pron :)
Isn't it strange how these law makers:
A) Have 'conveniently not noticed' that Juniper and Cisco (both American networking moguls) are providing similar products and services to pro-censorship regimes?
B) Are currently trying to rush a bill through in their own country that instates such a regime?
You can tell that American politicians are desparately trying to clutch on to their country's status as the economic leaders in the technology sector by the repeated bogus or hypocritical accusations they levy at Asian tech firms like Huawei, and every patent case in favour of the Silicon Valley software giants.
"We have never been involved in and do not provide any services relating to monitoring or filtering technologies and equipment anywhere in the world," Huawei said then."
That is pretty explicit and if they are bullshitting it should be readily refutable. I've been googling this one a bit and I can't find anywhere that these six senators have said anything that in fact actually amounts to *evidence* contradicting what Huawei have said. Anyone else seen anything different?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/05/us_lawmakers_call_for_huawei_probe/
"We have never been involved in and do not provide any services relating to monitoring or filtering technologies and equipment anywhere in the world," Huawei said
is a bit difficult to reconcile with:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/09/talktalk_homesafe/
"The system was provided by Chinese vendor Huawei and works by harvesting every URL visited by every TalkTalk customer. It then follows them to each web page and scans for threats, creating a master blacklist and a whitelist of dangerous and safe URLs."
Or maybe the United Kingdom isn't on the Huawei exec's world map?
Or he's just suffering from corporate short term memory loss?
http://huawei.com/products/datacomm/catalog.do?id=3685
What about SIG9800 ?
"All-round network security guarantee
By adopting multiple inspection technologies, such as DPI, signature matching, network rate and concurrent connection number anomaly statistics and analysis technologies, and searching protocol/system security vulnerability libraries and attack signature libraries updated in real time by globally distributed security threat estimation systems, the SIG9800 deeply analyzes network traffic at the application layer, and accurately identifies and blocks malicious traffic from DDoS attacks, worms, and botnets, thus protecting services and users against increasingly severe network attacks.
Depending on the perfect URL classification base including more than 20 million URLs as well as the latest and more comprehensive spammer library of Huawei, the SIG9800 is capable of filtering out most damaging URLs and spammers, helping operators to depurate network environment, mitigate loss caused by spams, and launch value-added services. "
and
http://www.carrieriq.com/company/PR.CIQ-Huawei.2011-02-14.pdf
(which I think does geolocation quite well)
For the potential of CarrierIQ - check here
http://androidsecuritytest.com/features/logs-and-services/loggers/carrieriq/
The Red Hand(ed) Gang strikes again?
In other news, American biz Apple invades China with sneak attack... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/05/iphone_china/
we'll call this the "elbow"
While Congress passes draconian monger-messages about Chinese tech sector
we''ll call this one the "asshole"
Take your pick - what works? Does america know one from the other?
The US criticises Chinese company for selling monitoring tech to oppressive middle east regime,
Meanwhile the US just approved the sale of $60bn of F15s and other peaceful kit to Saidi Arabia, a fellow peace loving bastion of freedom and democracy which recent sent it military into Bahrain to help brutally errr protect the erm cause of errr freedom.