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Huawei reviewing FedEx relationship, says packages 'diverted'

reuters.com

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Re: Huawei reviewing FedEx relationship, says packages 'diverted'

#91

Not related to this package delivery drama, but the way we are observing the live demolition of the world largest networking equipment maker and second largest smartphone maker (by number) in the name of trade war will never bring back the confidence in those who are flexing muscle. The illusion of the rule of law, free world, globalization and the reality of control is simply frightening, and worrisome.

> The illusion of the rule of law Rule of law has always been national. International politics are anarchic. Huawei quite clearly broke the laws of the United States ( e.g. with respect to Iran), repeatedly and wilfully.

Importing goods to Iran really isn't a violation of US laws, any more than, say, a twenty year old Huawei employee having a beer in Beijing or driving at 120 mph on a German autobahn. The rule of law is indeed national, and legally the US has very little jurisdiction outside its borders. Extralegally, of course, it has plenty of powers to arrest, kill or torture those it doesn't like.

Re: Huawei reviewing FedEx relationship, says packages 'diverted'

#92
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean Memphis? Atlanta would love to take some or all that traffic away from Memphis since the Atlanta airport is woefully under utilized after midnight.

Maybe? I just remember it was somewhere on the other side of the country where my package from SF to LA had no business being.

I had a package go from Fremont to SF via Memphis.

Re: Huawei reviewing FedEx relationship, says packages 'diverted'

#94
post #11
post #2

Not to a CIA "load station" ? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

They were documents. Why wouldn't they have just intercepted them in-place instead of sending them to the US? It doesn't make sense to be anything other than an error and Huawei being paranoid (rightfully so, but still).

They could be being paranoid, or they could be feeding mistrust of American corporations because the US has lead people to mistrust them. Russia has used similar tactics in the past to counter US measures.

Re: Huawei reviewing FedEx relationship, says packages 'diverted'

#95

Hanlon's razor applies here. If there was truly something nefarious going on, why would FedEx update the tracking status to say that the packages were re-routed? Why not just say they were held up in the sending or receiving country?

Because there was nobody who thought about it. We had a similar situation in Russia. A mobile operator was cooperating with government to hack into activists' Telegram accounts. They disabled SMS service for a user and then requested a password restore using SMS, intercepted it and got access. But they forgot to delete this information from their internal systems, so when the user called support, they told them that…

Why wouldn't an intelligence agency just intercept it quietly? If I were sufficiently motivated and had global assets willing to do my bidding I could probably have found a way to intercept it at a sorting facility or en route or by sending in an "inspector" or social engineering or something.

Why on earth would they do something so obvious to leave such a paper trail when you know they could pull this off quietly?

Re: Huawei reviewing FedEx relationship, says packages 'diverted'

#96

I wonder what the backstory is to this. You don't issue a press release for two missing packages. And since they were "important commercial documents" I am assuming that US intelligence must have intercepted them for some reason.

IMO vastly more likely that Huawei wants people to -believe- they were intercepted for US intelligence, as a counter measure for the pressure they are under. In reality, US intelligence would just place someone in a FedEx facility and track down the package and do everything off the record from FedEx's tracking system. The US government is pretty incompetent, but they could easily scan all the documents without a single soul knowing or having the suspicion, even FexEx would likely not know. This is likely just a logistical change, and Huawei is trying to take advantage of it and to raise doubt.

Re: Huawei reviewing FedEx relationship, says packages 'diverted'

#98

Not related to this package delivery drama, but the way we are observing the live demolition of the world largest networking equipment maker and second largest smartphone maker (by number) in the name of trade war will never bring back the confidence in those who are flexing muscle. The illusion of the rule of law, free world, globalization and the reality of control is simply frightening, and worrisome.

What they're doing to Huawei will have nefarious consequences to the US. Who can ever trust a country that can use this kind of tactics to destroy a comercial competitor?

> What they're doing to Huawei will have nefarious consequences to the US

And what consequences do you imagine there will be?

Re: Huawei reviewing FedEx relationship, says packages 'diverted'

#99

Hanlon's razor applies here. If there was truly something nefarious going on, why would FedEx update the tracking status to say that the packages were re-routed? Why not just say they were held up in the sending or receiving country?

It should be noted that we do know for a fact that the NSA has done things like this in the past (the Snowden documents revealed that they would intercept some networking equipment that was being shipped internationally so they could install backdoors[1,2]). And the NSA has hacked into Huawei's systems before to get access to internal emails and the source code of their products[3].

Hanlon's razor isn't as strong of an argument if you already have evidence that something similarly malicious has been done by that actor before. Obviously we still need to be skeptical, but not blindly so.

[1]: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden--the-nsa-p... [2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa... [2]: https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/23/latest-snowden-allegations...

Re: Huawei reviewing FedEx relationship, says packages 'diverted'

#100

Not related to this package delivery drama, but the way we are observing the live demolition of the world largest networking equipment maker and second largest smartphone maker (by number) in the name of trade war will never bring back the confidence in those who are flexing muscle. The illusion of the rule of law, free world, globalization and the reality of control is simply frightening, and worrisome.

> The illusion of the rule of law Rule of law has always been national. International politics are anarchic. Huawei quite clearly broke the laws of the United States ( e.g. with respect to Iran), repeatedly and wilfully.

Huawei may have broken the law with respect to violating U.S's sanctions on Iran. These are still unproven allegations as of yet.

Meanwhile, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, JP Morgan have provably done exactly that.

Yet there is only one C-suite level executive who is currently being held personally, criminally liable for corporate actions. I guarantee you won't be seeing Jamie Dimon threatened with prison time for JP Morgan's 87 violations of Iranian sanctions and Weapons of Mass Destruction sanctions, anytime soon.

Laws which are enforced selectively lack credibility.

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