Should China or the US Dominate the Big Brother Game?

I don’t know if you saw Greg Miller’s excellent article in the Washington Post on how the CIA secretly ran the Swiss company Crypto AG for decades and used to it to intercept supposedly encrypted messages from friends and foes alike. If not, it’s worth taking a half hour to learn this history, because it’s topical.

There is now a giant row between the United States and the United Kingdom over the implementation of 5G wireless communication.

The U.S. Attorney General said America should consider taking a controlling stake in European telecoms equipment makers Nokia and Ericsson to “blunt” Chinese firm Huawei’s “drive to domination.”

William Barr’s comments come after President Donald Trump expressed “apoplectic” fury towards U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson over Britain’s decision to allow Huawei limited participation in its 5G networks, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Vladimir Putin’s Sputnik News is highly amused, reporting that the Trump administration is sending a delegation lot London ed by White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to give a “b*****king” to the British counterparts.”

As things stand, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has cancelled an already delayed visit to the United States because he did not appreciate being berated by Trump over his handling of the Huawei issue.

Boris Johnson has called off plans for a spring visit to the United States to see Donald Trump amid ongoing transatlantic tensions that threatens to overshadow trade talks, it was reported today.

The Prime Minister is said to have originally planned to visit Washington last month following his election victory, before moving the trip to February.

But now the plans for a visit are said to have been shelved and the two men will not meet face-to-face until a G7 summit at Camp David in Maryland in June.

Washington and London are at loggerheads over issues including Mr Johnson’s decision to allow Chinese tech giant Huawei to have a role in the UK’s 5G phone network.

For now, the US is in a bind. It’s one thing to tell the UK to shun Huawei but it’s not very effective if they can’t offer a workable alternative.

British officials have tried to mitigate the furor by assuring us that they won’t allow Huawei to touch the so-called “core” elements of the 5G network, and won’t let Huawei near classified or sensitive data, including military data.

But these arguments are meaningless, or beside the point. It’s true that historically countries have protected sensitive information and functions at the core of their telecommunications networks. But with 5G the distinction between core and edge disappears. A potential threat anywhere in the network will be a threat to the whole network.

As for classified data, most of it will be encrypted anyway. The issue is the vast amount of unclassified data that 5G will generate, more than twenty times the amount in current wireless networks. Huawei will be in a position to collect and share that information with Big Data and AI—wielding Chinese intelligence services and military, to help them plan their anti-Western strategy, and to wage “fake news” disinformation campaigns while disrupting messaging and sites they don’t like.

In the end, the issue isn’t whether Huawei builds this or that part of the network, or what percentage of the overall network the Chinese company manages. It’s having Huawei there in the first place.

But Johnson does have a point when he asks, what’s my alternative to Huawei. Embarrassingly, the U.S. still hasn’t offered one—at least not yet.

It doesn’t make sense to scold allies and other countries for going the Huawei route, if there’s no U.S.-backed and U.S.-based alternative to offer.

What seems clear is that no one thinks 5G technology will be secure, so it’s really a battle over which governments get to exploit its weaknesses. America has traditionally dominated in this area, which has benefitted the West in general. But now China is in the driver’s seat and America is freaking out that it can’t stem China’s momentum.

In general, I’d prefer to take the side of the consumers against invasive government surveillance, but in a battle between China doing the surveilling and the West doing it, I’d choose the West.  Unfortunately, Trump would rather scream and yell at Boris Johnson than come up with an actual plan.

Meanwhile, do not assume that even you encrypted communications are secure. Traditionally, the CIA has depended on people believing that.

It wasn’t just that the CIA sold compromised encryption equipment to foreign government for decades, they also opened people’s snail mail. And the main reason they didn’t tell anyone, including the president, that they were opening people’s mail is because the whole reason it worked was because the Soviets actually believe the U.S. mail was sacrosanct and secure. To demonstrate my point, read the following exchange between Sen. Walter Mondale of Minnesota and the former head of counterintelligence at the CIA, James Angleton. It occurred on September 24, 1975, during a Church Committee hearing on the illegal mail opening program.

MONDALE: All right. What was your understanding of the legality of the covert mail opening operation?
ANGLETON: That is was illegal.
MONDALE: It was illegal. Now, you are an attorney?
ANGLETON: No, I am not sir.
MONDALE: Well, that might be an asset.
ANGLETON: That is my cover, Senator.
MONDALE: How do you rationalize conducting an operation which you believe to be illegal?
ANGLETON: …From the counterintelligence point of view, we believe it was extremely important to know everything possible regarding contacts of American citizens with Communist countries. And, second, that we believe that the security of the operation was such that the Soviets were unaware of such a program and therefore many of the interests that the Soviets would have in the United States, subversive and otherwise, would be through the open mails, when their own adjudication was that the mails could not be violated.
MONDALE: So, that a judgment was made, with which you concurred, that although covert mail opening was illegal, the good that came from it, in terms of anticipating threats to this country through the use of this counterintelligence technique, made it worthwhile nevertheless.
ANGLETON: That is correct.

Angleton’s point was that everyone agreed that the government opening people’s mail was illegal, which is precisely why people were willing to send incriminating information to each other through the open mail. They couldn’t ask for permission, even from the president, because if word leaked out then the whole operation would dry up as a useful way to get intelligence.

It would be naive to think that China has a more enlightened view of people’s civil rights and privacy than the CIA. And the CIA continued to sell compromised encryption equipment up the point that their company’s products were not commercially competitive. This is how the world works. We’re supposed to believe the government isn’t looking so that we’ll spill our secrets more readily to the government. It’s been this way since the beginning of the Cold War, and there is good reason not to let Huawei dominate the Big Brother surveillance game.