'Five Eyes' Spy Chiefs Agreed to Contain Huawei's Global Reach at Meeting in July: Report

[nir]

At a meeting in Canada in July 2018, espionage chiefs from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S.—all signatories to a treaty on signals intelligence, and often referred to as the “Five Eyes”—agreed to do their best to contain the global growth of Chinese telecom Huawei, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing a prior report from the Australian Financial Review.

 

According to the Journal’s report, while the various member countries of the Five Eyes view Huwaei with varying amounts of alarm—the UK is a major buyer of its telecommunications gear—they nonetheless all agreed that the tech giant posed a security risk on the grounds that it could be spying on behalf of the Chinese government:

 

Discussions touched on concerns about China’s cyber espionage capabilities and growing military expansion, people familiar with the meeting said. One focus was how to protect telecommunications networks from outside interference, according to one person familiar with the discussion.

 

Five Eyes members have long had differing levels of concern over Huawei and other Chinese equipment makers. They have also differed sharply in their tolerance for Huawei, in particular, as a supplier to their national telecommunication carriers. The U.S. has all but banned Huawei gear, while U.K. carriers have been big customers. Reflecting that divide, a person familiar with the meeting said participants agreed that an outright ban in many countries was impractical.

 

... After the meeting in Canada, first reported by The Australian Financial Review, some of the typically reticent intelligence officials who were there made unusual public comments about what they saw as a growing threat posed by Huawei.

 

Intelligence officials from the countries involved have, in the past few weeks and months, publicly raised concerns about Huawei without going into much detail about the specifics. Australian Signals Directorate Director-General Mike Burgess warned that the country’s entire transport and utility grids were at risk if 5G networks were open to attack, the Journal wrote, while British Secret Intelligence Service chief Alex Younger said the UK needs to think carefully about whether it trusts Huawei with 5G expansion. Canadian Security Intelligence Service head David Vigneault also raised concerns in general about “increased state-sponsored espionage in fields such as 5G,” but did not go into specifics, the paper added.

 

U.S. intelligence officials have been raising the alarm about Huawei since well before the meeting, and have asked allies to follow their lead and shut out the company from roles in building out 5G networks. The Journal wrote that German officials in particular were skeptical, citing a lack of evidence to back the warnings:

 

The U.S. has been pressuring German authorities for months to drop Huawei, according to people familiar with the matter, but the Germans have asked for more specific evidence to demonstrate the security threat.

 

German authorities and telecom executives have yet to turn up any evidence of security problems with Chinese equipment vendors, according to a person familiar with the matter.

 

However, the paper also added that Deutsche Telekom AG, Germany’s largest telecom, was reviewing its procurement strategy given global concerns about the “security of network elements from Chinese manufacturers.”

 

The Associated Press reported on Sunday that the response from Five Eyes countries and their allies has significantly slowed Huawei’s global expansion, despite the company’s denials that anything shady is going on:

 

Australia and New Zealand have barred Huawei Technologies Ltd. as a supplier for fifth-generation networks. They joined the United States and Taiwan, which limit use of technology from the biggest global supplier of network switching gear. Last week, Japan’s cybersecurity agency said Huawei and other vendors deemed risky will be off-limits for government purchases.

 

There is some skepticism as to whether Huawei truly is an espionage threat (which it has repeatedly denied) or whether the suspicions are a pretext to try and blunt the growth of Chinese competition to Western firms.

 

“There never has been any actual proof,” Andrew Kitson, head of technology industry research for Fitch Solutions, told the AP. “They’ve only got to make a few insinuations for other governments to sit up and think, hang on, even if there is no proof, it is too much of a risk.”

 

The company is the world leader in mobile network gear, particularly in Asia, Africa, and Europe, comprising 28 percent of the $32 billion market in global sales in 2017. Per the AP, there are concerns that excluding Huawei could raise prices and slow innovation, as countries that bar the company from government-funded network expansions may be forced to largely rely on just two major competitors: Ericsson (27 percent) and Nokia (23 percent). Other companies in the market include Chinese manufacturer ZTE and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Corp, the AP noted, but ZTE has faced much the same pushback as Huawei.

 

Huawei has also been in the headlines recently due to Meng Wanzhou, its chief financial officer and the daughter of its founder Ren Zhengfei. Canadian authorities recently detained Meng at the behest of U.S. authorities seeking her extradition on accusations she portrayed a de facto Huawei subsidiary, the Hong Kong-based Skycom, as an independent company in order to trick Western financial institutions into processing transactions related to attempted sales of embargoed HP telecommunications gear to Iran.

 

As the U.S. and China are also locked in a trade war that is now in the middle of a shaky truce, the detention is escalating tensions between the two countries at a less than ideal time. China has warned of “grave consequences” if Meng is not released, while there were rumors some White House officials planned on using her as a sort of bargaining chip during negotiations.

