There's not even such a thing as a "US phone" though, is there? Even phones manufactured by US companies like Apple are made in China with Chinese/Taiwanese sourced parts. Google always outsources its Nexus/Pixel devices to third parties like LG and Motorola. Speaking of Motorola, they are now owned by Chinese manufacturer Lenovo, which has also been in hot water lately over spyware and rootkits in their laptops.
I'm of two minds about the announcement. On the one hand, Huawei and ZTE have both been caught installing backdoors and spyware on their devices in the past[1]. On the other hand, the US three letter agencies have a vested interest in US citizens carrying around easily monitored and tracked devices, and they easily find ways around Constitutional protections against spying within their own borders.
I honestly don't know who to believe in this situation.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/4025254/new-phone-who-dis-huawei...
Exactly my thought. US gov't even outsources to private contractors that then subcontract and outsource to China for electronic components including chips that can easily end up in our DOD systems. I wonder if this is more of a money or market thing being pushed by the Existing Oligopoly?
Something doesn't appear to add up completely?
That's easy. And moreover, its a bigger threat. With a Huawei phone, the Chinese government has control over everything from the processor to the userspace software. With a small piece of silicon in a fab, the threat surface is much smaller; they'd have to sneak it in against Apple's will, past all of Apple's American-loyal QA.
In the software world, we tend to think about security as an absolute, because computer logic is absolute. In the real world, security is probabilities. How can you minimize the chance of breach while minimizing costs.
Is Apple's QA workforce mostly American or do they have a lot of Chinese H1Bs? I mean loyalty is a fickle thing.
If the 'threat' was real, that makes as much sense as hardening one door in your house, when you have 4 other doors because "you can't protect against every threat model".
Asking Apple to manufacturer their phones outside of the US is a highly expensive action.
That being said if you don’t control the software, modifying manually a handful of devices doesn’t scale. If you modify all of them the chance that you will be spotted is very high. If you control the software and it is encrypted / not readable, you can backdoor all devices of a whole country. So I can see how it is a step up in term of threat level.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
BLU?
[0] https://www.kryptowire.com/adups_security_analysis.html
[1] https://www.bitsighttech.com/blog/ragentek-android-ota-updat...
But, do they feel above the law? This is certainly a common complaint of South Koreans. These groups are definitely "too big to fail" and they know it. So yes the concentration of power in a few giant firms is remarkable, and not in a good way.
Nope, per recent incidents.
I'd say that is a LOT of influence.
Even if they only had rough suspicions (with rigorous technical underpinnings, just like a security researcher taking their job seriously). The public security community has repeatedly discovered, reported and fixed serious security vulnerabilities without the NSA doing shit all to help out (which is their job) whether they knew about the vulnerability or not, going as far as deliberately pushing back.
The only reason I can see why you'd prefer one argument over the other is if you somehow believe the NSA always has the best interest of the people at heart. But I think we know a little better by now and they might support the people in theory, but there are usually other interests that are bigger and better and more important.
If it was just the NSA saying this I'd be a bit more skeptical. But if the FBI and CIA agree, that seems like sufficient reason to believe that their motives are honest.
My first thought was "Why? Can't they snoop on us with those phones?" Then I thought that they snoop at the network level so I don't think they need anything on the handset to listen in. Maybe I'm wrong about that.
Yes, you should. More than one entity has committed a sin does not make that sin a non-sin.
If China is listening in, then there's a chance I will be denied a visa to visit China or, should I be given a visa and visit, then they can arrest me, etc.
Upsides in either case? None.
So I would rather have China listening in than the US.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/08/daughter-gui-m... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/twelve-days-in-xinjiang-how-chi... [2] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/political-prisoners-chi...
What can China do to someone a US citizen, living in the US, using a Huawei phone? Even if all telephone calls are monitored?
What can the US do to someone in the same situation?
Yes, others are in different circumstances and would make a different choice. Best of course would be to have no mass surveillance system.
Sell personal details like credit card numbers or the SSN to a criminal syndicate.
No one said they would spy to steal state secrets.
Another possibility is identity theft. Read about the scandal involving Australian passports used by Israeli secret services in 2010: http://www.smh.com.au/national/mossad-hit-snares-australians....
That kind of ticky-tack stuff seems more like the work of organized crime ring than a national government of a state like China. Anyway, that stuff is subject to much more prosaic risks, like your being at the mercy of your dentist's office's online security set-up.
> That kind of ticky-tack stuff seems more like the work of organized crime ring
seems like you are idealizing China. I idealize neither and wish my privacy to be wrenched back from the illegal search and seizure of the NSA.
You should be worried about the government who has the power to imprison you.
The US absolutely does make lists of "suspicious" citizens. Just look at what the FBI did to protestors of the keystone pipeline.
Also even if you are not of direct interest to China, what about your friends and colleagues? They can use you as a tool to get to those that you have direct communication with.
What can the US do to someone who's not a citizen, living outside the US, with access to their communications? It's not difficult to find an answer to this. China would do the same to you and you won't be able to fight against it because you're not a citizen of China.
"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist...."
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/08/ice-nypd-ravi-ragbir-cit...
We can have discussions and concerns about the NSA while also recognizing foreign nations pose an equal or worse threat. At least with the NSA there is some hope of reigning them in when they overstep.
Honestly? The response to the Snowden leaks would seem to indicate the opposite.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Certainly China does face national security concerns.
If you are someone working with a military contractor or the government(with any kind of security clearance) I dont think the U.S. would want you using a Chinese phone for obvious reasons
Not that I don't believe this, but can you provide a canonical source to support this claim? I don't keep up with this literature.
