Huawei will likely become the main competition for NSO group and companies like it, but that's the least of the worlds worries.
Governments with resource wealth don't need large public services that would operate a sophisticated intelligence service, so they outsource it. So far these governments have been doing point targeting against dissidents w/ mercenary surveillance companies, but it's possible these companies are about to be steamrolled by one that implements their products as a free feature of their entire infrastructure.
The bargain will be, we'll support your campaign/coup and modernize your infrastructure for your people, while giving you intel we collect on your dissidents and opposition. Then, once Huawei infrastructure is ensconced, no government will get into power who does not have support from China. A very "harmonious," cycle. Want be be elected again? Secure our rights to extract rare earth minerals. Etc.
The company is a projection of Chinese state power, not unlike western telcoms with 5EYES and the ITU has been. The difference is the Party lacks the sentimentality of western countries when it comes to issues of total surveillance and intervention to maintain control. (Albeit, we have never been above supporting butchers either, so YMMV.)
My prediction is that once the Huawei gear is in place, a country's political class will turn to face east on policy and resource questions. It's pure leverage. Western tech companies can't make the same promises to those governments either. It's not like Google can promise to prop up the next Idi Amin, but Huawei doesn't have that constraint. So far, the world has been content to deal with the devil it knows.
Anyway, I'd say this article is an anecdote of a larger geopolitical shift. Containing Huawei should be a national security priority for everyone, but tbh, it's looking more and more like our respective mere leviathans have become oversized, slow moving prey for their hydra.
> It's not like Google can promise to prop up the next Idi Amin
I wish this were the case, but western companies are constantly supplying both software and hardware to repressive regimes. Hell, weapons!
Though the fact that we believe that western tech companies can't make those promises means that there's at least public support for making this a reality
In Serbia it was primarily Israelis who sold all of the surveillance tech to the government, and now China seems to be pushing everyone else out of the market. It really makes a very little difference to common people, one foreign actor or the other, none of the sides is really altruistic in that game...
I think this is the real problem: China/Huawei are pushing their competition out of the "support an (oppressive) regime" business. They become the go-to partner for regimes that historically relied on western or middle-eastern partners maintaining their authority.
Maybe merely a quality choice! If you want to buy a nice car, you go for a German brand, if you want fine wine, go French, if you want software, go American, if you want an orwellian mass surveillance system, you go with the country which speciality it is!
> if you want an orwellian mass surveillance system
I think this misses the point. Countries like US or Israel are perfectly capable [0][1][2] of offering such systems. And they do because it gives them another solid "string" attached to the regime receiving it. Their problem is that now the string (and all the knowledge, power, influence that come with it) could go to China. Hence the campaign to discredit them simply by suggesting this behavior is limited to them. Putting the facts in perspective would undermine this.
Israel is very powerful and ambitious for its size, but at 8 million people they're fundamentally limited in what kind of power they can or would want to project. No matter how advanced your intelligence or military there's just so far you can go when you're so tiny.
China on the other hand has almost 8 million people for every country on Earth. Imagine how many people they could assign to messing with each country around the world if they wanted to.
Israel gets $3.8 billions worth of weapons and other military equipment every year from the US because of its vital strategic importance. If someone messes with them that would be just like messing with an US state abroad; probably nobody would want to test that possibility.
What you said about Huawei is more applicable to Boeing, which sells weapon systems instead of telecom gears. You may want to look at how US companies are involved in arm sales to Saudi.
It’s fair that US wants to contain China’s leverage in Africa and maintain its own, but this is a national security priority for US , not “everyone”.
By you do you mean 'I', or you as in 327 million individuals that make up the population of the United States? Do you think it's easy to convince a nations population to push for change, if it was then issues like climate change could be tackled overnight.
Democracy is a messy and flawed process, but it is the best we have. The fact still remains that no matter how much you bemoan the current state of affairs that there is a framework for changing things.
Sadly it has been shown the United States circa 2019 is not an ally anymore ... it is an alien country to most of us now where you have somehow elected a nativist leader who is a racist.
At this stage for us Africans the Chinese seems like a more dependable and friendlier lot.
It's still an ally, more than the Chinese will ever be.
Just wait and see, the loans you are getting ( not investments) are for Chinese workers. The loans are at 4-6% if the work isn't executed by Chinese workers.
>It's still an ally, more than the Chinese will ever be.
The US has no concept for Africa, because unlike China which uses infrastructure projects and investment as a way to offload its export surplus the US is an overwhelmingly domestic economy.