 

“This is something that’s definitely concerning Huawei at this stage, because there is a political angle to it and a business angle,” Nikhil Bhatra, a senior researcher for International Data Corporation, told the AP.

 

Source

[BioHazard]

It seems that the "potential security risk' is merely hypothetical, not proven. It's the Chinese political system and not the technology. 

It's the equivalent of we don't trust China, so don't buy their stuff. You can't be more xenophobic than that.

With the revelations of Edward Snowden and the capitulatory compliance of Apple to the NSA and FBI, the world should be wary of Apple products as well.

[steven36]

2 hours ago, BioHazard said:

With the revelations of Edward Snowden and the capitulatory compliance of Apple to the NSA and FBI, the world should be wary of Apple products as well.

Why do you use Apple products then ?  I never have now 5 eyes are blocking Huawei you going to pull the Snowden card out on something you use .   i use open source  Linux  mostly ,  When push comes to shove  open source  are  the only ones that are going  to tell 5 eyes to stick it .

 

Quote

My question to the Microsoft representative was whether she’d be allowed to disclose if there are deliberate back doors in their systems, in the event that there are. She never responded to that question, but obviously, she didn’t have to. From other sources, we know that the NSA always prohibits the private companies they force into cooperation from disclosing any of it.

 

Quote

When my oldest son [Linus Torvalds] was asked the same question: “Has he been approached by the NSA about backdoors?” he said “No”, but at the same time he nodded. Then he was sort of in the legal free. He had given the right answer, [but] everybody understood that the NSA had approached him.

 

The story does not tell us how Linus Torvalds responded to the NSA, but I’m guessing he told them he wouldn’t be able to inject backdoors even if he wanted to, since the source code is open, and all changes to it are reviewed by many independent people. After all, that’s the whole point of open source code, and the reason that open source is the only kind you can trust when it comes to security.

 

 

 

https://falkvinge.net/2013/11/17/nsa-asked-linus-torvalds-to-install-backdoors-into-gnulinux/

 

Quote

 

Signal announced on Thursday that it would not be able to comply with access requests. It claims that it is not because it doesn’t want to, but that it just can’t due to the design of its messaging app.

 

“By design, Signal does not have a record of your contacts, social graph, conversation list, location, user avatar, user profile name, group memberships, group titles or group avatars,” said Signal’s Joshua Lund in the company’s blog. “The end-to-end encrypted contents of every message and voice/video call are protected by keys that are entirely inaccessible to us.”

 

Furthermore, since Signal is open-source and available on GitHub, there is no way to “hide a backdoor” in the software, even if the government demanded it. The only option is to ban the software outright, but as Lund points out, this does not usually go well.

 

https://www.techspot.com/news/77873-signal-not-complying-australia-access-assistance-law.html

 

Anything closed source regardless of were it's  made is most likely backdoored  and the USA know this because Big Tech have been working  with NSA and the FBi all along and that's  why they paranoid that others are doing it , they don't need proof  because they invented  Cyber spying the NSA been around  for  a 100 years under different names 5 eyes government had the internet since the 1960s  many years before they made the www so they invented that too .

 

Five eyes cracked the Enigma encryption way back in World War II  so this is nothing new too them , just now instead of breaking it  they backdoor it because now days its much harder to break..

 

World War II encryption tactics: How the Enigma failed

https://www.itworld.com/article/2725605/virtualization/world-war-ii-encryption-tactics--how-the-enigma-failed.html

 

NSA  even broke  encryption  on early file sharing software we used in the early 2000s.

 

NSA Broke the Encryption on File-Sharing Apps Kazaa and eDonkey

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/13/nsa-broke-the-encryption-on-file-sharing-apps-kazaa-and-edonkey/

 

 

[BioHazard]

for me personally I don't care what I use. I use both iPhone and android as mobile and windows as desktop.

and not doing anything illegal    

[steven36]

4 minutes ago, BioHazard said:

 

and not doing anything illegal    

You don't need to tell me that i don't care  if you do anything illegal , you need to tell  that to your Government  who  was spying on you when downloading because there not called 5 eyes  just because the NSA.

 

CSE tracks millions of downloads daily: Snowden documents

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cse-tracks-millions-of-downloads-daily-snowden-documents-1.2930120

[knowledge-Spammer]

removed befor mods do it

[knowledge-Spammer]

removed befor mods do it

[BioHazard]

 

On 12/17/2018 at 4:41 AM, knowledge said:

Collateral damage

 

China arrested our citizen is not acceptable while we  kidnapped chinese citizen. It is a rule of law. 😂

[knowledge-Spammer]

removed befor mods do it