<p><pre><code> In the U.S., military espionage is heroic and economic espionage is a crime. In China, the line is not that clear.
</code></pre>
Let me say this: BULLSHIT, a thousand times.<p>Who says this? Any of the companies who have been lying to their customers? Any of the government agencies which have not explained anything about the NSA activities (not that they would know what is going on)? Any of the officials caught lying, one and again?<p>The US will not perform economic espionage as long as the US has a technological edge (which is probably not anymore the case in lots of areas).<p>Which brings us to an important observation: OCDE rules forbidding economic espionage are designed to keep the current technological status quo; any country is well advised to sign them to be accepted to the club, and immediately throw the rules to the garbage bin. Because we can be sure that any country capable of doing economic espionage has been doing it, is doing it, and will continue to do it, no matter the rules, no matter if they get caught, no matter the hypocrital public posturing of their leaders.<p>Those rules, and the whole "Intellectual Property" apparatus, is there for the suckers to respect them. The US, in particular, has never respected those rules.
Is it just me or does this seem to be a tortured argument - the US suggested that huawei might be implementing backdoors in their product out of the box, is not the same thing as the US security agency actively searching for exploits for the product. One is a collaborative effort to sell someone a defective product (could be fraud) the other is a adversarial effort that is a natural part of the security industry cycle.
It's important to note that during the USG vs Huawei discussions there were no actual proofs brought by the USG about the allegations it pressed on Huawei. Huawei even wrote an open letter just two years ago asking for investigation and denying all the allegations <a href="http://www.huawei.com/ilink/en/about-huawei/newsroom/press-release/HW_092875" rel="nofollow">http://www.huawei.com/ilink/en/about-huawei/newsroom/press-r...</a><p>Later on Huawei testified before the US House
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApQjSCUpt4s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApQjSCUpt4s</a><p>To my knowledge, no response has been made by USG justifying the allegations it was making when it was openly called by Huawei. Given all of this, I find it ironic the comments here such as "backdoors in Huawei's devices" are taken for granted. Now with the latest leaks exposing hacking by the USG itself the tone of the conversation (including the comments in HN) has not changed. What am I missing?<p>The only noticeable change seems was the decreased tone of the US media (CNN alikes) who used to shout extremely loud that <i>'Those Chinese are hacking our systems!'</i>. At the very least frequency of such news got decreased ever since the leaks.
Why do you think the US was so concerned about buying gear from China? They just realized that since they're doing it, China is probably doing it as well.
I guess at this point, its fair to ask all those previous commenters who were telling us: "It just doesn't work like that.. We were in the dept of defense.. you guys don't understand" to comment..
The consistently frustrating thing about all these 'revelations' is that the US government allegedly do it only for national security concerns where as other nations does it for corporate espionage.
Messing with the manufacturing base for maybe 80% of all USA non-food goods is probably a very bad idea.<p>Sure we can open source our router software for review but what if their hacks are right in the chips being made in China.<p>Don't US fighter jets and bombers use some electronics made in China too?