[LINK] What's Behind the Huawei Fracas

[Glen Turner]

On Wed, 2012-03-28 at 17:56 +1100, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> Where I become sceptical, Roger, is not "can a device collect data?" but 
> "can it phone home without detection?"

Equipment manufacturers of transmission systems have a huge amount of
access to deployed kit. The level of manufacturer support for these
systems is pretty full-on and it's not uncommon (once or twice a year)
for the manufacturer to tell you of a particularly obscure fault in your
equipment and to have already shipped you a replacement card.

Transmission systems take a long time to plan, and that planning is very
tied to the details of the equipment used, so there is a large amount of
involvement from the equipment manufacturer from the very start.
Transmission systems are not like an IP router or ethernet switch where
you can swap out one manufacturer for another with relative ease.

So a purchaser is very much placing themselves into the hands of their
supplier. As Nortel customers learnt.

The blunt question is: in a confrontation between China and Australia,
would Huawei respond to its customers or its government. The answer is
unquestionably that they would respond to the Chinese government.

In this determination Huawei have done themselves no favours -- it took
the best part of a decade to learn who their owners were, and there's
still no great certainty about where the control of the company lies.
It's inescapable that the company is the child of the Chinese military /
intelligence complex (although you could say the same of many US
computing firms).

Huawei have also spied on US companies in the past, and victims like
Cisco Systems aren't about to let the US government forget that. And
sure, there's some commercial self interest there. But there's also a
fair whack of anger and a fair whack of concern that such spying hasn't
stopped but has simply become more sophisticated.

If your view of the future may include a confrontation between Australia
and China then having Huawei control a major infrastructure isn't wise.
This isn't the same as China owning a mine -- a stroke of a
nationalising pen can fix that. This isn't the same as
non-infrastructure electronics, such as 3G USB modems.

-glen