Huawei president Ren Zhengfei: We won't spy on US even if Chinese law requires us to, what backdoors?

[xeni]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/20/huawei-president-we-wont-sp.html

In his first U.S. TV interview, Ren Zhengfei describes Huawei as “a tomato” crushed between two superpowers.

[Wanderfound]

@xeni

In recent months, intelligence officials in the United States have raised concerns over Huawei’s capacity to backdoor its devices to help China spy on Americans.

From 2014:

Reports: NSA hacked into servers at Huawei headquarters

The operation, code-named “Shotgiant,” was to try to establish long-suspected links between Huawei and the PLA, and also to plant backdoors on Huawei equipment sold worldwide, according to the Times .

Among the information cited by newspaper was a 2010 document detailing Shotgiant operations. However, covert operations against Huawei go as far back as 2007, The New York Times report said. The NSA also monitored communications of Huawei executives, the report said.

One goal of Shotgiant was to place backdoors on Huawei technology in order to monitor communications on network equipment acquired by the company’s customers, which include U.S. allies and adversaries, according to the report.

[Papasan]

We won’t spy on US even if Chinese law requires us to

Roger That!

[FFabian]

various US tech companies:

We wont spy on foreigners even if US Three-Letter agencies tell us to.

Roger that!

In other news:

Google admits Nest security product has a secret mic, insists it wasn't supposed to be a secret

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/20/internet-of-ears.html …

[anothernewbbaccount]

I think Mandy Rice-Davies applies here.

"Well he would say that wouldn’t he."

[anotherone]

There have been many extraordinary claims about their hardware and an extraordinary lack of evidence to support those claims.

Unless one has bias based on the nationality of Zhengfei and Huawei, one should expect evidence to backup these claims.

[andrewlwood]

I mean, this is nonsense, of course. He absolutely would follow the law or he’d be out of business in a shot, and possibly disappeared soon after.

In my four years living in China, the biggest misunderstanding of the west I saw in some otherwise very, very smart and enlightened zhongguo ren is that western civilians treat their media with substantially less credulity than the Chinese.

I think Ren might be surprised at how little impact his comments ultimately have; that or he doesn’t care.

[Slant]

I’m prepared to forgive them, provided that, 20 or so years from now, when the truth finally comes out, they simply confess that they meant to let us know all along that they were in fact spying all that time.