A Grain of Salt: Is the CSIS guy really an "Expert?"

For those who've been following this blog, you'll have noticed that it has morphed over time, from the lonely posts of a father on the road, to geeky posts from a wireless pioneer (okay, kinda), to posts defending free and fair global trade, as well as my current employer which, summed up, is the victim of American racism - not just protectionism - due to its heritage in China.

In a previous career, when I was at Nokia, I met a man at the Commerce Department in the Office of National Security and Foreign Policy.  At the time, in the late 90's, Nokia was introducing the "Communicator" to the market, a shoe-sized phone (featured in Val Kilmer's movie "The Saint") that could surf the web, and which incorporated 128 bit encryption, which, back then, made it of some interest to American export control officials.

The Commerce guy seemed nice enough at the time.

Not long after joining Huawei three years ago, I re-established contact with this gentleman, who had relocated himself to the prestigious Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.   

He seemed a nice enough guy at the time...

Over the last couple of years, however, the now-branded cyber-expert has established himself as a not-terribly-nice guy, at least when it comes to Huawei, my employer. 

Fair enough.  He has his career, I have mine.

But, you know, fair only goes so far. 

At some point along the way, this one-time bureaucrat, now-christened “scholar” joined a chorus of wildly fact-free Sinophobic Washingtonians taking potshots at my company. 

Hey, I've got no issues with objecting to Chinese Government cyber-mischief (nor with concerns about what our own government is up to - whether abroad or, scarily enough, at home), but when it comes to promoting an anti-China agenda by libeling an innocent company that just happens to be headquartered there - which also happens to be my employer - that's no longer fair.

So, just as I've recently used this blog to call out a prominent Congressional fibber, I'll take a shot at calling out this CSIS “expert.”  I mean, it's all fine and good to toss out dirty one-liners, but, hey, how about backing them up or shutting the f*ck up.

(Whoops.  Sorry).  

Now, let’s see, where should we begin?

Let's start with "60 Minutes," our expert's big claim to Huawei-bashing fame, in which he reprised tired misinformation about Huawei having been birthed at the teat of Cisco innovation.

What exactly did our seemingly compromised “cyber expert” say that was so egregious?   

Bold-faced and willful lies.

A quick digression: The hullabaloo about Huawei having at some point engaged in intellectual property theft dates back to 2003.  At that time, Huawei identified that a miniscule percentage of code in a single module of one of its router products had incorporated Cisco code that had been floating around on the open Internet.  Cisco sued.  Huawei and Cisco settled.  Huawei product being shipped as of the settlement was already clean of the offending code.  Details of the settlement remain confidential.  And, yes, there were allegations that Huawei had also copied Cisco router user manuals.

Yet, on an October 2012 60 Minutes program focused on Huawei, the CSIS expert made the following observation when asked “What about Cisco?”

“The big obstacle in the telecom industry is R&D.  You have to do R&D and be at the cutting edge to be in the game.  And if you can just take it from a world leader like Cisco, you’re gonna get a huge advantage and that’s what Huawei did.  They copied, they took things apart, they reverse-engineered, they used the manuals right down to the last comma.  Everything they did was kinda Cisco-based…One of the things that gave Huawei an early edge was the fact that they took Cisco technology.”

Okay.  Let’s tear this garbage to shreds (which is what 60 Minutes might have done if they’d not utterly sacrificed integrity for political sops and “intrigue”-based ratings).

“You have to do R&D and be at the cutting edge to be in the game.”  At the time of the 2003 Cisco case, Huawei was investing 10+% of annual revenues into R&D (hundreds of millions of dollars) and had been doing so consistently for the better part of ten years.   Indeed, by 2002 Huawei was filing about 1,000 patents annually (well eclipsing Cisco).  Long story short: In 2003 Huawei was already an intellectual property powerhouse based on billions of dollars in R&D invested over the preceding decade.

“They copied, they took things apart, they reverse engineered, they used the manuals right down to the last comma.”  Our intrepid cyber expert throws this catch-all statement out there as if it were some sort of string of self-evident truths when in fact the only reference with any basis in reality is the one about the manuals (While I personally don’t know how the issue of the manuals was addressed beyond that Huawei withdrew and re-issued user manuals, let’s be honest, routers are pretty much commoditized and their end-user application is pretty standard – did some Huawei marketing guy get lazy and go online and download a template?  Who knows?  I don’t.  Bad form?  Yeah.   A monstrous intellectual property violation?   Uh, hardly).  The rest of the “expert’s” statement is unsubstantiated fluff which literally cried out for the 60 Minutes correspondent to challenge it.

“Everything they did was kinda Cisco-based.”  This is the height of our expert’s absurdity.  A wild and willful falsehood.  A quick look at the product portfolios of Cisco and Huawei in 2003 exposes this utterly ridiculous statement for what it is.  Huawei’s broad and diverse portfolio of products spanning fixed, wireless, cable, fiber and IP-based networking solutions matched and/or exceeded and/or was significantly divergent from Cisco’s.  The miniscule section of code from a single module in a single router product which was the subject of the 2003 case - whatever the facts may have been - was little more than an inconsequential burp in the grand scale of Huawei’s business.  I’m not forgiving it, I’m just putting it in context.

“One of the things that gave Huawei an early edge was the fact that they took Cisco Technology.”  As if telling the lie once wasn’t enough, our expert decided to conclude his remarks by making it yet a broader statement.  And the 60 Minutes correspondent, sigh, swallowed the whole load without challenge.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Our favorite CSIS cyber expert isn't usually quite so bold in his fibbing.  But he’s definitely biased, indeed, almost seemingly bought-and-paid for (by whom is a question, perhaps, for another post)…

…And he is prolific. 

A grain of salt folks, a grain of salt…

You wanna put our expert in really unique perspective?  

Link back to my February 13, 2011 blog post about a company called Hua Mei (NOT Huawei) which exported some nasty stuff to Saddam Hussein.  Strangely enough, folks in the U.S. Government have tried to pin this one on Huawei, notwithstanding very publicly available GAO and other U.S. Government documentation demonstrating the truth.  Yet a bit more strange?: Our very same CSIS "cyber expert" was the Commerce Department official at the time that signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) response obfuscating and denying information to American public requests for clarification about Hua Mei.

Go on, Google it...  

Indeed, let's play his game: "Prove the negative."

Another grain of salt...