Hypocrisy Knows No Heights: Shotgiant

Over the last couple of days, I’ve had no shortage of folk wondering when I might post on Shotgiant.

Frankly, I’ve been flummoxed.  What to say?

According to the New York Times and Der Spiegel, relying on Snowden-released documents, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has, since 2007, been rooting around in Huawei’s corporate networks, monitoring executive communications and stealing proprietary product info.

In terms of the former, the U.S. Government is supposedly meant to be seeking to determine once-and-for-all if Huawei is somehow in cahoots with the PRC Government.

In terms of the latter, they reportedly wanted to be able to exploit Huawei network gear deployed in markets where, it seems, there isn’t a critical mass of already-compromised American gear to gather signals intelligence.

Obviously they haven’t realized their fantasy in terms of objective number one.  If they had, they’d have spread the word and shut the company down.  There is no way they’d have stomached Huawei gear deployed across every other NATO market otherwise.

In terms of objective number two, well, the challenge is now Huawei’s to determine whether and to what extent there’s any truth to what’s detailed in the Snowden leak and how to remedy it.

I swear, I am growing terribly weary of this shit.

So far, the response from the U.S. Government has been limited and muted, something to the effect of “well, when we conduct industrial espionage, we don’t share the information with American companies to give them a commercial edge, like others do.”

Really?

You get your hand caught in the cookie jar and you say “Well yeah, but I didn’t give any cookies to the kids (although they may have stumbled upon some “inadvertently” dropped crumbs), I just re-baked them into concrete and used them to break the neighbor’s windows so I could ransack their house.”

That’s crap. 

If a non-U.S. Government penetrated an American company and monitored their private comms and stole their intellectual property to re-purpose it to exploit networks in the U.S. and other countries we would be up in arms.

And, no, it’s not okay ‘cause we’re ’mericans.  After all, as you sow…  Honestly, we should be setting the right examples, not just examples.

As for the monitoring of Huawei’s communications to “prove” the company is compromised by the Chi-coms, well, they’ve obviously found squat.

Indeed, a wiser man than I made an interesting observation on this element of Shotgiant today.  He had an idea that no-one could possibly have had in advance of the Shotgiant revelation.

Referring to the inexplicably shallow and vacant 2012 U.S. House “Intelligence” Committee Report on Huawei, this wise man wondered if perhaps the entire charade was an intelligence operation.  Think about it. The NSA was five years into mucking about in Huawei’s email servers and hadn't turned up a whit of evidence of any unusual relationship with the Chinese Government.  What to do, what to do?...

Well, why not harness HPSCI and play a game of “shake the tree” - stir up Huawei with an “investigation” and monitor the internal communications to see if that might expose the heretofore unfulfilled pre-ordained outcome of inappropriate government ties?

Judging from the vacuous Intelligence Committee report that emerged nine month’s after the “investigation’s” launch, this didn’t work out either.

Enough already.

I take back the title. 

Hypocrisy should indeed know heights.