On paper, it looked like a fantastic deal. In 2017, the Chinese government was offering to spend $100 million to build an ornate Chinese garden at the National Arboretum in Washington DC. Complete with temples, pavilions and a 70-foot white pagoda, the project thrilled local officials, who hoped it would attract thousands of tourists every year.
But when US counterintelligence officials began digging into the details, they found numerous red flags. The pagoda, they noted, would have been strategically placed on one of the highest points in Washington DC, just two miles from the US Capitol, a perfect spot for signals intelligence collection, multiple sources familiar with the episode told CNN.
Also alarming was that Chinese officials wanted to build the pagoda with materials shipped to the US in diplomatic pouches, which US Customs officials are barred from examining, the sources said.
Federal officials quietly killed the project before construction was underway. The Wall Street Journal first reported about the security concerns in 2018.
The canceled garden is part of a frenzy of counterintelligence activity by the FBI and other federal agencies focused on what career US security officials say has been a dramatic escalation of Chinese espionage on US soil over the past decade.
[...] Among the most alarming things the FBI uncovered pertains to Chinese-made Huawei equipment atop cell towers near US military bases in the rural Midwest. According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, the FBI determined the equipment was capable of capturing and disrupting highly restricted Defense Department communications, including those used by US Strategic Command, which oversees the country's nuclear weapons.
[...] Despite its tough talk, the US government's refusal to provide evidence to back up its claims that Huawei tech poses a risk to US national security has led some critics to accuse it of xenophobic overreach. The lack of a smoking gun also raises questions of whether US officials can separate legitimate Chinese investment from espionage.
[...] "It really comes down to: do you treat China as a neutral actor — because if you treat China as a neutral actor, then yeah, this seems crazy, that there's some plot behind every tree," said Anna Puglisi, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. "However, China has shown us through its policies and actions it is not a neutral actor."
[...] As Huawei equipment began to proliferate near US military bases, federal investigators started taking notice, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Of particular concern was that Huawei was routinely selling cheap equipment to rural providers in cases that appeared to be unprofitable for Huawei — but which placed its equipment near military assets.
[...] Some former counterintelligence officials expressed frustration that the US government isn't providing more granular detail about what it knows to companies — or to cities and states considering a Chinese investment proposal. They believe that not only would that kind of detail help private industry and state and local governments understand the seriousness of the threat as they see it, but also help combat the criticism that the US government is targeting Chinese companies and people, rather than Chinese state-run espionage.
"This government has to do a better job of letting everyone know this is a Communist Party issue, it's not a Chinese people issue," Evanina said. "And I'll be the first to say that the government has to do better with respect to understanding the Communist Party's intentions are not the same intentions of the Chinese people."
See also: MPs Call for Ban on Chinese Surveillance Camera Technology
Related Stories
MPs call for ban on Chinese surveillance camera technology:
A cross-party group of MPs has called on the government to ban the sale and operation of CCTV surveillance cameras linked to human rights abuses in China.
Surveillance cameras supplied by Chinese manufacturers Hikvision and Dahua are widely used in state "re-education" camps, which have been accused of subjecting Uyghur Muslims to forced labour and torture.
The cameras have been banned in the US, but are widely used in the UK across government departments and companies.
[...] They also called on the government to commission an independent national review of the scale, capabilities, ethics and human rights impact of modern CCTV in the UK.
[...] "This technology comes equipped with advanced surveillance capabilities, such as facial recognition, person tracking and gender identification," he said. "These pose a significant threat to civil liberties in our countries.
"These companies, Hikvision and Dahua, are Chinese state-owned companies, raising urgent questions over whether they also pose a threat to national security."
The MPs' call to action follows research by campaign group Big Brother Watch that found the cameras have been widely deployed by government bodies including councils, secondary schools, NHS trusts, universities and police forces in the UK.
[...] The campaign group said the Chinese companies supply rebranded cameras that are sold under other names, including Honeywell and Toshima, so that the true number of Hikvision and Dahua cameras used in the UK public sector may be significantly higher.
