Wednesday, December 15, 2021

From the liar files: Chinese companies that tells us they don't do the Chinese government tells them to do

The Washington Post has analyzed public marketing presentations by the computer hardware and internet company Huawei, now taken offline to hide them. Not surprisingly, the presentations had evidence that the company was involved in Chinese government spying on the Chinese people. 

The marketing presentations had been posted on a publicly accessible Huawei website, but the company removed them last year. They show Huawei touting the use of its technologies to help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor individuals of political interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.

Huawei technology: Monitoring people by voiceprint



Also not surprising, the company denies everything. A company statement comments: “Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report. Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards.” What a bunch of liars.

Huawei claims to be just an innocent maker of computer and cloud hardware and software. The company says it would never cooperate with the Chinese government in China to do anything nefarious. At this point, it is worth noting that the Chinese government is brutal, authoritarian and it is the law, regardless of what the written laws may say. So, if Huawei did refuse to do what it was told to do in China or anywhere else on the planet, some Huawei heads would roll, maybe literally.

Huawei publicly claims that it doesn’t know how its technology is used by customers. But the detailed accounts of surveillance operations on the company’s slides accords with long-standing concerns about lack of transparency. Huawei is the world’s largest vendor of telecommunications gear. For years, Huawei has been criticized that it is opaque and closer to the Chinese government than it claims. 

WaPo comments: “A number of Western governments have blocked Huawei gear from their new 5G telecom networks out of concern that the company may assist Beijing with intelligence-gathering, which Huawei denies. .... The new details on Huawei’s surveillance products come amid growing concerns in China, and around the world, about the consequences of pervasive facial recognition and other biometric tracking. Even as the Chinese Communist Party continues to rely on such tools to root out dissent and maintain its one-party rule, it has warned against the technologies’ misuse in the private sector.”


Question: Is it credible to believe that, just like it does with all other Chinese companies, the Chinese government doesn't tell Huawei what to do and the company does it, or is Huawei just plain lying?

No comments:

Post a Comment