> Some officials feel that the sales violate the spirit of the law and undermine government efforts to pressure Huawei, while others are more supportive because it lightens the blow of the ban for American corporations.
It clearly does violate the spirit of the law and undermines government efforts, potential jeopardizing US national security. However, any corporations that legally circumvent this ban will have a competitive advantage, leading other corporations to follow.
This is all about the trade war. The espionage pretext is just that: a pretext. US wants to keep everybody hostage to its military, its technology and its economy.
This is not something new. The only change is that now the US admin uses a kind of zero tolerance policy and I believe it will fire back.
The free trade is replaced by America First trade: we have the biggest military power and economy so you do it our way or you deal with the consequences.
Personally I believe the policy reflects Trump's personality.
While I agree with you, I would also like to point out that to protect our economy President George W Bush’s administration came up with the ‘axis of evil’ to economically fight three oil producing countries who had announced willingness to trade oil for currencies other than the US dollar. I think this is close to the same thing, really. Using our military might and pressure on allies to maintain an advantage.
I personally believe that we must spend less on our military and more on education, new technologies, more efficient industrial systems, have firm but fair laws governing corporations. Capitalism can work long term if we have laws that are guardrails on what corporations can do and fight hard to be competitive with other countries on merits, not coercion.
You're not going to get rid of espionage. NSA has been doing this for years. The ban is purely a battle for who has more power and control. In the end, the user loses no matter what. Someone will be watching.
Of course espionage will continue and international rivals will resort to dirty tactics, this is a given. The only question is whose side you're on. I am surprised when US citizens or people of nations aligned with the US are critical of the US defending itself against foreign espionage.
Shoring up the US economy is in everyone's interest up to a certain point ofcourse everyone is exposed to US debt- but when the US starts imposing tariffs to keep out other countries expect criticism.
> people of nations aligned with the US are critical of the US defending itself
As an european, I properly couldn't care less about US defending itself, there is no higher moral ground compared to say China (Russia is a special case). We know about all the dirty unlawful watching, how we are considered less than american citizens in many ways etc.
I mean we all get why you guys do it, it just has the same moral ground as Chinese doing it
I got a pretty good laugh out of you saying Russia is a special case (special because you're European). Different moral ground when it's a direct military threat in your own backyard.
Unlike most/all countries in Europe, the US has truly global security interests. As the sole superpower it is in long-term security / defense partnerships all over the world, including in Asia, which pertains directly to the China situation. As the most prominent example, the world's third largest economy - Japan - has no real ability to defend itself from China in a conflict and depends almost entirely on the US for military security (including the US nuclear umbrella).
Are the Europeans going to all rush to Asia to defend Japan and or South Korea in a conflict? No. They're not going to lift a finger to do anything (protest at the UN perhaps), and more realistically can't do anything even if they wanted to. So should the US abandon Japan re defense, pretend we have no security interest there at all? I don't think so.
So no, it's not just the same as China doing it. That's merely the perspective of a European with only regional (the Russian special case) security concerns.
North Korea and South Korea are also not on the same moral ground.
The US do a pretty bad job of being world police and have a bad habit of invading countries, changing the regime, then leaving the country to rot into anarchy.
Yes the US defends its allies, don't you think that China defends its allies too? The real test of a nation is how it treats nations for which it has a grievance with.
The claim that dealing with Huawei "jeopardizes US national security" has little factual support. It is a political propaganda initiated in the Trump circle. Shame on those who perpetuate it, and shame on those who believe in it.
There is so much evidence Huawei are a bad actor, and probably marching in lockstep with the Chinese government, that it has it's own very long Wikipedia page:
You should read this wiki in its entirety bef you use it as evidence to support the claim. It cites patent infringements, IP thefts, and then allegations by China's political enemies about the possible backdoors in its equipments. Huawei equipments may have vulnerabilities, but that doesn't constitute evidence that it has malicious intention to spy on its customers. Many Western telecom make unsafe products with different degree of vulnerability. How come they don't raise the same degree of concerns
Yeah, this was the gist of my comments the last time I posted re:Huawei on HN. You can either have the US backdoor your network, or you can have China backdoor your network. Which you chose is based on your risk assessment of which state actor poses the greatest threat to your operations (whether those are business, personal, or even military in nature hardly matters).
Well there is evidence that Chinese spied on African Union's members through the servers they installed. Tangential, i know, but would it be that crazy to expect them to do the same if they had full access to a 5G network without fear being caught? Especially with US or EU were the secrets they would be able to gather would be far greater. I mean I trust the Chinese less than US on their espionage standards, yet US still spies on its allies and enemies.
And yet the British vet the code and hardware of Huawei components used in UK networks and, apart from sloppy coding, haven't found anything that backs up the "state sanctioned espionage" claims so breathlessly made by certain quarters.