Previously: The World's Biggest Surveillance Company You've Never Heard of
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RamiK on Monday August 01 2022, @11:30AM (17 children)
A most riveting tale good sir! Quick question, how is Hauwei involved again?
Moving on...
Yes. As bought and deployed by American ISPs for the purpose of providing 5g coverage.
Oh so what you're saying is that Hauwei's 5G antennas are electrically capable of overstepping on military frequencies and that, since they're networked, they're capable of relaying traffic overseas. Well, putting aside the obvious question of encryption, surely sanctions aren't handed out over just being capable of doing possible harm, right?
So, in other words, Huawei was sanctioned in 2019 without any evidence. During the following 3 years and change, multiple investigations came and went under different administrations and the only thing you have to show is an unrelated story about some Chinese pagoda from 2018 that didn't end up with any actual evidence of espionage and that has nothing to do with Huawei and an unconfirmed rumor about their hardware being "capable" of doing stuff that you've yet to show evidence of them doing.
Who wrote this propaganda piece?
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(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 01 2022, @12:12PM (7 children)
> Who wrote this propaganda piece?
One could just as easily ask:
Who paid you to shill for Huawei?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Monday August 01 2022, @01:28PM (6 children)
See now on the one hand you have a rag piece suggesting the Chinese needed to use diplomatic pouches to smuggle stuff into the US while there's literally hundreds of thousands of illegals crossing the border every year. While on the other hand you had someone pointing out the absurdities behind that bull. And what did you make of it? That the guy telling you you're reading propaganda is a shill...
But hey, lets make things interesting: I've had my hands on a few Huawei phones over the years and installed pcapdroid (a pcapd client from the fdroid) so I can say with absolute certainty Huawei spies on you. To be specific, their chatterbox updater and launcher keeps pinging to their telemetry baidu servers dozens of times a minute with the occasional unique id and so on type details.
Now, putting aside by Pulitzer nominations, am I still shilling when I say that story was a propaganda piece?
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(Score: 4, Informative) by khallow on Monday August 01 2022, @09:08PM (5 children)
The former is untouchable by the US with obvious breaking of law, but they intercept the latter all the time. The former is clearly better, if you want to get special gear into the US without it being inspected (or reverse engineered!) by the US.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday August 02 2022, @12:27PM (4 children)
The point is that smuggling stuff into the US, whether it's people, drugs or whatever, is trivial enough to organized crime and foreign governments that they wouldn't let such a small detail ruin an intelligence operations.
In other words, better doesn't mean deal breaker.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 02 2022, @03:08PM (3 children)
And my point is that small detail can completely destroy the value of the intelligence operation. They run the risk of the US getting their hands on the equipment. The US can then not only negate the value of the gear in that operation, they can give it negative value, say by feeding fake information or countering the value of the gear everywhere in the world.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday August 02 2022, @08:20PM (2 children)
Why would the people openly port-scanning DC's IP ranges hundreds of times a week care if a couple of antennas and a sat transceiver gets discovered? Worse, the whole story is the journalist telling you how Huawei's antennas are openly installed all across the US so why would they need to involved diplomats and build a freaking multi-story pagoda and a Chinese garden to hide one when they're already out there in the open?
All this James Bond level Hollywood writing bullshit is just full of random plot points strung together without a hint of context. The US isn't North Korea. If the Chinese want to do this sort of intelligence gathering, they buy a high-riser's apartment, install the hardware and then rent the apartment to some random tenants from Craigslist or whatever. Who in their right mind would sign-off something so visible and involve so many diplomats and contractors to put up a couple of antennas? It don't make no sense.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 02 2022, @11:20PM (1 child)
Why would they be throwing up merely a couple of antennas and a sat transceiver? Seems like a lot of effort to go through for that.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday August 03 2022, @08:04AM
See now, on the one hand putting this discussion into cost-benefits analysis framework is the right way to go about things. On the other hand, I personally think the whole sigint mass surveillance state is just bureaucrats and contractors joining hands on inventive ways to rob tax payer's dollars/yuans. So, while I'm inclined to agree the 1:1000 risk of getting discovered and losing the hardware isn't worth the radio equipment & man-hours that go into putting them up, from the Chinese military-industrial sector's point of view, it's billable hours and another successful operation for one's personal file.
