Tag Archives: Huawei

Playing us for suckers.

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Huawei NZ has offered to only use NZ citizens to install its 5G equipment as part of the national broadband upgrade. It does so because of concerns about a revised Chinese National Intelligence Law that requires all Chinese citizens and firms to serve the interests of state security. Prior to now, many of the technicians involved in installing Huawei equipment around the world were and are Chinese citizens. After the GCSB advised against using Huawei in the NZ 5G roll-out citing national security concerns and publicizing of the Chinese intelligence law requirement of its citizens, Huawei NZ decided to allay fears by offering to use Kiwi technicians instead.

This is akin to ISIS using white females to deliver package bombs. It is not the method of delivery that matters but the content of what is being delivered.

Huawei technicians in NZ may or may not know what “backdoors” or other bulk collection or data mining filters are embedded in the equipment that they install. That comes from the source, and when it comes to Huawei the source is intimately bound up with the Chinese state and its ruling party. Huawei is not a publicly traded company. Instead, it is a state capitalist enterprise and the CCP has a major role in its direction. Its technical arm is believed by Western intelligence agencies to have close ties to Chinese signals intelligence, which given the intelligence law’s requirement on Chinese firms is part but not all of the reason that Huawei has been banned from 5G roll-outs in Australia, NZ and the US.

Western telecommunications firms also install backdoors in their equipment. Those are used to, via bulk collection and data mining, ascertain customer preferences with an eye to selling advertising. According to Western security agencies, the difference between them and Huawei and its Chinese counterpart ZTE is that the former do not work hand in glove with intelligence agencies and in fact (especially after the Snowden revelations about bulk collection of domestic communications in Western democracies) require warrants from security courts in order to access encrypted communications on private networks.

So the argument goes that Western telecommunications firms install backdoors in their equipment in order to enhance commercial profitability while Huawei and ZTE install backdoors in order to serve Chinese intelligence. This includes collecting political, economic, military, diplomatic, commercial and intellectually proprietary information that extend well beyond aggregating and selling consumer preference data.

That is a big difference that the nationality of the technicians doing the installing of such equipment cannot obscure. Perhaps the Huawei NZ management think the NZ public are gullible enough to believe that the citizenship of technicians is the reason the GCSB advised against using it as a supplier.

When it comes to who to believe in a contest between NZ profit-seekers and national security professionals, especially when the profit-seekers are backed by an aggressive authoritarian state that regularly violates international norms, my inclination on this particular matter is to believe the security professionals, warts and all.

Which Way, Huawei? (With postscript).

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All internet architecture has the potential for use as a Signals Intelligence Intercept platform (SIGINT). Data mining already occurs at the mid-range of  IT frameworks, such as when Facebook collects personal information on users for consumer research (or more nefarious) purposes. Cell phones have GPS trackers, which requires software. The range of data-mining already at play in the commercial field is extensive. It therefore should come has no surprise that States also have an interest in data-mining, but for military, diplomatic and intelligence purposes.

If mid-level IT platforms such as FB and numerous other private agents can data-mine extensively with or without the consent of those whose personal information is being accessed, then it stands to reason that providing the basic support infrastructure for IT operations gives the provider even more opportunities at such. In a liberal market environment there are standards of conduct and protocols developed to restrict the unfettered access to private information. But what happens when a state capitalist enterprise is the provider of basic IT infrastructure?

In market capitalist systems the state serves the interests of capitalists by framing the legal and governance frameworks so as to encourage competition on an ostensibly level regulatory playing field. In state capitalist systems capitalists serve the interests of the state above and beyond their particular commercial interests. This is seen in European fascism, Latin American national populism, and in Asian developmentalism such as that of Singapore.

Huawei is the product of a state capitalist system. It was founded by and is led by former PRC intelligence officers. Although Huawei claims to be 100 percent employed owned, that is true only because the one-party authoritarian regime than rules China continues to maintain that it is Communist, which means that all employees are owners. Huawei has been designated as one of the seven national economic treasures that are considered to be essential strategic assets for Chinese power projection, and as such are subject to the strategic dictates of the ruling party. All of this is well known, and having independent local Huawei operators fronted by non-Chinese managers cannot disguise that fact, particularly when all of the components and associated hardware are engineered and made in the PRC.