There will never be an American 'Belt and Road' because it just doesn't make much sense for a country that has so little international economic exposure, whenever the US forms alliances it is towards purely political ends. In that sense one could indeed characterise the relationship with China as more stable. No Chinese leader is suddenly going to go isolationist over the next two decades just because they feel like it.
> There will never be an American 'Belt and Road' because it just doesn't make much sense for a country that has so little international economic exposure
It's not because of a domestic economy. It's because a freight/boat is much more economical than a train and a train doesn't make any sense.
It's only here ( now ), because it's heavy subsidized by China and an excuse for modern colonialism.
PS. A lot of ( sane / healthy) infrastructure works are happening in Africa with Europe / US though. But if it's not feasible, it ain't going to happen. That's where the Chinese come in to burry them in debt.
China is still a country with significant room for industrial expansion with hundreds of millions of people moving from rural to urban areas adding to the manufacturing workforce, the country as a whole has not reached levels of prosperity that would produce a consumer driven economy, and one also needs to account for the heavy influence of export-led sectors on policy-making and the state-led economy which doesn't tend to lend itself well to consumer sectors.
And also quite importantly as China climbs up the value chain it will increasingly seek to outsource to cheaper countries, as it has already started doing in Pakistan, one of the major hubs of the Belt and Road initiative. And given the quite authoritarian system, it will probably do so quite effectively without facing the political backlash that workers in the United States have caused.
Unfortunately the US now mostly has hostages rather than allies. There's always the threat of economic retaliation if the allies don't support US initiatives, no matter how outrageous ("let's start another war, Europe/Middle East/Africa can deal with the humanitarian consequences!"). And as the Snowden leaks have shown, the US is ready to try to cripple the infrastructure of their allies in case this is ever needed (the particular leak was about utilities and power).
This is not excusing China's attitude, and it's by no means (much) better. You wouldn't call someone who keeps slapping you over the face a friend just because they could have punched you.
> The Western world has been giving back colonies from a dark past.
No they won their independence from wars, most of the colonies that where "given back" won their independence through fighting in world war 1 and 2, there are very few exceptions to this rule.
I made an edit, I meant World Bank and USAID as they don't only lend to member countries.
I don't have sources I would quote, but I have enough to be told to look over there and see the cause and effect.
Developing countries are saddled with debt, and further crippled. Recipients of the debt are contractors. Austerity measures are needed to repay the debt, and the citizens are the ones burdened by it to help extract the country's natural resources to pay the debt.
Even IF an indictment of the World Bank is just crackpot conspiracies, it is a really good instruction manual. China's approach is running the same playbook but may even be more completely benign. Their industries have been entering emerging markets that others have decided not to effectively touch, without invading. Are they also running the regime change playbook too like the US did all last century? Time will tell. They are doing a lot for African markets. They don't need to be an "ally", everyone should be skeptical. Lightyears ahead of what the west is doing though.
Isn't this against Hacker News rules to call another user "completely brainwashed"?
Brainwashing is what WSJ does since Murdoch took control over it and what mainstream Western media were doing to motivate the last deadly invasion on Iraq [1,2]. Just look at the reality. The US military killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, while the US public elected and supported its leaders who started this war by brainwashing the global population to believe their lies (and now the story repeats itself with Trump [3]).
"The difference is the Party lacks the sentimentality of western countries when it comes to issues of total surveillance and intervention to maintain control"
No, the difference is hypocrisy, and of course tons of daily propaganda from the Western media / Corporations / Governments / intelligence agencies.
Shocking that Israel barely gets a mention in this article (you know, the actual supplier of the surveillance tech used).
So we just ignore that Israeli companies sell spy tech to every corrupt government on the planet and instead focus on demonizing Huawei giving Africans cheap 5G?
Trade war inspired reporting, not surprising coming from the Murdoch rag WSJ.
"The Journal investigation didn’t turn up evidence of spying by or on behalf of Beijing in Africa. Nor did it find that Huawei executives in China knew of, directed or approved the activities described. It also didn’t find that there was something particular about the technology in Huawei’s network that made such activities possible."
There were activities that infringed privacy, but (I believe) not attributable to Huawei hardware or anything. In the article it mentions Huawei employees helping the govt get malware/insider onto the Whatsapp group chat.
I find the term “oppresive” to be more and more difficult to get a handle on when everything is on a spectrum now.
People draw the line somewhere that puts them in the “non-appressive” camp, and justify it in so many ways (“you can’t compare because the other side does really bad things”), but it tends to hide how the lines are much more murky, the “oppressive” side is supported from the other countries, which also look at it like a live experiment to see how far they could get away with it.
Before Huawei it was european or US companies that where eyeing the market, and I feel like Huawei just happened to win the bids so we can now point the finger at them.