All-in-all, it's all just fiction. We're 3 years after the fact and not a single backdoor was confirmed in Huawei hardware and software despite all these random allegations which is why we're reading about them being "capable" and dumbass 4 years old tales about Chinese gardens and pagodas. In fact, the last time someone alleged a backdoor exists in their telecom products was back in 2019 when it turned out to be a known unpatched 2011 software bug Huawei have long since shipped firmware fixes for but the carrier (Italy Vodafone) didn't bother deploying since they didn't want to spend money on renewing their service deals: https://www.zdnet.com/article/huawei-denies-existence-of-backdoors-in-vodafone-networking-equipment-brands-them-technical-flaws/ [zdnet.com]
Show me some facts - or at least make the effort of trying to cook up some false evidence - instead of stories about Chinese pagodas and "capable" and I'll change my mind. Otherwise, I stand by my original claim: It's all just low-effort propaganda.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Monday August 01 2022, @01:03PM (8 children)
I don't know about you - but this suggests to me that it wasn't as innocent as you are suggesting.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 01 2022, @01:29PM (4 children)
Without any link to Huawei it's as relevant as a story about the US Embassy doing something similar and then trying to link Cisco to it.
(Score: 2, Troll) by RamiK on Monday August 01 2022, @02:00PM
I'll have you know Wang Lili, wife of one Wang Zhang, brother of one Wang Feng, whose son works as a fork lift operator on the port handling the shipping containers, owned a Huawei phone at the time.
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(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Monday August 01 2022, @02:14PM (2 children)
Why should there be a mention of Huawei there? I'll just note here that Hauwei's ownership is very murky (unusually opaque even for a Chinese business) and one of the likely owners of Huawei is the Communist party via the weird labor union committee mechanism. So we have a (IMHO) likely owner of Huawei operating in a fishy way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2022, @06:12PM (1 child)
Probably less murky as Apple etc "We're not making any money so we don't need to pay taxes meanwhile we had a great quarter where we made billions!".
Just depends on whose spin you wanna believe:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/technology/who-owns-huawei.html [nytimes.com]
https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/05/huawei_staff_dividend/ [theregister.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 02 2022, @11:31PM
No, it's pretty crazy by any country's standards. Does look like a state-owned property that doesn't want to appear to be a state-owned property. But it could be some private group as well behind it.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday August 01 2022, @01:46PM
I'm guessing they wanted to keep the billings secret to avoid embarrassing themselves and the contractors about the real costs so when the US started investigating they simply pulled out. Like, just between you and me, and I'm not making any insinuation, but that $500k prized Ming Dynasty Urn the diplomatic delegates brought over last year? Well, it looks an awful like the $50 ashtray I got off Alibaba last Black Friday... Just saying. :D
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(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 02 2022, @03:49AM
Listen to Gordon Chang. He generally knows what he's talking about.
https://www.commentary.org/gordon-g-chang/no-way-huawei/ [commentary.org]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday August 02 2022, @02:17PM
Yeah, you want to ship "construction materials" in diplomatic pouches? That's not just no, that's *hell* no - you're obviously up to something.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by lars on Monday August 01 2022, @12:46PM (5 children)
My thought is that, while other manufacturers will gladly bake in whatever the NSA wants, Huawei is from a less friendly country and either refuses to, or the NSA doesn't trust them with their code. Which is why I have a Huawei phone, I figure while my network might spy on me, at least my phone doesn't, or at least gives my info to a government that can't do anything to me with it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 01 2022, @01:47PM (4 children)
The main thing is if you're a US company and you buy Cisco/Juniper if the US Gov wants to pwn you they can always send you an NSL or some of their people. So your exposure isn't that different whether the US Gov sends you an NSL or sends Cisco/Juniper an NSL. But there could be big difference if you use Huawei and the Chinese Gov sends their "NSL" to Huawei... e.g. you have a Huawei order and that order gets special firmware...
