Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Huawei and Dilbert

Years ago, the brain of Scott Adams created the cartoon Dilbert.  Dilbert was working with a company from a fictitious country, Ebonia.  The Ebonians worked for nothing and would write software for any company that wanted to use them.  Dilbert's pointy haired boss thought that was a great idea.  Dilbert thought something was amiss. 

I saw Gordon Chang on Fox Business yesterday and he was describing much the same kind of thing with some of Huawei's work for African nations.  We will build your infrastructure for free, and you can buy services from us afterwards.  A lot of the data they were processing on those infrastructures was going right back to China every day.  This is not an even complicated way to collect intelligence, but Huawei says it is not a part of the intelligence services of China. 

There are two sides to this story.  The first one says there is no free lunch, unless you are the potential client and business is taking you out.  Anyone would have to be thinking, "Why are they giving me a very expensive infrastructure for free?"  Is there a catch?  Come on!  Yes, there is a catch and anyone who thought more than a minute on the subject could know what "free" means in a case like this.  When a politician sells his soul to the idea that anything free must be good, he should serve time in a new place in hell.  Even Dante did not see that one coming. 

The second part of that is more and more countries are seeing the connection between Huawei and Chinese intelligence, knowledge they had years ago when I wrote my first book.  Our government had denied Huawei attempts to buy into technology sectors and the infrastructure of the United States.  They finally gave up, though they got quite a bit of what they wanted in many of those cases because some business leaders are a lot like Dilbert's boss.  Those payments from Huawei, in the form of joint ventures and partnerships were too good to pass up.  They never even looked twice at the reasons for the U.S. stopping so many of those deals going through.  They got their money and Huawei got what it wanted. 

Last February, the heads of FBI, CIA, and NSA said don't use phones made by ZTE or Huawei, yet they are still for sale here.  Routers are an even greater problem but they still sell those too.  Where is Scott Adams when you need him? 

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