I'm sure it isn't news to most of you that Huawei and ZTE have been systematically attacked by the United States for a couple of years now. Carriers in the U.S. do not carry Huawei phones, and in the past couple of weeks alone things have been escalated on all fronts. Huawei stock has all but crashed, the victim of serious market manipulation by everyone that the U.S. is forcing to play along with their charade. They are even trying to force other countries to ban hardware from both these companies. Last week, the U.S. bullied Canadian authourities into arresting the CFO of Huawei, who is of course the daughter of the CEO. Needless to say, China is not happy about it - and have made some fairly ugly threats on diplomatic channels since.
There are a few aspects to this, first of all the insistence by U.S. intelligence services that both Huawei and ZTE are 'spying' for the Chinese government. If there exists one iota of proof showing this, they haven't come out with it. In other words, they are claiming that these companies have the 'capability' to spy, which is of course a nonsensical statement because the same could be said for ANY device capable of networking made by ANY company in the past 30 years. If phones or routers or switches or dedicated backbone mainframes WERE spying, any privacy/hacking group would have already come out with obvious evidence of such. I won't even go into the irony of the American government complaining about spying on civilians... The thing that makes this truly laughable is that approximately 80% of all hardware handling Internet traffic already in place was made by these two companies. It is rumoured that the reason for this hysterical attack on these companies, especially Huawei, is that the NSA has not been able to crack their encryption - and that these companies have refused to give the NSA backdoor access. Again, the irony is so rich it hurts.
The U.S. has unilaterally imposed sanctions on Iran, sanctions that have been repeatedly overturned and veto'd by all of the other members of the U.N. council. As such these sanctions do not carry any weight in the international system at large. As an example other countries are merrily continuing to trade with Iran, and the United States cannot legally do anything about it. Their excuse for flat out kidnapping the daughter of the CEO of Huawei (on the same day that Trump sat and had dinner with Xi in Beunos Aires) was the claim that Huawei was doing business with Iran through a shell company. They are accusing her of a crime, based on sanctions that are illegal. A crime that she didn't commit in Canada, or Iran, or China, or Mexico, or in any other country she has been to. Canadian extradition treaties with the United States mean that what the United States did was 'legal' as far as ordering Canadian police to apprehend her - except for the fact that technically she never left the airport, which by law is considered international territory that is legally bound by the laws of specific parts of the airport. For example, a good sized chunk of the Vancouver airport is considered American ground - in the same way that an embassy is. You cross a checkpoint, within which you are bound to the laws of the United States and there are U.S. military forces there in fatigues and carrying AR-15's. She, of course, did not enter this area. In fact she legally didn't even enter Canadian territory.
This is all part of a bigger trade war, one that could potentially get very ugly - very quickly. In the week since her abduction (I won't call it an arrest), Canadian authourities have stalled on having a bail hearing for her. Of course the Americans are demanding that she be denied bail, for obvious reasons. Meanwhile the citizens of Canada (like me) are outraged by this disgusting abuse of American thuggery, and by the simpering cowardice of our buffoon of a leader Justin Trudeau - who in typical idiot fashion happily gushed about how he was warned in advance of this 'arrest'. Let's be clear here. China has blatantly broken international law when it comes to patents and legal intellectual property as a matter of course through the history of technological development. This is how they operate. No one will argue that they caused the crash of several major tech-communications companies here in Canada, including Nortel and arguably Blackberry (although they were a victim of their own shortsightness as well, but hey they really stuck to that physical keyboard to the very end). No one is going to say that China has a great record when it comes to human rights, and they certainly aren't afraid to disappear their own people in a heartbeat - even from foreign countries. That said, it could very easily be argued that the United States has done more harm in our world than China by orders of magnitude - but that is another discussion entirely.
<Insert 20 page rant here about how Bush and Obama sold 500,000 production jobs to China and the American public happily allowed Borgmart to spread across the country like a Cancer>
Anyway, back to the topic of... well, my topic (if that is even possible). Things are heating up BIG TIME - by the day. China announced today that they have banned the sales of all iphones in large parts of the country. They have recalled diplomats, and are very close to expelling Canadian diplomats. The CEO of Huawei isn't just another Billionaire playboy, he is very chummy with the highest members of the ruling party. The Americans knew fully well what message they were sending when they snatched his daughter out of the Vancouver airport. The question is, how far will this go? What lengths will the Americans go to in order to shut Huawei down? Could they lean on Google to the point where Google services disable themselves on Huawei devices? Could they actually force countries like Canada to ban Huawei devices from using tele-communication networks? Let's step back for a moment, to just a couple of months ago. Keep in mind that both Huawei and ZTE phones are allowed to be used by the highest level of government in the U.K., in France, and in Germany. Do you really think that if there was any proof of any kind that these phones were uploading data, that these governments wouldn't have joined the United States in 'banning' them? Here in Canada, Huawei is the prime sponsor to 'Hockey Night in Canada'. What will happen if the Americans take things to the next level, and our phones start little by little becoming unusable? Can we honestly expect Huawei to expend a lot of effort to keep our firmware updated here in the West given the nonsense that is going on?
