Microsoft Asks For Actual Spying Evidence To Justify Blackballing Of Huawei

from the protectionism-is-the-new-black dept

We've repeatedly noted that while Huawei certainly engages in some clearly sketchy shit (like any good telecom company), the evidence supporting the global blacklist of the company has been lacking. The Trump administration still hasn't provided any evidence supporting the central justification for the global blackballing effort (that Huawei works for China to spy wholesale on Americans), and at least some of the effort is little more than protectionism driven by companies like Cisco, which don't want to compete with cheaper Chinese gear.

Again while Huawei does pose some legitimate security concerns, there's also little doubt that at a sizable chunk of this effort is just good old protectionism. Despite this, plenty of companies (like Google) have been happy to jump on the Huawei blackballing bandwagon. That hasn't been the case with Microsoft, which this week broke ranks and went so far as to call the Trump administration's attempt to blackball the company "un-American."

While clearly holding selfish motivations (Microsoft wants to be able to sell Huawei product), company President Brad Smith was quick (and correct) to point out that the Trump administration is incapable of providing actual evidence of Huawei's spying in the US:

"When Microsoft asked US lawmakers to explain the threat, they've been too vague for Smith's liking. Huawei is a major customer of his company: Its laptops come with Microsoft's Windows operating system. "Oftentimes, what we get in response is, 'Well, if you knew what we knew, you would agree with us'," Smith told Bloomberg. "And our answer is, 'Great, show us what you know so we can decide for ourselves. That's the way this country works.'"

The thing is, that's the response everybody gets when they pressure the Trump for actual evidence that Huawei spies on Americans. That includes the UK, which has also lamented a lack of solid spying evidence, while noting that most of Huawei's security issues (frequently the result of sloppy craftsmanship, not malice) can be addressed using common sense instead of harmful trade wars and blackballing.

The last time we went through this was in 2011, where similar protectionist sable rattling (again, well hyped by US networking gear competitors) led to an 18 month investigation into Huawei by the White House that discovered... nothing at all. And while it's certainly possible that Huawei has helped the Chinese government spy on Americans, actual public evidence is kind of important if you're going to engage in sweeping global blackballing policies impacting a massive chain of companies and ecosystems. If the shoe were on the other foot, there'd be no limit of US indiignation at the lack of supporting evidence.

The other problem of course is that the US isn't really in much of a position to lecture anybody on spying. Snowden docs revealed that the NSA (aka the United States) had broken into Huawei as early as 2007 in a bid to steal source code and covertly implant backdoors into Huawei products. Similarly you'll recall how the NSA was also busted intercepting Cisco hardware in transit, taking that gear to a special facility, then outfitting it with backdoors. That's before you even get to AT&T's role in international and domestic US surveillance, something routinely applauded as patriotic.

Pursuing the blackballing of Huawei without showing any evidence of actual spying sends two messages. One, that unethical behavior is only okay when the United States does it. And two, giant countries don't need to provide evidence when flinging accusations about if they just bury the data under ambiguous accusations of national security violations. Neither China nor Huawei are saints, but there are far better ways to go about shoring up US telecom security (like spending some of these calories on fixing the internet of broken things), assuming fixing telecom security is even the actual goal.

Filed Under: blackballing, china, evidence, trade wars
Companies: huawei, microsoft

What Happens When The US Government Tries To Take On The Open Source Community?

from the maybe-we-are-about-to-find-out dept

Last year, Microsoft bought the popular code repository GitHub. As Techdirt wrote at the time, many people were concerned by this takeover of a key open source resource by a corporate giant that has frequently proved unfriendly to free software. In the event, nothing worrying has happened -- until this:

GitHub this week told Anatoliy Kashkin, a 21-year-old Russian citizen who lives in Crimea, that it had "restricted" his GitHub account "due to US trade controls".

As the ZDNet article explains, a user in Iran encountered the same problems. Naturally, many people saw this as precisely the kind of danger they were worried about when Microsoft bought GitHub. The division's CEO, Nat Friedman, used Twitter to explain what exactly was happening, and why:

To comply with US sanctions, we unfortunately had to implement new restrictions on private repos and paid accounts in Iran, Syria, and Crimea.

Public repos remain available to developers everywhere -- open source repos are NOT affected.

He went on to note:

The restrictions are based on place of residence and location, not on nationality or heritage. If someone was flagged in error, they can fill out a form to get the restrictions lifted on their account within hours.

Users with restricted private repos can also choose to make them public. Our understanding of the law does not give us the option to give anyone advance notice of restrictions.

We're not doing this because we want to; we're doing it because we have to. GitHub will continue to advocate vigorously with governments around the world for policies that protect software developers and the global open source community.

