Tuesday 7 May 2013

Huawei executive John Suffolk slams the US government's cyber security strategy

UK government chief information officer John Suffolk
John Suffolk, Huawei's global head of cyber security, has criticised the US government for attempting to prevent American companies from buying foreign technology.
In a personal blog post, Suffolk questions the true motives of the government's protectionist agenda. The former chief information officer for the UK government suggests that US regulations are attempting to better implement military security in private enterprise systems.
Suffolk contends that by removing foreign technology from network infrastructure the US government can reduce cyber network access points by consolidating government and military defenses with private industry.
He theorises that in doing so the US can also collect citizen data from telecommunications networks.
"It's quite clever really. You have just reduced your threat landscape to probably less than 30 network points and you broadly have less than a handful of telcos," wrote Suffolk in his blog post.
"So put on those access points an array of sensors and other top secret gubbins that the USA has spent all of its defense budget on and low and behold you have created a veritable gold mine of information, and a lot of response options."
In his blog post, Suffolk also says that data sharing bills such as CISPA would legitimise government data collection from private industry.
"The kind of scenario I have detailed above has already created a law breaking situation and these new laws are there to legitimize what might have been happening already – not saying it has just might have been," continued Suffolk.
Suffolk's theory comes following repeated attempts for the US government to separate itself from Chinese technology companies.
Late last year, government officials launched a detailed investigation into whether Chinese firms such as Huawei were working with the Chinese government to spy on US private industry. No evidence of collusion was discovered following the investigation.
Huawei has since said that the investigation hurt its sales in the US. The company's marketing vice president said the investigation stopped Huawei's wireless network sales growth in the US.

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