I think social media has made people less tolerant of nuance. I say this after looking at the Hacker News comments to my latest post:
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=225182…
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=225182…
It could be simultaneous true that Huawei has done better than any of its competitors in closing/preventing backdoors -- and still be an intolerable national security threat due to it's backdoors used by Chinese intelligence.
I think both are true. The argument Huawei makes in its video is valid: if ever a technical backdoor were found its products, it would be an existential threat to their business. I'm sure they've done their best to close such backdoors.
For things like the CALEA-type law enforcement backdoors, they have plenty of controls to prevent abuse, by the phone company employees, or by contract support engineers from Huawei.
At the same time, they blatantly lie in the video. They acknowledge that while their support engineers do have some sort of side door access to equipment, they pretend its only on an as-need basis and is strictly controlled.
That may happen occasionally, but in all my experience, it's just a VPN connection back to their support centers in China allowing support engineers to connect any time they want for any purpose, with little logging of what the engineers do.
And as I mention in the blogpost, at one time I saw exactly this. A famous international incident was followed by a Huawei support engineer logging on and getting all the mobile device IDs near the incident during the time in question -- then deleting the logs.
Nuance is impossible. We can't grasp the fact that Huawei is a huge backdoor national security threat despite not having any nefarious backdoors in the system. We must instead fearmonger about backdoors in their products.
