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China Network Networking Technology

Huawei Says It is Willing To Sign 'No-Spy' Agreements With Governments (reuters.com) 173

Huawei is willing to sign no-spy agreements with governments, including Britain, the Chinese telecommunications company's chairman said on Tuesday as the United States pressures European countries to shun the firm over spying concerns. From a report: Washington has told allies not to use Huawei's technology to build new 5G telecommunications networks because of worries it could be a vehicle for Chinese spying, an accusation the firm has denied.
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Huawei Says It is Willing To Sign 'No-Spy' Agreements With Governments

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  • by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @10:35AM (#58590212) Homepage

    ... to the "Museum of I can't believe what I got away with".

    Soon to be located in Beijing.

    • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @10:43AM (#58590280)

      ... to the "Museum of I can't believe what I got away with".

      This reminds me of Neville Chamberlain and his piece of paper with a promise of peace from Adolf Hitler:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • by mspohr ( 589790 )

        Will ATT make the same guarantee?

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by aix tom ( 902140 )

          Of course ATT will happily provide a statement that they will most certainly not spy for the Chinese...

      • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @12:40PM (#58591274) Homepage

        This reminds me of Neville Chamberlain and his piece of paper with a promise of peace from Adolf Hitler:

        Which should be a reminder of the other aspect of this. One thing is the everyday spying that may lead to court cases, diplomatic incidents and a few people going to prison. But does Europe want critical infrastructure made by China in a potential WW3? Hitler didn't care about what Chamberlain or Britain felt about the bluff, because he planned to wage war and win. I mean it doesn't take that much to create an alt mode or a kill switch or whatever that you only activate if all hell is breaking loose and you cease to care about anything other than victory. It's a little early to declare world peace.

        • Decades ago I worked for a company that jumped though a bunch of hoops to sell a certain by-then previous-gen computer to the PRC. The government required that the clock rate be reduced, and that microcode be timebombed. If hostilities were to break out, the idea is that they would not be sent their monthly new microcode tape and the system would brick.

      • Or when the Soviets agreed not to use the Nene turbojet for anything but civilian applications......And then put it in every military aircraft they had.
        • by hoofie ( 201045 )

          Stafford Cripps was an admired of Marxist Theory so it's perhaps no surprise he agreed to the sale although this was before the cold war when Britain especially had a warmer relationship with the USSR [ the Russian fight against the Nazis was heavily publicised in the UK and the population were very sympathetic] and the economy was flat busted out and any export paid for in hard currency or gold was welcome.

          In the course of history it gave the Soviets a leg-up on Turbojet technology but they already had tha

      • Oh for mod points.... ++many

      • In other news, my friendly neighborhood burglar is willing to sign a "no-burgle" agreement with anyone willing to give him the keys to their house.

      • Dammit, you beat me to it. :shakesfist:

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Huawei puts its money where its mouth is. They allow customers to examine their source code and verify their firmware binaries. They have offered western governments the option to audit the code.

      Do US companies do that? Does Cisco dare let the NSA near its source code, for fear of them simply taking all the zero-day exploits they find for themselves?

      The other function of a no-spy agreement is that if broken it opens Huawei up to financial penalties and allows customers to get out of contracts with them. It'

      • by TWX ( 665546 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @11:01AM (#58590438)

        How about inspecting all of the chips? Remember that Intel has some preboot and parallel crap that runs entirely independently of the operating system, baked into hardware, not removable, and apparently exploitable.

        And the problem is, you can't just inspect the chips once, you have to repeatedly do it, randomly such that the vendor can't guarantee that a particular device won't end up inspected. And inspection of this magnitude would probably be destructive.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @11:20AM (#58590602) Homepage Journal

          Sure, inspect the chips. An electron microscope works well, or you can even do it by de-capping.

          But if you are going down that road, then you have to also accept that US hardware is just as bad because many of the chips and often the entire PCBs are made in China anyway. Dell, HP, Cisco, they all manufacture in China.

          Even worse, we know for a fact that the NSA intercepts US hardware during shipping to install hardware backdoors. So your concerns are valid, just not a reason to be any more suspicious of Huawei than anyone else.

          • So your concerns are valid, just not a reason to be any more suspicious of Huawei than anyone else.

            Unless you have investments in the competition...

      • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Chinese hacking is most definitely NOT limited to software.

        https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

        Even if they do this for government installations. Are they willing to do the same for corporate? What about all bait and switch opportunities?

        With China's track record the obvious answer is a simple hard no regardless of what they'll promise and say. At some point you just cut ties and move on. I wouldn't outsource garbage

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The Bloomberg story about Chinese spy chips is widely regarded to be false. What we know for a fact is that the NSA does it to US hardware.

          I'm no fan of the Chinese government. What I care about is being fair, and realistic, and trying to make China better through cooperation rather than propaganda and innuendo.

          • by gtall ( 79522 )

            "What we know for a fact is that the NSA does it to US hardware." So they are intercepting shipments of Dell, HP, etc. tat at the docks, employing an army of solderers, and then packaging the hardware to be sold. That's one might slick operation. Have you told anyone else about this?

          • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

            No, but you've previously advocated firing/pulling money from/and otherwise making business decisions on the basis of social principles. Essentially a financial tax if you will. You can not logically reconcile supporting actions against Kevin Spacey and Rosanne Barr with failing to hold similar positions with regard to Chinese companies that are exploitative of women.

            If we extending this to the Chinese government the basis for "firing" them on social grounds becomes far more dramatic.

            If one holds the positi

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              You can not logically reconcile supporting actions against Kevin Spacey and Rosanne Barr with failing to hold similar positions with regard to Chinese companies that are exploitative of women.

              Sure you can.

              The question is what action will result in the most benefit, the most good. In the case of someone like Spacey it seems unlikely that him getting more work will help anyone except him. Not getting work, making it clear that his actions were unacceptable, is best.

              In China we can't just make them treat women better with a boycott. For China, the best thing seems to be for women to be empowered through economic prosperity. Societies tend to liberalise as they get more prosperous. That's where we a

        • With China's track record the obvious answer is a simple hard no regardless of what they'll promise and say.

          The thing is, from the point of view of a major European nation, the US and China are both foreign powers with potential risks due to government interference. If you look at the US objectively, it's not as if it has a whiter-than-white track record when it comes to national security and defence issues, including in the way it has sometimes treated allies, and currently the US government is led by Donald Trump. You can't just behave like that year after year, then denounce a competitor with lots of rhetoric

          • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

            "The thing is, from the point of view of a major European nation, the US and China are both foreign powers with potential risks due to government interference."

            I think this view is missing a bit of key pieces of context though. Not least of which is history. Europeans are quick to point to their longer cultural history relative to the US but that isn't really accurate is it? The US was founded by European settlers from what were (in the current US makeup) English, French, and Spanish colonies. It's law buil

          • by hoofie ( 201045 )

            >>The thing is, from the point of view of a major European nation, the US and China are both foreign powers with potential risks due to government interference.

            I'd suggest you need to remove the UK from that list if we are talking about Europe as a geographical entity. The UK always has been and is more culturally aligned to the US than mainland Europe due to history be it legal, financial or military. The US-UK relationship suffered badly thanks to Obama's pivot to Germany but that didn't bear any fr

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        That accomplishes what exactly. How do I know firmware files you gave me are the ones on the devices rom?

        What about the 1000 other units dropped shipped for install at various places. Can't inspect all of them. Ah but they'd get caught eventually and busted you say!

        No, what would happen is they will get caught, deny they had anything to do with. "why someone must have intercepted it in transport and swapped the chips" they will claim. Heck it might even be true never mind the shared the shipping inform

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Does Cisco dare let the NSA near its source code, for fear of them simply taking all the zero-day exploits they find for themselves?

        Well given the NSA's history of seriously compromising their equipment, I'm going with 'yes'. Really the only question is whether it's willingly or not. Huawei certainly has more credibility, not that that's a particularly high bar.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Except it's Huawei engineers themselves doing the inspections, under the ostensible "supervision" of the host governments.

          The cheeky bastards! Who do they think they are, Boeing?

      • The no-spy agreement means shit when they are obligated under Chinese law to do whatever the Chinese government asks them to do, at penalty of being shot for refusing.