>A pop star turned political sensation, Bobi Wine, had returned from Washington with U.S. backing for his opposition movement, and Uganda’s cyber-surveillance unit had strict orders to intercept his encrypted communications, using the broad powers of a 2010 law that gives the government the ability “to secure its multidimensional interests.”
I suspect that most countries would try to intercept the communications of an opposition candidate that was openly backed by a foreign power.
The obvious ethical territory here isn't particularly difficult: deploring both the US action (in this case political interference) and the Huawei/CCP interference (political interference via an attack on civil liberties).
Commentators who are only interested in critiquing rival states ought to be viewed as discrediting themselves.
You realize you're defending a government that illegally shot and attacked the person in question and then arrested and tortured him, right? After which he was released and fled back to the US for medical treatment.
Defending the specific act of spying on foreign political influence isn't the same as defending the entire government, or even other actions related to that spying (such as the torture you mentioned).
By this logic, if someone 'bad' does anything, that anything can be claimed to be sinister and unreasonable, and any statements otherwise are "defending someone bad".
Mobile networks can be considered strategic infrastructure. Normally US State Department would be working closely with US companies to push back against Huawei with all kinds of political tie-ins and perks.
Except that the US is not in the market. US based mobile network infrastructure assets (Lucent Technologies and Motorola's wireless network infrastructure business) were sold to Europeans long time ago. Both of them are part of Nokia today. Nokia and Ericsson compete without government support against China backed Huawei and ZTE.
Huawei is most likely government owned/controlled enterprise:
The paper you link doesn't show that Huawei is government-owned (as is pretty clear from the abstract) and in any case, the government is going to support private enterprises just as much. The problem for Ericsson and Nokia is rather that their countries don't have dedicated economic representatives in Uganda who could assist them.
There doesn't seem to be a Swedish Chamber of Commerce in any African country [1], whereas Finland does have one, but it's only responsible for West Africa, which doesn't include Uganda [2]. On the other hand, both the USA [3] and China [4] have Chambers of Commerce that also operate in Uganda.
> The paper you link doesn't show that Huawei is government-owned (as is pretty clear from the abstract)
You're wrong. The paper's abstract says that Huawei is effectively government-owned, given the known facts. Read the last quoted paragraph carefully:
> * The Huawei operating company is 100% owned by a holding company, which is in turn approximately 1% owned by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei and 99% owned by an entity called a “trade union committee” for the holding company.
> * We know nothing about the internal governance procedures of the trade union committee. We do not know who the committee members or other trade union leaders are, or how they are selected.
> ...
> * Given the public nature of trade unions in China, if the ownership stake of the trade union committee is genuine, and if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned.
Also, ownership is just a specific cultural form of control. It's not synonymous with control, and lack of ownership does not necessarily imply a lack of control. The issue with Huawei isn't so much who owns is but who controls it. Hair-splitting arguments about ownership just distract from the issue.
> if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned.
That's the "they're Chinese, so obviously they can't be independent" argument. It not necessarily wrong, but also not terribly illuminating.
As you say, a more interesting question is that of control. Given the level of disunity within the Chinese government, a useful answer to that question would really need to break it down to the personal allegiances of the decision-makers. Unfortunately, those are unlikely to be recorded in publicly available documents.
In any case, Chinese government officials will extend their support even to Chinese companies they do not own, control or otherwise directly benefit from, so long as there's no competitor for whom that is the case.
> That's the "they're Chinese, so obviously they can't be independent" argument. It not necessarily wrong, but also not terribly illuminating.
What do you mean by that? China doesn't have independent trade unions, because the Chinese Communist Party doesn't allow political organization outside of its control, which independent trade unions would be. It's worth pointing that out because western misconceptions could cloud understanding.
> Do workers in China have freedom of association?
> No. There is only one legally-mandated trade union, namely the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). All enterprise trade unions have to be affiliated to the ACFTU via a hierarchical network of local and regional union federations. (See simplified organizational chart right). The ACFTU is primarily under the control and direction of the Chinese Communist Party. Any attempt to establish an independent trade union movement is seen by the Party as political threat. The only time in the history of the People’s Republic of China that an independent union was established was the short-lived Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation in 1989. The BWAF was declared an illegal organization and disbanded in the wake of the military crackdown in Beijing on 4 June 1989.
> At no point over the last twenty-five years, despite widespread unemployment, serious labor law violations, and appallingly dangerous working conditions, has the ACFTU attempted to distance itself from the CCP leadership or to question its policies. It has not defended the principle of independent union organizing, and it has never spoken out against laws and regulations routinely employed to justify imprisonment of labor activists who organize outside its aegis.
