{"id":110146,"date":"2014-03-24T17:24:12","date_gmt":"2014-03-24T17:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=110146"},"modified":"2014-03-24T17:24:12","modified_gmt":"2014-03-24T17:24:12","slug":"snowden-reveals-industrial-espionage-chinas-huawei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/snowden-reveals-industrial-espionage-chinas-huawei\/","title":{"rendered":"Snowden Reveals Industrial Espionage Against China’s Huawei"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Carter\u00a0<\/strong>
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Documents released by National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden and published in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0over the weekend confirm that the US spy agency has been engaged for years in a campaign of industrial espionage against Huawei, the giant Chinese telecommunications firm. The documents expose a broad range of espionage activities, from spying on company executives to creating \u201cback doors\u201d into the company\u2019s servers, routers and switches.<\/p>\n

The documents, which date from 2010, reveal that a major spying operation against Huawei had been underway since at least 2007 under the codename \u201cShotgiant.\u201d While the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0reported the existence of the program and published some of the PowerPoint slides provided by Snowden, the\u00a0Times<\/em>has \u201cwithheld technical details of the operation at the request of the Obama administration, which cited national security concerns.\u201d The \u201cnewspaper of record\u201d has once again bowed to the demands of the military-intelligence apparatus.<\/p>\n

The NSA issued a statement claiming that the release of the PowerPoint slides \u201cis detrimental to the security of the United States and our allies\u2013and places at risk those we are sworn to protect.\u201d Reuters reported the response of Huawei\u2019s global cyber security officer John Suffolk: \u201cIf the actions in the report are true, Huawei condemns such activities that invaded and infiltrated into our internal corporate network and monitored our communications.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2012, Huawei became the world\u2019s largest telecommunications equipment maker. Its products are in use in as many as 145 countries. For years, Washington has termed Huawei a \u201cnational security\u201d concern, alleging that Huawei grants the Chinese government unauthorized access to its telecommunications infrastructure (i.e., exactly what the American telecommunications companies allow the NSA to do).<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0quoted Huawei executive William Plummer as saying, \u201cThe irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us.\u201d<\/p>\n

One PowerPoint slide released by Snowden and titled \u201cWhy We Care\u201d explains that the NSA hacks into Huawei\u2019s infrastructure in order to spy on its products\u2019 users. \u201cMany of our targets communicate over Huawei produced products, [so] we want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products\u2013we also want to ensure that we retain access to these communication lines, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notes accompanying another slide include a list of \u201cwhat we are trying to accomplish.\u201d One of the items on this list is to \u201c[d]etermine if Huawei is doing SIGINT [signals intelligence, spying] for PRC [China].\u201d In other words, the NSA\u2019s own internal documents make clear that the NSA does not have any evidence that Huawei is engaged in the conduct for which American political functionaries routinely denounce the company.<\/p>\n

The documents name the NSA\u2019s \u201chigh priority targets\u201d as \u201cIran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya, [and] Cuba.\u201d The NSA PowerPoint slide defines \u201csuccess\u201d as the following: \u201cObtaining actionable intelligence of Huawei\u2019s (and potentially PRC\u2019s) leadership plans and intentions\u201d and \u201cEnabl[ing] SIGINT collection through CNE tools.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCNE\u201d or \u201cComputer Network Exploitation\u201d refers to the legion of malware programs with which the NSA has infected more than 50,000 computer networks around the world. (See: \u201cNew Snowden document reveals NSA\u2019s international malware operation<\/a>.\u201d)\u00a0These malware programs allow the NSA to take over networks and computers and use them to spy on their users.<\/p>\n

The recently released PowerPoint slides feature the now-familiar concept of \u201cintelligence gaps.\u201d As far as the NSA is concerned, if anyone anywhere in the world is engaged in any kind of activity and the NSA does not know about it, then this represents an \u201cintelligence gap\u201d the spy agency is determined to close.<\/p>\n

In the final analysis, the NSA spying campaign against Huawei has two fundamental purposes. First, Huawei (unlike the American telecommunications companies) does not allow the NSA free access to its infrastructure to conduct spying on its products\u2019 users. Accordingly, as part of its mission of spying on the entire world\u2019s population, the NSA hacked into Huawei\u2019s systems in order to gather information traveling through its infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Second, the spying campaign against Huawei is part of broader efforts to protect the profits and interests of American telecommunications companies at the expense of Huawei. This is the purpose of the NSA\u2019s particular interest in Huawei\u2019s executives and their \u201cleadership plans and intentions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, the latest Snowden revelations cast fresh light on the US government\u2019s repeated interventions around the world to undermine Huawei\u2019s business. In 2008, the United States blocked Huawei\u2019s participation in the purchase of 3Com Corporation, citing \u201cnational security\u201d concerns. In 2012, the US government intervened in Australia to block Huawei from constructing a broadband network there. (See:\u201cAustralian government bars Chinese telco on\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u203asecurity\u2019\u00a0grounds<\/a>.\u201d )\u00a0\u00a0Also in 2012, Symantec ended a four-year partnership with Huawei under pressure from the US government, which threatened to cut off Symantec\u2019s access to classified information. US Vice President Joseph Biden personally intervened in South Korea in 2013 to block Huawei from building a broadband telecommunications network in Seoul.<\/p>\n

According to\u00a0Der Spiegel<\/em>, the German news magazine, the fruits of the NSA spying program against Huawei included a list of 1,400 of the firm\u2019s clients, as well as internal engineering documents. One of the documents released by Snowden reads, \u201cIf we can see how Huawei is marketing itself, and working to expand this will help us to understand the company\u2019s plans and intentions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the PowerPoint slides just published, one sentence in particular stands out. Among the tasks the NSA is \u201choping to accomplish\u201d in its campaign against Huawei is to \u201c[d]ocument processes to be used later for targeting other non-partnerable companies.\u201d The description of Huawei as a \u201cnon-partnerable\u201d company, together with the expressed intention of targeting other \u201cnon-partnerable\u201d companies for spying, is full of significance.<\/p>\n

Translated into plain English, what \u201cnon-partnerable\u201d means is that Huawei does not \u201cpartner\u201d with the NSA to carry out illegal spying. Companies that are \u201cpartnerable\u201d are presumably those such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL, Verizon, AT&T and others around the world, which are willing \u201cpartners\u201d of the US government in its illegal spying on their users and customers.<\/p>\n

The new revelation about Huawei is one of the many devastating exposures by Snowden of different features of the spying architecture that has been built up behind the backs of the American and world population. The cumulative effect of these disclosures is to paint a picture of a massive military-corporate-intelligence complex, totalitarian in its implications, loosed from all constitutional and democratic controls.<\/p>\n

This apparatus\u2013with the integral participation of its \u201cpartners\u201d in the business and financial spheres\u2013has for years been quietly working its tentacles into virtually every corner of the world. The purpose of this spying apparatus is to protect the profits and wealth of the American ruling class at any cost\u2013from international rivals and, above all, from a movement from below.<\/p>\n

Tom Carter is a writer for WSWS<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Carter\u00a0 RINF Alternative News Documents released by National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden and published in the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0over the weekend confirm that the US spy agency has been engaged for years in a campaign of industrial espionage against Huawei, the giant Chinese telecommunications firm. The documents expose a broad range of espionage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107413,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-110146","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}