Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Political Opponents

Re:Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Poli... by ivanhoe on Thursday August 15, 2019 @04:01AM (#20703425)

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...

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Re:Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Poli... by close04 on Thursday August 15, 2019 @04:42AM (#20703586)

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.

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Re:Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Poli... by cm2187 on Thursday August 15, 2019 @06:55AM (#20704087)

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!

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Re:Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Poli... by close04 on Thursday August 15, 2019 @07:23AM (#20704187)

> 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.

[0] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-israel...

[1] https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/report-saudi-arabia...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/17/how-us-sur...

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Re:Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Poli... by waterdownship on Thursday August 15, 2019 @04:19PM (#20709211)

Cisco allegedly helped China built their surveillance system in the first place.

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Re:Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Poli... by wil421 on Thursday August 15, 2019 @07:38AM (#20704256)

There’s a giant empty Huawei building in Belgrade. Someone didn’t pay off the correct government official. I suppose the Israelis did.

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Re:Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Poli... by arcticfox on Thursday August 15, 2019 @09:27AM (#20704960)

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.

These are totally different players.

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Re:Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Poli... by squarefoot on Thursday August 15, 2019 @05:40PM (#20709968)

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.

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