        There is a Chinese law that requires them to provide any assistance the Chinese government asks for, including bugging firmware and prevents them from revealing this to anyone. Any no-spy agreement won't be worth the paper it's written on because of that. The only way they could be trusted would be if they moved out of China and the ownership

        • by dryeo ( 100693 )

          Do you remember what happened to Qwest when they didn't do what their government wanted? Maybe not a firing squad (America usually arranges accidents, especially small plane) but as the only telecommunications company that refused to spy and had principals, the company is gone.
          You should also check out national security letters. Basically a company has to do whatever the government tells them and can't talk about it. This in a country that claims to have free speech and even has in its Constitution, the bas

      • They have offered western governments the option to audit the code. Do US companies do that? Does Cisco dare let the NSA near its source code, for fear of them simply taking all the zero-day exploits they find for themselves?

        Of course they do, and they've been doing it for years - and not just to Western governments either. It's only your lack of information that makes you think Huawei is making some kind of extraordinary sacrifice. They are doing the bare minimum, and are far from the level of openness of Western companies.

        A quick Google search would have helped you answer for yourself. Here's an article from 2015 about Microsoft [pcworld.com] providing access to the source code of Windows and other applications to European governments (and

  • lolwut (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jgtg32a ( 1173373 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @10:36AM (#58590220)

    That's something a spy would say

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Dude, they totally pinky promised.

    • by TWX ( 665546 )

      Exactly.

      There are numerous historical examples of oaths being meaningless if the oathbreaker has a prior allegiance and is willing to falsely swear the new oath in service of the original master.

      For many international companies, if they want to do business with the military, they have to have an American division of the company that's run locally, with all local employees, with local data storage that is not replicated internationally, with even scant international business management, where the only major

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        The report is that this isn't *just* an oath, but also an open source agreement, and a financial obligation that they can't evade if they have business presence in the country.

        Also, the report said that the binaries would be validateable against the source code. It's not a perfect agreement, but it's a whole lot better than anyone else has offered.

        • by TWX ( 665546 )

          If an attack through this as a vector is state-sponsored by a nation-state that already is known to engage in currency manipulation, then why would the threat of fine or forfeit of business presence matter to that nation-state? They'll have already gotten what they wanted by the time they're found-out and on top of that detangling with the nation-state itself would be extremely difficult given all of the other business connections.

          And as already discussed in another thread in this topic, what's to prevent

          • by HiThere ( 15173 )

            If you're looking for perfection, you won't get it. China might not care about the financial cost to Huawei, but Huawei would. To claim that they could be overridden isn't anything that isn't true of any company situated anywhere.

            As for special chips...those are detectable when you have the hardware in hand, so you can't count on them staying secret. (Granted, the chip would likely be destroyed in the process of analyzing it...so direct detection would be cheap. Suspicions, however, could be checked via

    • by Hasaf ( 3744357 )

      When I was working on an airbase in China I was asked a question by a Chinese Brigadier General. He wanted to know why the US allowed Chinese people to work on projects that involved national security.

      I tried to explain the idea of the prohibition on discrimination, but he refused to believe that. He firmly insisted that if a person is Chinese, then it should be obvious that they will spy. He wanted to understand the hidden "long game" and refused to believe that there wasn't one.

      That and my discussion with

  • ha ha hah! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SirAstral ( 1349985 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @10:38AM (#58590244)

    Here sign this agreement everyone knows that we cannot even possibly honor.

    These types of shenanigans are explicit examples of how in your face dishonest the Chinese Government is. China openly lies about all sorts of stuff and people just believe it like its no big deal. But don't you dare say anything... that's not kosher.

    This is "Exactly"...

    The Emperors New Clothes"

    Participation with China's economy is approval of China's inhuman treatment of Buddhists, Muslims, their own citizens, the environment, the world economy, and their social credit system where you are almost an unwanted criminal for playing video games too long.

    I don't like Trump, but I hope Trump sours our relationship with China to the point that the US has to start bringing some things back to our home shore, but they will just likely find some other nation on the planet to abuse, until they get to powerful or big to abuse easily.

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Exactly this! All the moralizing on both sides of the political aisle about terror states this; human rights abuser that, divest from ...

      Is hollow bullshit unless and until you are willing to do something about the Chinese who have literally the worst record of pretty much anyone. The idea the opening China has made that better is joke too. Its given some of the party leaderships the chance to take a crash course in western style corruption to further enrich themselves; but that is about all. The notion

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Euuwwwh.... you might ask the Cherokees whether the Chinese are that much worse. And it's worth noting that the US has the highest percentage of its population in prison (at slave labor) of any country. (Well, actually I'm not certain what percentage of the prisoners are at forced labor....but it's not a small number. And quite profitable for the private corporations who "farm" them.)

