Chinese Media Calls For Boycott of Cisco 216
An anonymous reader writes "China's state-run media is calling on the country's wireless carriers to move away from Cisco products. According to reports, using Cisco products allows the U.S. to 'attack China almost at will,' and forms a 'terrible security threat.' Chinese officials are urging the companies' wireless carriers to switch to hardware made by Huawei and ZTE Corp. Citing cybersecurity concerns, the United States has banned the use of equipment from both Huawei and ZTE in its cellular networks. Cisco has not yet been named in documents describing the NSA's global wiretapping operations. Apple, a company named in leaked documents, has slashed iPhone production for the second half of this year on falling overseas sales."
Re:Excellent initiative ! (Score:5, Informative)
Well, quite frankly, how could they not?
If all of these companies are helping with this, and allowing them to spy on global communications, how can we believe they aren't complicit?
The US government can force you to add in back doors and not tell anybody due to secrecy laws, and looking at the scope of this spying issue, you pretty much have to assume there's a good chance that those products do have a backdoor.
How could China (or any other country) trust that this gear hasn't been written in such a way as to enable this kind of spying any more than the US believed this Chinese made gear?
The US has more or less said "for our security it's our right to spy on everybody", which means we should also assume that every other country has decided they should be able to do the same damned thing.
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Cisco ... if you've been named as part of this, the assumption simply has to be that, as an entity, you aren't safe to trust. It also means you should assume those same entities will be forced to help every other damned country carry out the same level of spying.
It's not like they could claim they aren't willing to help government spying, because they've already been doing it. At which point, saying 'yes' to the US government and 'no' to any other country is an untenable position.
When you get your corporations involved in spying, it's a natural conclusion that your corporations might be involved in spying.