Obama & NSA vs. China & Huawei?
So, the U.S. government is warning allies not to use network and wireless equipment from China’s Huawei Technologies. Uncle Sam has concerns Huawei’s equipment could be used for spying. Does Nobody See Apparent irony here? Hmmm…
The VAR Guy typically doesn’t jump into political discussions. But this was too tempting a topic to pass up. The Obama Administration, according to the Dec. 4 Wall Street Journal, has been raising concerns with government officials in South Korea — which plans to deploy an advanced wireless network using Huawei’s equipment.
According to the article: The U.S. is worried Huawei’s equipment may allow China to spy. American military personnel using Huawei-based networks could also find their communications compromised, the article alleged.
Huawei has repeatedly denied such claims, but the company has had plenty of run-ins with the U.S. government as well as Cisco Systems. The disputes have involved intellectual property, spying and other concerns.
Despite the controversy, Huawei seems to be catching on in the United States, where major distributors such as Synnex now offer the company’s networking products.
What the U.S. govt. did (in
What the U.S. govt. did (in excluding the Chinese techs) is supremely unfair competition. Beijing would have no alternative but respond in kind. Already the Big 6 (Cisco, IBM, Qualcomm, Microsoft, etc.) saw sales in China drop like a rock. If Huawei and ZTE are blocked from the U.S. market, there really is no justification to allow the American techs to profit in or from China – especially in view of the proven and still ongoing outright THEFT of data by the NSA and other alphabet soup agencies.
Beijing is far behind the curve in legislation. At the least China should adopt the personal privacy protection laws recently promulgated in Europe (expected to harvest many hundreds of Billions in fines against the big U.S. techs such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and others). Moreover there should be explicit laws criminalizing the NSA type malfeasance, and which punishes the techs which collaborate. US$1 per byte stolen, trebled? Treble damages can also be calculated on the size the project, or the actual damages suffered, if any, whichever one is higher. There should also be mandatory jail term.
What is good must be universal.
Zhuubaajie: Toss in the fact
Zhuubaajie: Toss in the fact that Cisco is now investigating alleged NSA activity involving Cisco’s networking gear, and the situation becomes all the more dramatic… -jp