        The Chinese certainly aren't saints, but they've been rising from abject poverty and a much larger percentage of their pop

    • by rv6502 ( 5793142 )

      they will just likely find some other nation on the planet to abuse, until they get to powerful or big to abuse easily.

      You're welcome China.

      I'm not sarcastic. Let's uplift Africa next.

      Evil capitalist "exploitation" is how civilisations gets brought into the 1st world with bountiful food to the point it becomes an obesity problem, great medicine, air conditioning, hygiene (boardgame cafes excepted), safety, clean water, electricity, and so on...
      It's the proper way to share the wealth by creating even more.

      Every other way has been a disaster. Nothing else has worked. Ever.

    • Here sign this agreement everyone knows that we cannot even possibly honor.

      Indeed. Meanwhile, obviously the United States would never covertly intercept and modify networking equipment being supplied to foreign purchasers by US companies, and it certainly wouldn't make law compelling any US company to provide it with data held by that company even if the data itself is collected and held abroad and supplying it would be breaking the law there.

    • Participation with China's economy is approval of ....

      No it's not. That is Trumpian BS. Tariffs are terrible way to shape the behavior of the Chinese. They just isolate the US from the world economy and make China stronger. Not to mention that the Chinese are simply better at this game than the current US administration is. Engagement with China has so far prevented them from shooting others, including us, and taking their stuff, which Trump does not seem to realize is the primary goal. Despite some inhumane treatment here and there, an integrated world

      • Absolutely correct. Pulling back from globalization, despite its problems, and embracing isolationism and excessive nationalism - including that with unrealistic goals - is going to leave the US in a far worse position than the containment strategy which has more or less worked since Nixon.

  • by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @10:39AM (#58590250)
    If you're suspecting someone is going to be spying on you is them signing a bit of paper with a pinky promise they won't really going to help? I'd say not.
    • by bob4u2c ( 73467 )
      It's not like they would sign agreements to cut back on CFC and not enforce them; or agree to trade terms and then go back on everything; or one of the many other things they agreed to and gone back on.

      No, China has cried wolf way too many times for anyone to believe them.
    • There used to be a fox that came by our henhouse, but he promised he'd stop eating our chickens once we caught him. These days our chickens are still disappearing, but the fox—who now keeps regular patrol around our henhouse, to keep them safe—hasn't reported any unusual activity, so I'm not sure who's taking the hens. At least we were able to stop worrying about the fox eating them, right?

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Let's run some mental simulations here.

      Suppose the contract promises a big payoff if they are caught, and they were actually caught with leaky tech. They would probably say it's not done by internal employees and must have been added by "unknown saboteurs" (probably the Chinese gov't).

      But if that doesn't work in the courts, the Chinese gov't would probably bail them out anyhow, perhaps making them a state industry, such that the incentive to stick to the contract is not very strong. Plus, in China if the go

    • If the Chinese government requires Cisco, et. al. to sign the same agreement, will the American companies even dare to sign?

    • Rambus joined JEDEC - a standards body where the different memory manufacturers worked together to hammer out new memory standards, so that everyone could manufacture memory which was compatible. One of the requirements when joining was to promise that you wouldn't patent any of the technologies under discussion. Essential since they were discussing confidential new technologies which were likely to become future standards.

      DDR2 was being discussed at JEDEC. Rambus secretly patented it. When the dust
  • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @10:43AM (#58590286)

    It is one thing to sign a piece of paper, but being if Huawei violates the agreement, these countries will have to fight the Chinese Legal system, which Huawei would be violating the agreement, for Chinese, self interest.

    This is part of the problem with the US Trade War right now, Other then the US being run by an Orange Idiot, who doesn't trust the experts, and doesn't want to comprehend the details. Chinese Government controls it companies, and any legal document will need to be enforced by its host country. So If China decided it want Huawei to spy on these countries, it will comply no matter what they sign, and these countries, have only recourse to stop using the products, which is hard for major infrastructure projects like 5G Implementation.

    Other then signing an Agreement, there will need to be a lot of additional steps needed to verify that the products are working as advertised, and are following the word of the agreement, and with appropriate punishment for failure to comply.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      these countries will have to fight the Chinese Legal system

      It would be under their domestic legal system. Huawei has subsidiaries in the EU and US.