The most important aspect of this latest move by GitHub is that open source projects are unaffected, and that even those who are hit by the bans can get around them by moving from private to public repositories. Friedman rightly points out that as a company based in the US, GitHub doesn't have much scope for ignoring US laws.

However, this incident does raise some important questions. For example, what happens if the US government decides that it wants to prevent programmers in certain countries from accessing open source repositories on GitHub as well? That would go against a fundamental aspect of free software, which is that it can be used by anyone, for anything -- including for bad stuff.

This question has already come up before, when President Trump issued the executive order "Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain", a thinly-disguised attack on the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei. As a result of the order, Google blocked Huawei's access to updates of Android. Some Chinese users were worried they were about to lose access to GitHub, which is just as crucial for software development in China as elsewhere. GitHub said that wasn't the case, but it's not hard to imagine the Trump administration putting pressure on GitHub's owner, Microsoft, to toe the line at some point in the future.

More generally, the worry has to be that the US government will attempt to dictate to all global free software projects who may and may not use their code. That's something that the well-known open source and open hardware hacker Bunnie Huang has written about at length, in a blog post entitled "Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War". It's well-worth reading and pondering, because the relatively minor recent problems with GitHub could turn out to be a prelude to a far more serious clash of cultures.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: crimea, doj, open source software, sanctions, trade wars, us sanctions
Companies: github, microsoft

No, Counting The Number Of Patent Infringement Lawsuits Is Not A Good Way To Quantify A Company's IP Ethics

from the look-at-this-high-number-which-is-actually-much-lower-than-several-others! dept

Much has been made about Donald Trump walking back sanctions placed on ZTE, a partly state-owned Chinese cellphone manufacturer, for selling products to Iran and North Korea. (Fun fact: our law enforcement agencies still do business with tech companies that sell to blacklisted countries.) The company has already paid millions of dollars in fines to the US for these violations, even if the working theory is the company paid zero dollars and the Chinese government picked up the tab.

The actual badness of ZTE is somewhere between the extremes resulting in sanctions and the trade war victim it tries to present itself as. Trump is a fan of trade wars, even if Pyrhhic stalemates are still considered righteous wins in the Trade War Game. Trump has decided to lift the US government boot from ZTE's mostly-unbruised neck as a gesture of goodwill or something after slapping the world's largest exporter of consumer goods with a bunch of tariffs that seem to be doing more harm than good on the home front.

And, because it's Trump lifting the sanctions, lots of people are claiming it's unilaterally a bad thing for him to do. This has resulted in some really bad arguments for maintaining sanctions and there's one being made at TechCrunch. It begins with a horrendous attempt to quantify the "terribleness" of ZTE by using an incredibly meaningless stat.

After meeting with Chinese Vice Premiere Liu He this week, President Trump is still considering easing penalties on Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE over its violation of sanctions against Iran and North Korea. But what Mr. Trump may not realize is that ZTE is also one of the world’s most notorious intellectual property thieves — perhaps even the most notorious of all.

The Most Notorious Of All!

How does one gain this desirable title? Here's how the Most Notorious sausage in made in the TechCrunch post:

To get a sense of just how egregious ZTE’s behavior truly is, we need only to consult PACER, the national index of federal court cases. A search of PACER reveals that in the U.S. alone, ZTE has been sued for patent infringement an astonishing 126 times just in the last five years. This number is even more shocking when you consider that only a subset of companies who believe their IP rights have been violated by ZTE has the means or the will to spend the millions of dollars needed to wage a multi-year lawsuit in federal courts.

SHOCKING! 126 times in the past five years. The mind boggles… oh wait.

Apple has been sued for patent infringement 296 times over the same period. It must be at least twice the egregious IP violator ZTE is, and no one (outside of the IPWatchdog staff) believes the US government should sanction it.

LG Electronics has been sued 193 times in the same time period -- an 1.5 times more astonishing rate of egregious behavior.

That's just two examples. There are countless more. There may be valid reasons to keep sanctions against ZTE in place, but IP infringement isn't one of them. If it is, there's got to be a better metric than "patent infringement lawsuits filed against." This doesn't indicate anything but how profitable patent trolling can be. Every NPE (non-practicing entity) with a pocket full of vague software patents has filed multiple lawsuits against multiple device manufacturers. The mere existence of dozens of patent lawsuits indicates nothing more than federal filing fees offer decent ROI for patent trolls.

The editorial is on more solid ground (in terms of IP enforcement) when it calls ZTE out for joining a patent pool to collect licensing fees but heading for the exit door as soon as it became apparent it would also have to pay fees to other pool members for making use of their patents.