It is laughable to try and point fingers at these companies for the 'potential to spy' when we are being wrung dry for every bit of personal information possible by Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. Every piece of tech we own is made in China. This situation is getting scary though, and personally I cringe to say it but owning a brand new Huawei phone may be a losing proposition. We have dared to support a company that isn't entirely under the boot of the American petro-dollar Deep State MIC. Is this all just high stakes posturing between superpowers, or the final chess moves in a grand game played by the darkest of Puppeteers?
(don't get me started)
There are a few aspects to this, first of all the insistence by U.S. intelligence services that both Huawei and ZTE are 'spying' for the Chinese government. If there exists one iota of proof showing this, they haven't come out with it. In other words, they are claiming that these companies have the 'capability' to spy, which is of course a nonsensical statement because the same could be said for ANY device capable of networking made by ANY company in the past 30 years. If phones or routers or switches or dedicated backbone mainframes WERE spying, any privacy/hacking group would have already come out with obvious evidence of such. I won't even go into the irony of the American government complaining about spying on civilians... The thing that makes this truly laughable is that approximately 80% of all hardware handling Internet traffic already in place was made by these two companies. It is rumoured that the reason for this hysterical attack on these companies, especially Huawei, is that the NSA has not been able to crack their encryption - and that these companies have refused to give the NSA backdoor access. Again, the irony is so rich it hurts.
The U.S. has unilaterally imposed sanctions on Iran, sanctions that have been repeatedly overturned and veto'd by all of the other members of the U.N. council. As such these sanctions do not carry any weight in the international system at large. As an example other countries are merrily continuing to trade with Iran, and the United States cannot legally do anything about it. Their excuse for flat out kidnapping the daughter of the CEO of Huawei (on the same day that Trump sat and had dinner with Xi in Beunos Aires) was the claim that Huawei was doing business with Iran through a shell company. They are accusing her of a crime, based on sanctions that are illegal. A crime that she didn't commit in Canada, or Iran, or China, or Mexico, or in any other country she has been to. Canadian extradition treaties with the United States mean that what the United States did was 'legal' as far as ordering Canadian police to apprehend her - except for the fact that technically she never left the airport, which by law is considered international territory that is legally bound by the laws of specific parts of the airport. For example, a good sized chunk of the Vancouver airport is considered American ground - in the same way that an embassy is. You cross a checkpoint, within which you are bound to the laws of the United States and there are U.S. military forces there in fatigues and carrying AR-15's. She, of course, did not enter this area. In fact she legally didn't even enter Canadian territory.
This is all part of a bigger trade war, one that could potentially get very ugly - very quickly. In the week since her abduction (I won't call it an arrest), Canadian authourities have stalled on having a bail hearing for her. Of course the Americans are demanding that she be denied bail, for obvious reasons. Meanwhile the citizens of Canada (like me) are outraged by this disgusting abuse of American thuggery, and by the simpering cowardice of our buffoon of a leader Justin Trudeau - who in typical idiot fashion happily gushed about how he was warned in advance of this 'arrest'. Let's be clear here. China has blatantly broken international law when it comes to patents and legal intellectual property as a matter of course through the history of technological development. This is how they operate. No one will argue that they caused the crash of several major tech-communications companies here in Canada, including Nortel and arguably Blackberry (although they were a victim of their own shortsightness as well, but hey they really stuck to that physical keyboard to the very end). No one is going to say that China has a great record when it comes to human rights, and they certainly aren't afraid to disappear their own people in a heartbeat - even from foreign countries. That said, it could very easily be argued that the United States has done more harm in our world than China by orders of magnitude - but that is another discussion entirely.
<Insert 20 page rant here about how Bush and Obama sold 500,000 production jobs to China and the American public happily allowed Borgmart to spread across the country like a Cancer>
Anyway, back to the topic of... well, my topic (if that is even possible). Things are heating up BIG TIME - by the day. China announced today that they have banned the sales of all iphones in large parts of the country. They have recalled diplomats, and are very close to expelling Canadian diplomats. The CEO of Huawei isn't just another Billionaire playboy, he is very chummy with the highest members of the ruling party. The Americans knew fully well what message they were sending when they snatched his daughter out of the Vancouver airport. The question is, how far will this go? What lengths will the Americans go to in order to shut Huawei down? Could they lean on Google to the point where Google services disable themselves on Huawei devices? Could they actually force countries like Canada to ban Huawei devices from using tele-communication networks? Let's step back for a moment, to just a couple of months ago. Keep in mind that both Huawei and ZTE phones are allowed to be used by the highest level of government in the U.K., in France, and in Germany. Do you really think that if there was any proof of any kind that these phones were uploading data, that these governments wouldn't have joined the United States in 'banning' them? Here in Canada, Huawei is the prime sponsor to 'Hockey Night in Canada'. What will happen if the Americans take things to the next level, and our phones start little by little becoming unusable? Can we honestly expect Huawei to expend a lot of effort to keep our firmware updated here in the West given the nonsense that is going on?
It is laughable to try and point fingers at these companies for the 'potential to spy' when we are being wrung dry for every bit of personal information possible by Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. Every piece of tech we own is made in China. This situation is getting scary though, and personally I cringe to say it but owning a brand new Huawei phone may be a losing proposition. We have dared to support a company that isn't entirely under the boot of the American petro-dollar Deep State MIC. Is this all just high stakes posturing between superpowers, or the final chess moves in a grand game played by the darkest of Puppeteers?
(don't get me started)