      Any contracts they had with Huawei could be voided without penalty, there could be pay-outs from the local subsidiary.

      It's similar to how the EU fines US tech companies - they have operations in Europe, subject to European law, with European assets that can be seized if they don't pay up.

      • But a US company isn't owned by the US. So if Google had it European Assets seized then Google would suffer the brunt of its damage. Vs. China while if it had its Huawei assets seized, it would be a planned "for the grater good" sacrifice for the country.

        A US Company may help the United States Country, but only for so far, if they are going to take a major hit to their bottom line, they will protest and stop, as there is less the US Can do to punish a company for not being patriotic, then what China can do.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Huawei isn't owned by the Chinese government either. This seems to be a common misconception.

          There are two issues with the Chinese government relating to Huawei.

          1. There is a law in China that requires companies to assist the government with spying. It's mostly aimed at domestic spying but in theory could be used for foreign spying. It's similar to laws in the US and UK where the government can request access to stuff or theoretically force the installation of backdoors.

          So while a concern, it's just as much

    • This is part of the problem with the US Trade War right now, Other then the US being run by an Orange Idiot, who doesn't trust the experts, and doesn't want to comprehend the details.

      The trade war has been a long time coming. Unless you're prepared to defend forced technology transfers, mandatory local partners, and large tariff differentials you have to admit that there are very legitimate reasons for the trade war. For decades the US has played along thinking, wrongly, that over time China would moderate. We've sold ourselves out. The "experts" you cite have advised playing along and all we have seen is stagnating US wages and declining standards of living. The experts are clearl

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        This and sadly the political lefts response to Trump's tariffs has been "Derp derp organge man bad, see even the experts agree." Its hard to see them as better when all they want to do is get power back even if it means slamming actual good policy that could help the working class long term.

        Its simple the wage gap has grown since the "opening of china" and "free trade policy' really took off in the late 60s/ early 70s. You can't just waive that away. That and flexible monetary policy are the two most obv

    • by TWX ( 665546 )

      Corporate greed got us here. In Huawei's case it was Cisco's. Cisco took their manufacturing to China/Huawei. Some of Huawei's earliest products post-Cisco blatantly ripped-off Cisco's code; they already knew how to build Cisco's hardware from the previous relationship, but they didn't have the code of their own. Eventually they did supposedly create their own code but initial products actually ran IOS.

      This is only one example. Anyone setting up shop in China to build something leading-edge or otherwis

    • if Huawei violates the agreement, these countries will have to fight the Chinese Legal system, which Huawei would be violating the agreement, for Chinese, self interest.

      And in the meantime, those companies/countries with Huawei products running their 5G networks are stuck with them. This isn't the sort of infrastructure you can just rip out and replace overnight -- you either suffer with it once found to be insecure, or you shut down your networks that use their gear.

      Yaz

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Is that like the promise US cell providers made to stop selling location data.....multiple times?

  • It'll be violated before the ink is dry.

    • Your situation is theoretical. However we know for a fact that the NSA - prohibited by law from spying on us - did exactly that. James Clapper was director of National Intelligence when he lied under oath to Congress and the American people saying we were not spying on innocent Americans. Good thing Scandal Free Obama was in charge and the media didn't care.

      On March 12, 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress that intel officials were not collecting mass data on tens of millio

      • by Chas ( 5144 )

        Theoretical.

        Based on my experience in the last 30 years in dealing with businesses in China.

    • paper & ink? How quaint...

      Here's the Agreement [youtube.com]

    • It'll be violated before it's signed....

  • by Anonymous Coward

    "We promise not to spy one you, but if we lied, it would have been worth it, because we still got your money, and we got to spy on you!"

    Next, the self-inflicting hole-in-the-head.

  • by Tempest_2084 ( 605915 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @10:46AM (#58590316)
    Well that's that then. I'm glad this little problem could be solved so easily. Why didn't anyone think of this before?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    ... that he would not invade Poland. Just before, you know, invading Poland.