However for those in other countries it might actually be better to get Huawei than US equipment - the US Gov and their allies are often a bigger threat than China. For now and based on past track record.
The USA has a long arm and has a track record of (ab)using it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident [wikipedia.org]
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/details-of-surprise-assault-on-dotcom-mansion/7TUKCWOGMGPWR5SIXWXBNM22CY/ [nzherald.co.nz]
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/uk-approves-wikileaks-founder-julian-assanges-extradition-to-us-.html [cnbc.com]
In contrast if you're not a Chinese citizen or ex-Chinese citizen and not living in China, China is far less likely to mess with you. And in fact you might be able to help by getting a Huawei/Xiaomi/etc and regularly sending/using banned keywords[1] via wechat etc... The more resources they spend spying on you the less they have to spy on their own citizens.
[1] https://github.com/jasonqng/chinese-keywords [github.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday August 02 2022, @04:47AM (3 children)
Unless, of course, you have something they want. Funny how we're supposed to pay attention to the track record of the US, but not to the track record of China.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Immerman on Tuesday August 02 2022, @02:26PM (2 children)
Well, that's the point isn't it?
China is far, far less likely to want anything from you than your own government is. China cares a great deal about controlling the narrative among Chinese people in China, but who are you that China would care?
Now, if you're talking corporate or military espionage efforts, that's different. But John Doe off the street just trying to get by? His secrets are of no use to such efforts.
John's own government though is far more likely to care, because they care about controlling the narrative he's exposed to/spreading.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Tuesday August 02 2022, @03:15PM (1 child)
Unless, of course, you have something they want, like technology or information.
That's a huge exception to dismiss.
I think that's a bad assumption. Russia already has been gaming the social media scene. John Doe's info has value for that sort of operation. I don't see them pulling a pagoda-level op for that information, but I can see them hoovering data off any Chinese originating devices even for John Doe. More information means more power and countries like China just can't have enough.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lars on Tuesday August 02 2022, @04:56PM
For me, that's an advantage. Citizens that's won't want the US spying on them, turning to foreign services (not just phones, but email, social networking) mean that they are empowering enemy states with their information. This means that spying on your citizens has consequences, so makes it maybe less palatable.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday August 01 2022, @01:35PM (1 child)
But why it took so long to recognize a threat in this case?
In dozens of Chinese stories, if an established and/or esteemed faction holds the pagoda as their property or HQ, it's either hypnotism/mind control, dark demonism, ice magic, death magic or other form of hidden evility involved. Always.
It's literally a cliché. I'd be alerted at the very moment when hearing 'a pagoda'.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 02 2022, @04:55AM
That's just common sense. There's hundreds of documentaries detailing the practice.
The catch is how do you get your secret espionage gear to that hotel without it being intercepted? And the hotel to that sweet spot in downtown Washington DC? This sounds like a perfect storm of opportunity and lazy Chinese intelligence. They just got too greedy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by oumuamua on Monday August 01 2022, @01:48PM
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2016-10/29/content_27212180.htm [chinadaily.com.cn]
And pandas, has anyone checked the pandas the National Zoo they could be spying for China!
FYI there was no need to spy; millions of companies flocked to China where most were required to form joint ventures with a local Chinese company - basically giving away their tech.
https://www.quora.com/Did-China-steal-high-speed-rail-technology-from-Germany-or-other-countries [quora.com]
Let's see what China says:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2107096/china-says-its-bullet-train-technology-was-stolen-days-after-us [scmp.com]
Accusations all around, yep it's a cold war
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Tuesday August 02 2022, @03:47AM
Just one look at their modernized military equipment tells you they have all our designs. The Chinese have no respect for intellectual property rights. If they can get their hands on tech of any sort, they will reverse engineer and produce it for their own interests.
This is the country we handed off our major production industries to. I-phones are manufactured there. Pretty safe bet they've taken a real close look at the hardware and software while they were MAKING IT. Their intelligence operations stateside are better than the USSR ever was.
IMHO