Claiming lawsuits = valid claims based on solid, distinct patents is a bogus argument. It ignores the expected outcome of a patent troll-friendly litigation system in an attempt to score points against Trump's new favorite Chinese manufacturer. It's not so much disingenuous as it is ignorant. But ignorance gets ignored when confirmation bias comes into play, and those who hate Trump are just as susceptible to being duped by their own minds are his supporters are. If there's a legitimate case to be made against continuing sanctions against ZTE, it's for the company's willingness to sell electronics to blacklisted companies. This argument only legitimizes patent trolling, portraying it as something other than what it really is: speculative invoicing on a mass scale.

Filed Under: donald trump, patent lawsuits, patent trolls, patents, trade wars
Companies: apple, zte

Will Corporate Sovereignty Disputes Lead To Wars One Day?

from the even-if-they-don't,-they-hardly-promote-peace dept

Last August, we wrote about the most egregious corporate sovereignty award (so far): $50 billion against Russia, under a treaty that it never even ratified, in favor of the major shareholders of the Yukos oil company. Of course, as everyone pointed out, being awarded $50 billion was one thing, collecting it, quite another. Most people probably assumed that it would be practically impossible to squeeze that money out of a recalcitrant Russia, but we now learn that some serious steps towards that goal have recently been taken, as reported by Der Spiegel (original in German). In Belgium, the bank accounts of the Russian embassy were frozen, as were those of Russia's EU and NATO missions, while in France, something similar happened, with Russian accounts blocked at 40 banks.

Understandably, this did not go down well with the Russian government. The country's deputy foreign minister warned, "whoever dares to do that must understand that it will lead to reprisals," something his boss, Sergei Lavrov echoed. Meanwhile, Lavrov's own boss, Vladimir Putin, was also well aware of the situation, and was quoted as saying: "we will defend our interests using legal means."

A story on France 24 reports that Russia has already threatened to retaliate against state-linked foreign firms operating in the country, so that's one way that things could escalate. But more seriously, the relations between Russia and EU nations are extremely strained over the conflict in eastern Ukraine; the last thing the situation needs is additional tension caused by arguments over a massive fine. Even if corporate sovereignty doesn't actually cause a war -- well, let's hope not -- the Yukos award may turn into a hindrance to resolving an existing conflict. That's yet another reason to get rid of the whole deeply-flawed system before it causes more serious damage.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: belgium, corporate sovereignty, france, frozen assets, isds, russia, trade wars, vladimir putin, war
Companies: yukos

Antigua Still Threatening To Launch Its WTO-Endorsed Legal Piracy Site, But We've Heard That Before

from the any-day-now dept

In a dispute that's dragged on for over a decade, it appears that Antigua is, once again, making noises about how this time it's really, really, really going to do what the WTO has said it can do: set up a legal platform to infringe on American copyrights as a form of official payback for the US clearly violating a trade agreement with Antigua by outlawing online gambling. We've covered this dispute and all its twists and turns for years, but the short summary is that Antigua won at every turn, even as the US tried to once declare victory where it had lost. The US even tried to just say it could unilaterally change the trade agreement, which is not how those things work.

Of course, Antigua is a small country, so how does it "get back" at the US after such a win, when it's clear that the US doesn't care at all about the WTO saying it violated the agreement? Well, some folks had the bright idea that perhaps Antigua could just violate American copyrights, and pirate their way to the equivalent value of what the US should be paying. That idea was first floated around 2006, and it seemed like a joke. However, it continued to gain steam. Of course, the real idea behind these sorts of things is that Antigua and the WTO hope that this will make the RIAA and MPAA go running to the US government and beg them to come to some sort of settlement in which gobs of cash are sent from the US Treasury to Antigua. It's a well-known trick in trade wars: co-opt some powerful lobbyists who really shouldn't have any dog in the actual fight, and get them on your side. It happens in trade disputes quite often.

Of course, in the years since the WTO first gave its stamp of approval to this plan, what we've seen is every so often, Antigua makes a public statement along the lines of, "Hey! we're really going to do it!" and the US responds with "You'd better not!" and then there's silence for a year or two, and the dance starts all over again. Apparently it's time for that dance again, because Antigua is making very public that it's really, no really (do you hear that USTR?) really, really, really planning to move forward this time. No, really. They even had a meeting about it. And they're going to set up a body to "manage and operate" the platform. They also claim that they'll soon let private companies bid on participating. And... of course, they knock the US for "failing to negotiate."

I imagine that at some point the US will do another "Oh no, you'd better not!" statement, and then we'll be waiting around for another six to nine months before Antigua insists that it's really, really, no really moving forward with it this time. Really. Guys. Really. We mean it this time.

Filed Under: antigua, copyright, infringement, piracy, trade wars, wto