Drip, Drip, Drip

David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth report about how the NSA has successfully placed backdoors into the networks of the Chinese Telecommunications giant Huawei for purposes of (a) discerning Huawei’s links to the People’s Liberation Army and (b) preparing for offensive operations in third countries.

[...]

The Huawei revelations are devastating rebuttals to hypocritical U.S. complaints about Chinese penetration of U.S. networks, and also make USG protestations about not stealing intellectual property to help U.S. firms’ competitiveness seem like the self-serving hairsplitting that it is. [...] “The irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us,” says a Huawei Executive. The Sanger and Perlroth story comes at about the same time that Michelle Obama is in China extolling the virtues of free speech and an open Internet. Censoring speech is not the same as secretly monitoring speech, and the Chinese do both. But the two are obviously related, and the First Lady’s speech – which of course follows other speeches and pronouncements in this vein, and reflects the views of the Obama administration – will widely be viewed as hypocritical in light of the NYT revelations.

  Lawfare

And she should be embarrassed at the least.

The NYT states that it “withheld technical details of the operation at the request of the Obama administration, which cited national security concerns.” (The Washington Post recently withheld important details from an NSA story as well.) But note that the NYT is co-disclosing the information about Huawei with the German magazine Der Spiegel.

[...]

Der Spegel [has] more and more interesting detail, and promises a longer version of the story in its print edition tomorrow.

While the US has been telling the world that the Chinese government is spying on them through backdoors in Huawei products, it’s actually the NSA that has been doing that. It also yet again gives the lie to the claim that the NSA does not engage in economic espionage.

  Glenn Greenwald