Comment by eliteraspberrie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eliteraspberrie | Hacker News Reader

eliteraspberrie

So they got a taste of their own medicine. Huawei has spied on and stolen from US companies. For example, Huawei copied Cisco's iOS -- including source code comments and bugs -- and even copied their user manuals verbatim. [1, pp. 8-10,12; 2]

Besides, the facts that non-Chinese employees cannot own shares in Huawei; [3, p. 23] that the Communist Party appoints an anonymous "Party Committee" within Huawei; [3, p. 30] and that Huawei was involved in selling US network-monitoring equipment to Iran [4] -- makes them a legitimate target for NSA, in my opinion.

[1] Cisco's motion for preliminary injunction http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/Cisco_Mot_for_PI.pdf

[2] http://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-co...

[3] Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/f...

[4] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/08/us-cisco-zte-iran-...

Basically, tu quoque? I personally believe both NSA and Huawei's actions are morally reprehensible.

It's also a very out-of-date take of what Huawei is. It is an Ericsson-sized infrastructure gear maker now. Not that that should make Ericsson complacent. They've been a target since the Athens Affair at least.

Not really.

The first paragraph is essentially gloating. Not necessarily commendable, but understandable.

However, he's not using the "they did it too" as justification, which is what tu quoque is all about. He outlines reasons beyond "taste of their own medicine" for why this would be justified.

Sorry, in my opinion spying on China's president, tracking source code on product lines and deep infiltration of a company is clearly crossing the line. IPR skirmishes differ from mass surveillance and are not a taste of their own medicine. Or did I miss something?

For starters, this isn't "mass surveillance" on China, so maybe you should use the right buzzwords. :)

Also, "IPR skirmishing" is actually worse I would think. Military/strategic intelligence-gathering is as old as Caeser (and for that matter, Sun Tzu...) and is well-recognized as legitimate (if distasteful).

However even that doesn't directly affect the economy of either party. With "IPR skirmishing" it's possible to go almost straight to the acquisition phase of a particular tech without having to do the R&D, which can have substantial effect to the groups who actually did have to pay for that R&D.

Stealing technological secrets is older than you might think. China lost its monopoly on silk production and trade with the West after Byzantine monks smuggled silkworms out of China using their canes, defying an imperial edict forbidding such a thing.

! Great point, I'd quite forgotten that since high school but you're right, that was an incredibly big swing in geopolitical affairs of the time.

Maybe the Chinese just wanted to find out whom exactly to thank for getting a bit more than they ordered from Boeing [1]?

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

> Huawei copied Cisco's iOS -- including source code comments and bugs

Didn't Fujitsu Automated Computers (Facom) copy IBM's MVS source code in the 1980's? Will the US deal with both offences in the same way?

> So they got a taste of their own medicine

You're assuming they did it first.

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