from Hacker News

Huawei ‘may have eavesdropped on Dutch mobile network’s calls’

by kumarharsh on 4/19/21, 4:01 PM with 56 comments

• by sschueller on 4/19/21, 5:38 PM

  Interesting how this 3 day old story is getting twisted more and more. Can we stick to the facts?

  Huawei was used for outsourcing, Huawei obviously has root access. If you outsource your IT to a company with known ties to a foreign government you can't complain about them having sensitive access.

• by xster on 4/19/21, 5:15 PM

  So it's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26842733 but with one more layer of indirection and rephrased to be stated with more confidence without any changes in primary source?

• by nottorp on 4/19/21, 6:38 PM

  Funny, a couple days ago the title was "Huawei spied on Dutch bla bla". Today it's "may have spied".

  The original article (well, the translation bondarchuk posted here) says they had the access. Not that they did anything with it.

• by elric on 4/19/21, 7:03 PM

  It's interesting to see how this speculative piece keeps popping up, whereas GCHQ's THREE YEAR long hack [1] of Belgium's largest ISP was largely ignored. China bashing is easier than Five-Eyes bashing?

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Socialist

• by bondarchuk on 4/19/21, 6:30 PM

  My (amateurish) translation of the Volkskrant article:

  https://0bin.net/paste/poCzYk4t#IRjhnXLT31zdiDMCVJIIqvZgLDqh...

• by LatteLazy on 4/19/21, 7:54 PM

  It's quite incredible really. We have undeniable proof the US spies on the EU, phone taps it's leaders, and uses the info to help US companies.

  But the stories are all about a Chinese company once having done a thing they were asked to do...

• by dathinab on 4/19/21, 6:55 PM

  It's still the same news and it's still:

  - could have eavesdropped - likely wouldn't have been found out - but there is no indication that they did so

  In the end Huawei (the company) has no benefits and IMHO no intention to spy on the Dutch mobile network. The problem is that the employees of Huawei, independent of nationality, might be a different story. (Or more precise China or the USA pressuring employees or installing "their people" in the right technical positions).

  But as a side note that is also true for the USA, not just China.

  It's just that for all western/(somewhat proper) democratic countries the US is much closer ideological and political then China, even with all the faults the USA has.

  Like e.g China is a "de-facto" one party system (theoretical they have more) and the US is a "de-facto" two party system. Which is better but still not proper democratic.

• by de6u99er on 4/19/21, 7:52 PM

  Those articles are just FUD.

• by egberts1 on 4/20/21, 12:44 AM

  so Guardian retranslated Dutch strict wordings into English loose wordings. tsk tsk tsk.

• by reddotX on 4/19/21, 4:17 PM

  that's not nice!

• by zadwang on 4/19/21, 5:01 PM

  This could be said of ANY telecom providers. It is all speculation without a shred of fact.

• by jariel on 4/19/21, 6:22 PM

  There's some debate about the degree to which the authorization could have been abused, but it today's world it's just hard to imagine how such rights and authorization could be granted in the first place.