
Trump likely to sign executive order banning Chinese telecom equipment next week - metaphysics
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/07/trump-ban-chinese-telecom-1157090
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solotronics
Good! As a network engineer I condemn the use of Huawei network equipment.
They are a prime example of blatant intellectual property theft and backdoor
spying for the Chinese intelligence apparatus. If your company uses this gear
you are exposing everyone on your network to state level hacking.

edit: I was involved designing datacenters in China and one of our
requirements was the network gear was all American. During a visit we were
asked to coordinate with an engineer from ChinaTelecom to figure out where to
place Gov. deep packet inspection devices on the backbone network. My take
away from this was it was easier for them to add additional equipment than to
hack the American routers.

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craftyguy
> If your company uses this gear you are exposing everyone on your network to
> state level hacking.

Why do you automatically assume that equipment made in the US (or any other
country) is magically immune to 'state level hacking' by the country that made
it?

IMHO, this is more of a power move to encourage folks to use equipment the US
government has control over to do with as they please. In other words, trading
one 'state level hacking' opportunity for another. But in this case, the other
is close enough to pay you a visit.

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rudolph9
Pick your poison. Although there are many examples of corruption and human
rights violations in the US, compared to China US-citizens have significantly
more leverage over their government and arguably more power to push back on
this kind of surveillance.

A good example of this is Google encrypting network traffic between servers
after the Snowden stuff was made public.
[https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-
of...](https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-of-email-
security.html?m=1)

~~~
magduf
Yes, but practically speaking, China has almost no power at all to bother you
if they successfully spy on you, aside of course from passing any secrets they
learn from you to your Chinese competitors.

The US, on the other hand, is where you're located (in this example) and can
easily use any information gained against you in a large multitude of ways.

Basically, everyone would probably be better off just assuming any network
gear has backdoors open to the government of the country that it came from,
then just adopting security policies to mitigate this, and buying network gear
from countries that aren't their own.

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quotz
It was about time... Should have done it sooner

