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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Slightly better source:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-trump-telecommu...

seeing the reasoning includes violations against ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) its difficult to see how the US isnt creating some sort of whipping boy for its own agenda. Bluecoat, Intel, IBM, and hundreds of other companies have been accused of ITAR violations as well yet were not subjected to a 7 month long PR campaign from Washington to ablate them from the economic playing field. This feels like telco's flexing their close relationship to washington and pushing for a scorched-earth policy rather than be caught completely unprepared for 5G. "if we cant sell it, you cant have it" sounds rather less like a capitalist nation.

it also bears remembering that none of their CEO's were detained in foreign airports and led to Jail to await US extradition.

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> 7 month long PR campaign

While 5G may be a new front in this battle, US suspicion of Huawei goes back a long time -- at least as far back as the Bush administration. The current administration might be antagonistic toward China, but in no sense did they invent the war against Huawei.

The suspicion might go back a long time, but the PR campaign is relatively new, at least at the current level. I do remember the occasional story a few years ago, but not this barrage of articles.

i don't watch tv anymore due to the excessive 'spin' and sometimes straight out lies. usually they start off by saying "allegedly" and by the time they're done you'd think it's one of Newton's laws of motion

ITAR violations wouldn't be against Huawei though, they would be against the companies selling controlled items without a valid license. However, I think this just reinforces the idea that they're doing anything they can to justify the ban on Huawei's products.

I'm not at all surprised that suspected violations wouldn't result in a public war against US-based companies. What would be the point in that? The violations would be addressed quietly I think.

Is there any sort of technical evidence, documentation or anything out there justifying this?

Since we are mostly talking about hardware; it should be possible to proof the existence of a backdoor or similar by careful analysis.

I remember a few years back where all of sudden it was made an issue that members of the Danish parlament had Lenovo laptops. I think it turned out to be unfounded. Today the largest 4G network here in Denmark is made by Huawei; though they have lost the bid for the 5G network to Ericsson.

I only have a really distant perspective on that but even if there were backdoors in particular Huawei devices, what - the recent PR campaign aside - would that really tell us? We read about critical vulnerabilities and backdoors from Cisco and the likes on here almost every week or at least month without consequence. *

Not that I find the Chinese government trustworthy but from a non-US perspective it just looks like two governments throwing mud with a certain disconnect from any technical veracity.

* Maybe they get laughed at for the incompetence or negligence regarding that particular issue but that doesn't seem to affect their bottom line or the striving consultancy ecosystem surrounding those products.

My interpretation is binary: Either this is a bullshit move in trade war where the current US administration is hell-bent in bringing the Chinese economy to its knees. Or Huawei is major security threat and all its technology infrastructure spread around the Western world should be rolled back.

It would be very surprising if Huawei was significantly more threatening than any of it's competitors, if you consider being compromised by any government to be a threat.

Since the above threads focus on 5G: Assuming the Finnish (Nokia) and Swedish (Ericsson) governments have the capacity, competence, and willingness to engage in that kind of stuff (I find it hard to believe but you never know,) indeed it would honestly be less threatening to be compromised by Finland or Sweden than China.

Welcome to politics, where laws and such are merely the tools to transferring power from A to B.

If China can steal US IP at will, then the US can blacklist their companies at will. All’s fair in love and war.

There are not many things I agree with the current US Administration on but their hardline stance on China is certainly one of them.

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