It may be a bad actor in the sense of an aggressive tech giant employing unconventional means to make profit and take market share. But there is zero evidence in the wiki that Huawei is a national security threat. The only evidence it's a national security threat is that it is a Chinese company.
I know it seems that way; it's a common perception, which is why these posts are so common. But we've learned from long experience that in nearly all cases, it's an optical illusion coming from a cognitive bias, which we almost certainly all share (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). The trouble is that the resulting accusations poison the community in their own right.
If you read back through some of the posts I linked to you'll see tons of commentary about that.
People assuming that someone with opposing views must be disingenuous, astroturfing, a shill, or bad-faith actor, is so common on the internet, including HN, that it is probably a cognitive bias we all suffer from. I've written about this a ton, and we do everything we can to counteract the toxic effect this bias has on discussion. But that doesn't make it ok to lash back at someone.
I'd appreciate staying away from personal attacks on HN. If you have a case to make, then flagging the user is the best way to do it. Emotions are clearly running high on US - China relations and it's pretty hard to find the signal through all the noise. Calling people out in public doesn't help things.
I just realize what you're implying here. You think only China state-controlled "bots", or some China govt sponsored actors would be posting comments like what I posted here, right? OMG, if that's what you think, you really need to get out to other part of the world and ask people what they think of this whole Huawei attack. You'd be surprised how many people think the bad actor here is the US govt.
I'm so glad you ask. I certainly have an "agenda". That agenda is to give a balanced view on what currently is a completely one-sided criticism of Huawei. Since Trump started the trade war on China, every piece of US media coverage of Huawei is negative, portraying it as the greatest evil on earth. That sounds very coincidental and suspicious, does it?
If Huawei has been such a bad actor, how come there were hardly much coverage before Trump trade war. It's been around during the Obama administration, during the G W Bush administration, it was already a rising tech startup during the Clinton admin. How come no one noticed it's spying on its customers and other "terrible" behavior? and no one took issue with it?
So, answering your question, having follow HN for a short while, I actually feel there is a hidden agenda in the many of the comments here in HN, and that agenda seems suspicious aligned with the Trump administration foreign policy.
lol just guessing. Chinese immigrants are likely to comment on China related issues and hold dramatically different viewpoints from most westerners, who are blind-sided by the misinformation spread by their media
The fact it is a Chinese company is all the evidence needed. Huawei is subject to China's 2015 National Security Law, which grants the Chinese government the power to force Chinese companies to provide assistance in matters of national security. In other words, if Chinese intelligence wanted Huawei to secretly introduce a backdoor, it would be a legal order and unlawful for Huawei to resist. What makes you think the US needs to have evidence beyond that when this impacts critical infrastructure and national security? Why take the risk?
That would be an argument for not allowing Huawei to supply equipment for the US 5G network.* It is not, however, an argument for banning American companies from doing business with Huawei.
As the American head of the US-China Business Council said, it's one thing to ban Huawei from the US, but banning American companies from selling equipment to Huawei is more like "murder": https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/06/11/trump-trying-to-murder...
* An analogous argument could be used, of course, by other countries to justify banning American hardware in their own critical systems.
I am curious. Would the same be true for CSIRO? Considering that Austalia has introduced laws requiring any company to provide them with a backdoor that does not notify the user and the developer is essentially under a gag-order?
The "evidence" against Huawei always seems to be two cases that it settled 15+ years ago, plus the "Tappy" robot a few years back. They also may have indirectly done business with Iran, but they're a Chinese company, so doing business with Iran was legal under the laws of their country.
Respond to the strongest version of the argument, not a straw man. My meaning was obvious.
The above commenter pointed to the existence of a "very long Wikipedia page" criticizing Huawei as evidence that Huawei is a "bad actor." These sorts of "Criticism of" pages exist for many companies. Many of those pages are far more extensive than the page for Huawei. Are all those companies also "bad actors"? The existence of such a page in itself means nothing.
If you actually look at the "Criticism of Huawei" page, it contains no evidence that Huawei has installed backdoors in its equipment. There are the accusations of the US government, and various vulnerabilities that have been discovered over time (and patched), but vulnerabilities and backdoors are different things.
Then there are the various IP disputes. Tell me: which major tech company has not had multiple IP disputes over the past 20 years? The disputes that Huawei has been involved in are pretty minor, and the largest ones were 15+ years ago.
We're in the middle of a moral panic, in which suddenly, were being bombarded by messages that Huawei and China are the worst things in the history of the planet. Huawei is a "bad actor," whatever that's supposed to mean. Google stole Oracle's copyrighted Java API? Samsung violated Apple's design patents and has to pay half a billion dollars? Small potatoes. But Huawei copied Cisco's implementation of strcmp 15 years ago? Bad actor!
It clearly does violate the spirit of the law and undermines government efforts, potential jeopardizing US national security. However, any corporations that legally circumvent this ban will have a competitive advantage, leading other corporations to follow.