Also, the US has blackmailed people, like the FBI attempt to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. We know the US gathers the porn habits of people who it considers might be a threat, including of a US person (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n... ).
So really it's a matter of balancing the odds. The odds are low that either government will care about me. It feels more likely that my life will be upended by a mistake, like what happened with Brandon Mayfield, and a mistake by the US government is far more likely to affect me than a mistake by the Chinese government.
The hypothetical choice is, would I rather have the US or China listening to my phone, if I had to choose one, and "none of the above" was not an option.
It is not easy to assassinate someone in another continent, and I don't live in China.
There's also the chance that the assassination will fail, and even backfire, where the further investigation might reveal agent identities. I'm just not that worthwhile to possibly waste those resources.
(yeah the relationship is more complicated than "hostile" but you get my drift)
For instance Switzerland had some of the most secure and private banking in the world. It was actually a criminal act in Switzerland to reveal the name of an account holder - to anybody, including governments. And so if the US were to request information on a possible US account holder, they would be likely to say no. But given the influence of the US on both Switzerland and on the nations it most heavily depends upon, they've proven themselves unable to say no, and ended up passing all sorts of special laws, just to bend over to US requests that infringed their nation laws and more generally their sovereignty.
Another interesting example with Switzerland is Champagne. Champagne, Switzerland has been making a local wine known as Champagne since the 9th century. Many centuries before the champagne of France even existed. In 2004 the EU told them to stop using the name. And again even if they were likely to say no, they would be unable to do so. As another interesting aside Champagne, using the ubiquitous méthode champenoise, was not invented in France. It was created by an Englishman. What a sordid tale that little drink has!
Would Finland be likely to say no? I don't know - I have very little knowledge of the security arrangements between Finland and the US. Would they be able to say no to the US? Not a chance.
I'd think China, Russia, or Iran would be your best bets if you were seeking countries unlikely to cooperate with US intelligence services.
This seems remarkably unlikely. One would have thought the security industry would have noticed if Huawei had particularly robust security.
Blame North Korea for Sony hack? Nah, no way. Blame Russia for election hacking (even though at most they bought some ads on FB and ran some twitterbots) oh yeah, those manipulative Russians.
You're free to ignore their advice, btw.
It was quite a bit more than "some ads on FB and twitterbots" and to downplay the extent of their actions is disingenuous.
Interestingly WaPo is going counter tight wing as well as left wing predispositions and calling for national voter id.
Or you're saying Americans are so much more deceived and gullible?
The Kochs and the Soroses pump so much more money into manipulating elections what the Russians did was peanuts. People would hardly be complaining if they had instead been on Team Bernie. But since the candidate who could not possibly lose lost a Sure shot, people want and need a ready made answer, enter twitterbots and FB ads.
Anyway, the agreeing narrative phenomenon is most clearly evident in the Assange issue. When he was exposing America's behavior in Europe and the middle east and it also aligned with left ideology, he was a hero, Swedish accusations be damned. Now that his leaks hurt the left, he's a tool of the Russians, of course.
The Kochs (etc) are Americans manipulating the system with their wealth and probably within the law. I resent them for it, but that’s very different from a foreign government attempting to influence the results of a US election. I don’t pretend to know the actual pervasiveness of Russian influence; I’m only saying that your comparison falls flat.
I have to wonder if you might realize this yourself, but choose to ignore it in order to justify your own agenda.
Also, I would be angry with any outcome that was shown to be the result of election tampering. That goes for any candidate, even if I voted for them myself.
Yes. What’s so tricky about that?
Can a Russian, Israeli or Saudi or Mexican citizen in their respective country buy political ads targeting Americans and favoring or disfavoring a particular American candidate for office?
What if they are on vacation in the US?
What if they have jobs in the US, are not citizens, but live here and have an interest in politics?
What if they are here illegally and buy ads favoring or disfavoring a candidate for office?
What if in some cases it was their own money, what if in other cases they were hired by people in their home countries to buy ads?
What if they work in DC and act as foreign agents and pay for lobbying?
Does FB, Tw, etc. track all that?
Yes, lawfully [1]. This is a complicated area of law, which is why foreigners and foreign governments seeking to properly lobby in America hire proper counsel.
It's time to stop this "Russia hacked the Election" non-sense and just accept the fact that Hillary lost in a fair election.
You are very conveniently omitting recent disclosures from facebook that over 126 million Americans may have seen Russia based political posts over a two-year period leading to the election. Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-socialme...
This isn't about a particular candidate winning or losing the election. The case would be equally horrifying if Hillary had won the election with the help of a foreign-state-sponsored social media campaign.
And I would implore you to check out the Ted talk I have posted above. It is not about supporting any particular candidate - it simply talks about how powerful these micro-targeted campaigns can be, and we ignore their potential and their effects on democracy at our own peril.
Just like it didn't matter what the exact process by which GW won the contested election. The very fact that the counts were so close means we might as well have tossed a coin.
All US phones have components manufactured in China as well as all over the world. It is not a stretch to think the foreign governments couldn't get in the middle and create vulnerabilities or straight up drop attacks on different components they have access to. How is Huawei any different?
Are we supposed to take their complaints seriously when Snowden leaks revealed the NSA hacked Huawei servers to find vulnerabilities they themselves could use to spy on people around the world. /shrug operations Shotgiant doesn't matter? If the NSA hack revealed that Huawei was injecting spyware it's time to release the details of how they found out.