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This is a sub-selection from Frightening

battleop
join:2005-09-28
00000

1 recommendation

battleop to Chubbysumo

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to Chubbysumo

Re: Frightening

"there are a few targets of interest,"

That's exactly it. If you have ever read about or watched some of the things the US did to the Russians during the cold war you would understand why they are cautious.

The Chinese government doesn't care about the average citizen but there is quite a reward in being able to sniff traffic that may contain data going to and from Obama's special Blackberry.

KodiacZiller
Premium Member
join:2008-09-04
73368

1 recommendation

KodiacZiller

Premium Member

said by battleop:

"there are a few targets of interest,"

That's exactly it. If you have ever read about or watched some of the things the US did to the Russians during the cold war you would understand why they are cautious.

The Chinese government doesn't care about the average citizen but there is quite a reward in being able to sniff traffic that may contain data going to and from Obama's special Blackberry.

Not likely. For one, Obama's blackberry is encrypted with Top Secret Type I ciphers. Second, most of our really sensitive systems are not going to be run on such commodity hardware (or even on the public Internet at all). NSA has its own chip manufacturing plant for this reason. I am not worried about really sensitive systems inside the government -- they are going to either manufacture it themselves or strictly oversee contractors who do.

This is more about the Chinese ripping off the Apple's and Microsoft's and Boeing's of the world. Corporate espionage is what they are concerned about. They also worry, of course, about public networks (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) But really, the horse is already out of the barn -- the Chinese have been ripping off American corporate secrets for decades and they haven't needed subverted hardware to do it. They even stole the Stealth fighter from us, FFS.

What's worse is there are ZERO American companies that can make LTE gear. 60 minutes ran a story about this the other day. In their report, they interviewed one guy from Kansas who wanted to expand his town's 4G LTE network. He looked at all American companies (including Cisco). He found out that NONE of them made the 4G gear so he was forced to go to Huawei. A while later he got a visit from guys in dark suits (he wouldn't identity the agency they were with). He said "they were concerned about Huawei." He was pretty ticked off about the whole matter and wouldn't talk in any detail about it.

According to the 60 minutes episode, there are only 3 companies worldwide who make all the gear needed for a 4G network -- Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and Huawei. Swedish, French, Chinese.

That's really the problem. American manufacturing, while once the best in the world (especially at networking, routers, telco gear, etc.) is now at the bottom of the barrel. America invented packet switching and the Internet and now we can't even manufacture any of it. Sad. And these small towns looking to upgrade 4G are going to use Huawei over Ericsson or Alcatel because they are undoubtedly cheaper.

But the irony in all of this, as has been noted, is how the government is worried so much about backdoors. They know that they themselves are the best in the world at backdooring systems (NSA is notorious for it). So I guess it's kind of like a bank robber giving a course on bank security.

I don't doubt Huawei is spying, but it's just ironic coming from the House Intelligence Committee (who oversees NSA's spying program).

battleop
join:2005-09-28
00000

battleop

Member

"Not likely."

I agree it's not likely but it's not impossible. As long as there are humans and greed in the process it's always a possibility even it it's an extremely remote possibility.
« I call bullsh*t
This is a sub-selection from Frightening