Today, Germany's Der Spiegel reported on the latest wave of NSA Revelations (the provenance of which are unclear, but presumably they are Snowden-sourced).
According to the Der Spiegel article (link to GigaOm coverage in English), the most recently unveiled information indicates that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was not only successful at compromising sometimes-witting-but-almost-certainly-unwilling American telecom and Internet service providers, but also at compromising American and non-American telecom and Internet infrastructure hardware and solution providers, without their knowledge.
Through what appears a combination of software hacking and cracking (and, possibly - from my personal perspective - infiltration and tampering with American components, chip-sets, etc. that feed into multinational company supply chains), the NSA has seemingly extended its global surveillance and information dragnet well beyond what had been previously reported, or even imagined.
One of the companies whose gear was reportedly compromised is my employer Huawei. The irony of this situation could not be richer (Reminder: this is a personal blog reflecting my personal thoughts).
For the last few years, China-headquartered Huawei has been the victim of a U.S. Government-wide (and beyond) conspiratorial witch-hunt. Vicious and baseless allegations have been made without end, with Huawei accused of being somehow financed, directed, controlled or otherwise uniquely vulnerable to Chinese Government cyber penetration and manipulation. Wilder and weirder myth and misinformation has been spread, slandering the company and its employees in many and nasty ways.
Never, not once - not once - has there been a shred of substantive evidence presented to support any such allegations.
Now, while to the best of my knowledge Huawei has yet to validate or invalidate the vague suggestions made by Der Spiegel, let's for the moment imagine there is some truth to what's been unveiled.
In that context, let's consider last year's U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) "investigation" of Huawei which concluded with the company branded - with zero substantive reason - as some sort of threat to U.S. national security due to being somehow uniquely vulnerable to potential compromise by the Chinese Government.
As much of a circus-like sham as the whole exercise was, it is all the more shameful in light of today's revelations.
Indeed, HPSCI Chairman Rogers - the man charged with overseeing U.S. intelligence activities to prevent abuse, who has instead spent the last six months trying to sugar-coat such abuse - has forever redefined the height of hypocrisy by accusing Huawei of being uniquely vulnerable to compromise by one Government when, as the Chairman of HPSCI, he was almost certainly aware, the U.S. Government had already achieved this feat (at least per Der Spiegel).
You know, in the immediate wake of the initial Snowden Revelations, some joked that the reason the U.S. Government was so hell-bent on keeping Huawei out of the market was because they were uncertain they could penetrate and compromise our solutions as easily as they might the gear of our American or other Western peers.
If Der Spiegel has it right, such lighthearted wit was dead wrong.
Indeed, if Der Spiegel has it right, the whole Huawei embargo and witch-hunt was nothing more than good-old-fashioned protectionism and China-baiting - the NSA has proven that it doesn't matter where a company is headquartered in terms of it's vulnerability to potential malicious penetration and compromise.
These most recent NSA revelations expose past U.S. Government representations about Huawei (and similar opinions from sycophants like my favorite CSIS cyber-gasbag, as well as military-industrial-complex fan-boy groups like the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission) as utterly baseless and equally and maliciously and knowingly duplicitous
Moreover, if Der Spiegel has it right, they have confirmed rather solidly that cyber vulnerabilities are universal, agnostic to geographies, location of headquarters, flags or borders, and demanding of universal industry-wide solutions to address such challenges.
Huawei-related fuming aside, back home, it's time for some serious accountability...
From the Administration. From the Congress.
U.S. intelligence agencies are now recognized - unequivocally - as the most advanced persistent threat to the integrity of global networks and data.
American standing on the world stage is lessened.
Our ability to project the values we have nourished and cherished for two-plus centuries is diminished.
We are increasingly distrusted abroad. Such distrust extends to our businesses, and will quite likely yet further adversely impact our economy.
Where will the buck stop?
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