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Exclusive: U.S. lawmakers urge AT&T to cut commercial ties with Huawei - sources
U.S. lawmakers are urging AT&T Inc, the No. 2 wireless carrier, to cut commercial ties to Chinese phone maker Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and oppose plans by telecom operator China Mobile Ltd to enter the U.S. market because of national security concerns, two congressional aides said.
[...] Earlier this month, AT&T was forced to scrap a plan to offer its customers Huawei handsets after some members of Congress lobbied against the idea with federal regulators, sources told Reuters.
The U.S. government has also blocked a string of Chinese acquisitions over national security concerns, including Ant Financial's proposed purchase of U.S. money transfer company MoneyGram International Inc.
The lawmakers are also advising U.S. firms that if they have ties to Huawei or China Mobile, it could hamper their ability to do business with the U.S. government, one aide said, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:37AM (4 children)
The US isn't in the best place to be shining a spotlight on "hey, foreign-made software and hardware could in theory be deliberately compromised by their governments to secretly do bad stuff!"
I mean, the NSA is still in business, and more than a few of their tricks are out of the bag recently. [wikipedia.org] The exact same arguments could be used by foreign governments to exclude Apple handsets, Cisco and Juniper routing gear, or any primarily-US telecoms from expanding overseas. With the exception that it's provable that the US DOES do some of the things we currently only SUSPECT China would do...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:57AM (1 child)
Intel, cough
Facebook, cough
So if Huawei cannot come through the door, there are plenty of windows. "Allies" in the 5-Eyes... here in New Zealand almost ALL the fibre kit is Huawei, so 99.996% of our stuff (including this) is most likely echoed via somewhere in China. They practically OWN NZ already.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:26PM
When you realize NZ is a 5 eyes companion, and 5 eyes now has eyes over most of europe, the us, canada, australia, nz, etc.
It's a huge clusterfuck of literally 'big brother' proportions.
(Score: 2) by lx on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:36PM
My guess is that they couldn't persuade Huawei to put in an NSA backdoor.
(Score: 2) by gottabeme on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:21PM
Are you saying that we should let Huawei stuff in and use it because it would be unfair to do otherwise? i.e. "We might have given them some compromised stuff, so we have to accept their compromised stuff. It's only fair." Do you think this is a game?