
Huawei, ZTE to be excluded from Australia's 5G network - mediawatch
https://www.itwire.com/government-tech-policy/84151-huawei,-zte-to-be-excluded-from-australia-s-5g-network.html
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contingencies
Unofficially they were already excluded as early as about four years ago by
shady government visits to telcos implying covert monitoring of infrastructure
related tender processes.

This sort of thing no doubt came from US pressure or practice and could be
argued to represent direct, covert, cross-border intelligence agency influence
on 'free market' capitalism.

Source: Guy managing network upgrade planning at the time for the major
wireless internet provider in the country.

Frankly, I think best practice is that no country or vendor should be trusted,
networks and devices should be designed in such a way as to guarantee
vulnerabilities are detectable and impact-limited, and politicians should stay
out of network design. Only when carriers start acting this way will the
situation improve.

Notably, Australia had no problems selling Optus to Singapore, Inc., which is
a strong US ally and no doubt strongly active in regional intelligence
gathering owing to its central position on regional undersea cable networks.

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ggm
_Unofficially they were already excluded as early as about four years ago by
shady government visits to telcos implying covert monitoring of infrastructure
related tender processes. This sort of thing no doubt came from US pressure or
practice and could be argued to represent direct, covert, cross-border
intelligence agency influence on 'free market' capitalism._

I was told the "five eyes" required this, and that no government agency in any
of the five eyes economies will confirm or deny what evidence justified it.

The ironies here are supreme: We _know_ within limits, Cisco and Juniper do
backdoors. What we don't know, is who reads the backdoors Huawei do, but we
can assume its not the US government.

What I am also told, is that the only established proven concern is about
state-company governance structures: Huawei were insufficiently transparent
about the stock holdings of former Peoples-Army board members and the
relationship of the state and the party to the company. I can believe there is
a governance issue, but c'mon: we buy oil from countries which want to execute
human rights workers, and _this_ is the issue?

I think we all know, this is "belt and road" vs "soft diplomancy" -China is
being excluded for economic strategic reasons which have nothing to do with
snooping risks.

The Australian Huawei board includes former Australian politicians. Senior
ones. Ex-cabinet ones.

I interact with Huawei staff at IETF, and see them frequently at meetings in
Asia. I don't view any of them as an existential threat, I think this is
bullshit. Many of the Huawei staff at IETF are ex-Cisco, US and Canadian.

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ksec
I sometimes wonder who do company operate that backdoor? I assume many
engineers will know about it. What is there to keep them shut their months?
Special Visit from Intel agency? What is there to prevent these people speak
out?

One of the good thing coming about SDN, is that hopefully everything will be
open sourced. Since we cant trust no one, then we open it and at least allow
many to look through it.

I sometimes wonder why China hasn't taken this business model.

