Surprise: U.S. Quest To Purge Chinese Gear From Domestic Networks Was A Sloppy Mess

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the we-are-not-good-at-this dept

We just got done noting how the patriotic quest to purge all Chinese hardware from U.S. networks was a a bit of an incoherent mess. The U.S. demand to purge all Huawei and ZTE equipment imposed huge costs on many mid- and small sized telecom vendors (read: their customers), and the U.S. now says it somehow lacks the money to help pay for the “rip and replace” effort as originally claimed.

To be clear, Huawei like many telecoms, is an unethical mess. It has been happy to provide IT and telecom support to the Chinese government as it wages genocide against ethnic minorities. It has also been caught helping some African governments spy on the press and political opponents. And it may very well have helped the Chinese government spy on Americans. So yeah, purging the gear isn’t a bad bet.

But, and this is kind of important for transparency’s sake, we’re a decade-plus into this collective freak out and the U.S. still hasn’t released any public information proving any widespread use of Huawei and ZTE gear to spy on Americans. Given how often U.S. company lobbyists use xenophobia and NatSec hyperventilation to scare lawmakers into self-serving proposals, that’s important.

And, as the New York Times recently noted, after years of hysteria on this subject, the U.S. did a shitty job actually making the plan work:

The Federal Communications Commission once estimated the cost of replacing Chinese gear to be about $2 billion. An updated estimate disclosed last month showed it was about $5 billion. It will take time for the F.C.C. and Congress to figure out how to pay the amounts small telecom companies say they need. In the meantime, many such providers haven’t even started replacing Huawei and ZTE equipment, as Politico reported last month.

Huawei competitors get a huge windfall from no longer having to compete with significantly cheaper (albeit often shittier) Chinese network hardware. But what do consumers get? They don’t actually get improved privacy and security, because the telecoms haven’t even really started doing anything yet. But they will get the added costs incurred on U.S. telecoms, which will be passed on to users.

The idea that the FCC (which can’t even map U.S. broadband availability, police monopolization, stop billing fraud, or track how domestic taxpayer subsides are spent) was going to do a coherent job here was always kind of a question mark.

So often, the tech and telecom policy rhetoric about “the Chinese threat” is completely superficial (take a look at the “race to 5G” for another excellent example), and often simply the byproduct of U.S. companies lobbying to prevent having to compete with cheaper Chinese gear. But when you look under the hood at actual execution on the security front, it’s so often just a hot mess:

“One big question is whether this drama could have been avoided. I asked Paul Triolo, senior vice president for China at Albright Stonebridge Group, a strategy firm, if the U.S. had a good plan with wobbly execution or if the strategy was misguided to begin with. He said it was a little of both.

Triolo said that the U.S. government could have phased out Huawei and ZTE equipment over many years — similar to Britain’s approach — and fast-tracked removal of some types of Chinese gear or equipment near sensitive locations such as near military facilities. While the U.S. said that it needed to remove the risk of the equipment quickly, all that stuff remains in place anyway, he said.

This is just… what we do. Guys like Trump or the FCC’s Brendan Carr love to use China as a bogeyman to agitate the xenophobic base, but then actual execution to protect network security and consumer privacy winds up being just an absolute joke. An afterthought. These gentlemen aren’t in the actual solution business, they’re in the self-serving fear mongering for political gain business.

There’s just no consistency in any of it. We’ll stage a multi-year freak out about Huawei, but do absolutely nothing about very real telecom vulnerabilities in satellite and wireless networks or the Internet of broken things. Politicians will have a complete embolism about TikTok, yet oppose privacy reform and do absolutely nothing to shore up privacy problems across the entire telecom, adtech, and app ecosystem.

That’s not to say the U.S. does nothing competent to improve cybersecurity, but a significant portion of political China hysteria is often a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And an even larger share is just corruption dressed up as national security concerns. The secrecy needed in NatSec means less transparency. Less transparency is then exploited as cover by lobbyists. It’s a tale as old as time.

As one anonymous Hill staffer told the Washington Post a decade ago, it’s just just corruption-fueled gibberish:

“What happens is you get competitors who are able to gin up lawmakers who are already wound up about China,” said one Hill staffer who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. “What they do is pull the string and see where the top spins.”

Worse, the U.S. long ago eroded the credibility it now needs by doing all of the stuff it accuses the Chinese government of, such as installing covert backdoors in both Cisco and Huawei hardware. 

So yeah, it’s possible Huawei and XTE gear should be banned from U.S. networks, provided you do it transparently and competently. But so often most of the folks yelling the loudest about this stuff lack both the credibility or competence to actually accomplish anything useful. It’s often just a big, expensive, dumb performance, polluted by corruption and paid for by taxpayers.

Filed Under: 5g, china, fcc, network, nsa, rip and replace, spying, surveillance