The US and Australia have decided to bar Huawei from providing IT technologies to strategically important sectors of their IT markets. The US specifically excludes Huawei from any defense or security related contracts, and for that reason Symantec decided to sell its interest in Huawei USA. The Australians feel that their National Broadband Network (NBN) is too precious an asset to be opened to Huawei. They say they have their reasons, and that those reasons have to do with national security.

NZ has just signed off on several broadband infrastructure contracts with Huawei. The question is whether those responsible for the decision were aware of the US and Australian position and if so, why they choose to ignore it. The UK and Canada have allowed Huawei civilian IT contracts, which is important because they are part of the Echelon SIGINT and TECHINT network that binds the “5 eyes” parties together (along with the US, Australia and NZ). In the UK Huawei was awarded contracts for civilian IT, but that was followed by the government communications security agency running an extensive and costly forensics accounting of Huawei systems in order to ensure its cyber security, and even then cannot guarantee that the system is safe as far as covert “backdoor” entryways are concerned. This had something to do with the Australian decision.

95 percent of attempted probes into US corporate and security IT systems originate in the PRC. In the PRC all internet access is tightly controlled and monitored. Huawei is a leading provider of the IT systems used in the PRC, to include the firewalls used to censor foreign content and the tracking devices used to monitor internal dissent. Although all of this is circumstantial, this is the non-classified reason why US security agencies have decided that the company serves as a SIGINT front for the PRC. Add to that concerns about Huawei activities in foreign SIGINT gathering, and what you have is a reason to ban it from competing for security related contracts.

Of course, this could all be a corporate driven plot to preserve market share in the face of superior Chinese efficiency. Or, it could be racism. Or it could be part of the Trilateral Commission efforts to extend its world hegemony. I am agnostic on the exact reasons, but whatever they are, I sure do hope that someone in the National government was briefed by the GCSB and/or SIS on what they were. After all, as full intelligence partners with the US and Australia, one would think that these agencies would have received some of the classified details of why the US and OZ have their doubts about Huawei, and that these agencies would have dutifully reported to at least the Minister for Security and Intelligence, John Key, on the nature of these concerns.

Mind you, if the concerns about cyber espionage are true, I do not fault the PRC a bit for doing so. As an emerging great power with global economic interest and no intelligence sharing network such as Echelon on which to rely (unless one thinks that intelligence sharing with North Korea and Burma is a good counterpart to Western intelligence networks), then the PRC must–and I do mean MUST–develop its own human, signal and technical intelligence capabilities in the measure that its global interests grow. That is just the way the game is played in international security affairs.

The major sea lanes of communication between Latin American and Australasian primary good and raw material suppliers and the Chinese mainland pass through the South Pacific. It would therefore be remiss of the PRC not to seek to ensure the security of these vital channels, and one part of doing so is to have a better intelligence “grip” on what goes on in the countries through and in which they are situated. To put it in Brooklyn-ese: they gotta do what they gotta do because no one else is gonna do it for them.

That is why it would be helpful to hear a “please explain” response from Mr. Key on the matter.

Postscript: It turns out that as early as 2008 the concerns of NZ intelligence partners about Huawei were discussed in US embassy cables from Canberra (which were sent to the US embassy in Wellington, among other places). In 2010 the SIS and GCSB informed him that they could not guarantee that the broadband infrastructure would not be compromised if Huawei was awarded the UFB contract. For reasons as of yet unexplained, he choose to ignore the warnings. As it also turns out, India and South Korea have banned Huawei from critical IT infrastructure projects. Thus it seems that concerns about Huawei are not just a Western plot born of anti-Chinese xenophobia and a desire to protect market share for western businesses, but part of a wider conspiracy amongst China-haters of all stripes. Mr Key, however, is not one of those, and his meetings with Huawei executives at the 2010 Shanghai Expo is proof of that. (Note to readers: all of this has been discussed in the NZ mainstream media the past week, and the 2008 embassy cables were published by Wikileaks).