The US warning seems to be about sanctions due to ZTE selling to NK, but the UK one seems to be around security.
Only the yanks and our own people are allowed to spy on us.
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The US warning seems to be about sanctions due to ZTE selling to NK, but the UK one seems to be around security.
Only the yanks and our own people are allowed to spy on us.
There are three issues with National security in general:
The first is at the political level - how the UK might react to certain situations, both international and at a national level (for example civil defence precautions). Economic forecasts be of interest to foreign governments.
The second is at the military level, states of readiness, orders of battle, logistics levels, military capability (and linking to the above, political will)
The third is industrial espionage, research projects, industrial processes and so on.
All those areas are of interest to hostile intelligence services and need to be protected.
the BIGGEST threat is the USA government to their own people. CORRUPTION: ~2.4 Trillion Dollars spent on the Iraq-Afgan war then in 2018 they say its Chinese companies which are a threat! People are dying of poverty in this first world country. Current state of affairs caused by US/UK + other NATO governments is Syria and Libya (Dig deep you will find top people in these governments are benefiting financially from this war).
I'm guessing there will be a practical solution to this if everyone was willing to sit round a table and discuss it. For example having UK cleared companies reviewing and auditing the hardware and software going on the chips, and the build and load of the software happening in the UK. ZTE still have the IP, UK gets some jobs and a little factory, and we don't end up in a situation where we can't develop critical projects due to a lack of hardware.
There's going to be a decent chunk of this about "they won't have the US friendly back doors in any more!" too.
We're all quite aware of the amount of snooping the US (and UK) like to do, these will obviously not be as... "friendly to their needs".
This and market share will be a thing.
All that said, China and Russia are both stepping up quite considerably in "online warfare" capabilities. There's a pretty good chance they'll have learnt plenty about where to hide back doors etc from reverse engineering the stuff made out there for US companies. I'd think some of the fear-mongering is knowing EXACTLY what "holes" foreign powers will now be able to exploit.
Yet we are fine with Chinese firms investing in more critical things like our energy infrastructure,ie, nuclear power plants. It also shows a lack of basic understanding by people of how things are produced. All the stuff we palmed off to China,etc is made by the same factories that the Chinese design companies used.
So at any point in the last few decades it would have been easy for China,etc to compromise stuff before it left the country.
Yet when Chinese DESIGN companies use the SAME factories in the SAME factory cities it's all panic stations - the yellow peril conspiracy is out to get us. Sorry if they wanted to get us they already probably have.
The fact is if you care about security you need to source things locally.
Then ofc ignore the bigger realworld threat of PRIVATE companies data mining huge amounts of info about people and selling it to anyone around the world.
The Onion summed it up perfectly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqggW08BWO0
Investing in means putting up some capital and then gaining a return on that investment. It doesn't mean operating, or necessarily using components or control equipment built in China - and even if it did, the project is subject of oversight by the nuclear inspectorate and the ONR.
Hinckley point is being built by EDF, a French company with Chinese investment.
Whether that is the best way of building the next generation of nuclear power plant is a different argument, but security is not necessarily a concern in this instance. It may be in other instances, but there is a large organisation involved in the security and protection of the Critical National Infrastructure - which goes far beyond the National Grid and power generation.
No back doors were found in that equipment, what they said was that the Chinese had the technology to do so.
Also at the end of the day, none of that had anything to do with ZTE or Huawei which is the other company the US Gov is going after. It all boils down to protectionism, firms like Huawei have now surpassed the likes of Cisco tech wise and are putting out products that are superior at half the price.Cisco cannot compete and what we are seeing is lobbying dollars at work.the UK as uasual are just being the US's lapdog as usual with thier security warning.
Also why didn't the UK Gov put out a warning about Huawei like the US did?.
It's because a very large chunk of the UK internet structure is already running on Huawei built equipment and has been for the last 5 years or so.
Trump wants a trade war with China and he's pushing every button he can think of to get it.