  • by swan5566 ( 1771176 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @10:48AM (#58590334)
    If we catch you breaking it, we get to seize your entire company. Still want to play ball?
    • by riley ( 36484 )
      Better idea -- if caught breaking it, the 1.1 trillion dollars of U.S. debt held by the Chinese becomes null and void.
  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @10:55AM (#58590388)
    ... "we won't get caught spying" agreement.
  • Put it next to Zuckerberg's signature on the same topic. We'll ignore both later.

  • Is only valid if they double dog swear.

  • by Sarten-X ( 1102295 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @11:12AM (#58590522) Homepage

    Despite all the political posturing, I really don't think Huawei's executives are speaking in bad faith here. Sure, they'll happily agree not to put backdoors in their products, and they'll likely try to even follow that, too.

    I also don't think it'll make Huawei's products any more secure.

    It just means whatever mid-level manager is getting bribed by the MSS to add backdoors will need to be bribed just a bit more.

    It doesn't make sense to have top-level execs be involved in designing backdoors. They're a vulnerable target, with high visibility. It'd be much more effective to convince a lower-level worker to drop in an extra set of credentials, or to botch a particular bit of code. The country gets their backdoor, the company can claim ignorance, and the worker gets a nice extra paycheck. Everybody's happy.

    Even if a new backdoor is found after the agreements are signed, Huawei's management can claim it's a rogue employee, issue a quick fix, and politely ask MSS to hide a little better. Then they disclose a Cisco vulnerability to change the news cycle, and business continues as usual.

    • That seems a lot more realistic than most of the comments in this discussion.

      At the end of the day, 5G is potentially a huge business opportunity for one of China's biggest companies. If you follow the $$$ (or should that be the ¥¥¥?) then both Huawei and the Chinese government have a strong incentive not to screw this up.

      They know they have a trust issue, and they know there is probably some justification for that. So, it's hard to see them risking that much money, not to mention their future c

      • At the scale involved here, I usually simplify my thought process by assuming the parties have infinite money... With enough cash, anyone can be bribed to do something, but whether they'll actually be able to is more where my focus rests.

        You're also absolutely right, though. There is a huge economic incentive for everyone to play nice, and also to move past previous transgressions. Whoever gets the majority of the 5G rollout will get leverage to essentially dictate how communications technologies will work

  • ...I mean, as long as they promise not to spy, we're fine.

    Someone watch though to make sure they're not crossing their fingers or toes!

  • They can sign whatever 'agreements' they want, and they can keep signing them until the cows come home, and it all means precisely nothing.
  • Are guilty here. China won't even uphold its previous trade agreements for not stealing IP. Why would they not break this one? Also, the USA has said time and time again that they can't do their security without backdoors. This is a firm belief deep in the NSA/CIA/etc. For them even to say that makes you automatically know USA is backdooring everything that is and isn't bolted down. The very fact we can't trust China or USA equipment is reason enough to ban backdoors but both our governments won't do it. An
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Hm. Heh. Hrhh... heh heh heh.... hahahah... hahahahahaha... hahahahAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. If you believe that this will make a difference for even one second, I have a bridge to sell you, and a Nigerian prince's bank account to hook you up with. Huawei will do what their government orders them to. Period. End. Of. Story. They can sign whatever they want, whenever, with whomever, and it won't make a bit of difference.

    We shouldn't be surprised, or even particularly angry at China for doing this. The U.S. has
  • and anyone who believes them is a fucking idiot.

  • Trust is so easy to promise . . .

  • Let's be generous and assume that everyone at Huawei genuinely wants to keep their products spyware-free, and they are 100% planning to keep that commitment going forward.

    Even with that, what happens when the Chinese government quietly taps Huawei on the shoulder and says something along the lines of "you WILL add this little bit of spyware functionality to your products, or else we'll (shut you down / kill your firstborn / throw you all in jail / etc)".

    What does Huawei do then? It's not like they can call

  • An agreement is all well and good. But if the penalty is a fine, they’ll violate away. How about any patents they hold become public domain, and they dissolve their company if they violate the agreement. And the Chinese government has to sign on, and further if they violate China agrees to a block of all Chinese phones. And cancellation of any debt owed by the governments of the world. All of it.
  • Of course, this implies that they were spying before - the willingness to sign a no-spy agreement is telling.

  • Right. NSA is also willing to sign same agreement.
    Huawei is ran by Chinese gov. either directly or indirectly.
    ALL CHINESE companies are owned by COMMUNIST CHINESE GOV.

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