----
> Given the level of disunity within the Chinese government, a useful answer to that question would really need to break it down to the personal allegiances of the decision-makers.
The Communist party is united enough to make that irrelevant to the question of who controls Huawei in the contexts where it's typically posed.
By that I mean that there's no need to trace ownership to the trade union and conclude that because independent trade unions aren't allowed, the company can't be independent either. You could just go straight to Article 17 of the Company Law of the People's Republic of China [1], which reads
"The grass-root organizations of the Communist Party of China in companies shall carry out their activities in accordance with the Constitution of the Communist Party of China."
So no Chinese company could possibly be independent, trade union or not. That's on paper anyway. In practice, Chinese companies undermine each other and government agencies all the time, instead of harmoniously cooperating to fulfill the CCP's grand plan. Similarly, membership in the ACFTU doesn't tell you anything about the actual power dynamics.
No, there's no indication whatsoever that Huawei is government-owned. Stop spreading FUD. There are plenty of state-owned enterprises in China, but Huawei isn't one of them.
The objection in the article is that the workers don't directly own shares. It's still a company in which workers vote and share in the profits. They just can't sell their stake on the market.
That has nothing to do with being state-owned. Lots of people in China are in the party.
China has SOEs. It has private companies. They operate quite differently from one another. Huawei operates like one of the latter, and legally, definitely is one of the latter.
The way you explain it makes it seem like we shouldn't trust any Chinese companies to be separate from the party so not sure what you were going for but it's had the opposite effect.
You shouldn't trust any company anywhere to be able to act entirely independently of the national intelligence apparatus. It's been established that many American tech companies cooperate with the NSA, for example.
But Huawei is a private company. It will probably have to comply if the Chinese state forces it to (just like American companies have to silently comply if handed a National Security Letter), but it's not an arm of the government.
Mobile infrastructure provider are almost always delivering tech to monitor phone locations and communications. It is not unreasonable to expect them to support of such equipment. What would you do if your job is to support the sold and euphemistically called ‚lawful interception gateway‘ in a place with loose laws? This is mostly dual use tech.
I'm sure huawei corporate is correcting the issue right now. /s
But who do you think trained the ugandan cyber-surveillance team in the first place?
You can piece it together from the article: They had pegasus and were trained by the israeli company (probably not an advanced version... the one that just parses unencrypted comms). But they even said it was simplistic and needed/wanted more. Of course Huawei trained them. When they were unable to "punch" through with the "pegasus-style" spyware themselves, they strolled up to their teachers and said help us senpai.
I don't know if the Chinese firewall has been upgraded to Chinese hardware or if it is still running on US hardware. This kind of hardware often last for 10+ years so I would not be surprised if the hardware is still mostly from Cisco.
I wonder if things would be different if this individual was using, say, Signal, Conversations.im with omemo enabled, Briar, Wire, Threema, or other related e2ee enabled application. WhatsApp et al just have less security overall.
The best way to stop companies doing unethical things like this is to vote with your wallet, buy your stuff elsewhere. Use a good online list to pre-screen companies before you buy from them like https://www.ethical.org.au/3.4.2/get-informed/boycotts-criti...
Governments with resource wealth don't need large public services that would operate a sophisticated intelligence service, so they outsource it. So far these governments have been doing point targeting against dissidents w/ mercenary surveillance companies, but it's possible these companies are about to be steamrolled by one that implements their products as a free feature of their entire infrastructure.
The bargain will be, we'll support your campaign/coup and modernize your infrastructure for your people, while giving you intel we collect on your dissidents and opposition. Then, once Huawei infrastructure is ensconced, no government will get into power who does not have support from China. A very "harmonious," cycle. Want be be elected again? Secure our rights to extract rare earth minerals. Etc.
The company is a projection of Chinese state power, not unlike western telcoms with 5EYES and the ITU has been. The difference is the Party lacks the sentimentality of western countries when it comes to issues of total surveillance and intervention to maintain control. (Albeit, we have never been above supporting butchers either, so YMMV.)
My prediction is that once the Huawei gear is in place, a country's political class will turn to face east on policy and resource questions. It's pure leverage. Western tech companies can't make the same promises to those governments either. It's not like Google can promise to prop up the next Idi Amin, but Huawei doesn't have that constraint. So far, the world has been content to deal with the devil it knows.
Anyway, I'd say this article is an anecdote of a larger geopolitical shift. Containing Huawei should be a national security priority for everyone, but tbh, it's looking more and more like our respective mere leviathans have become oversized, slow moving prey for their hydra.