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The Clean Network – United States Department of State

state.gov

251–260 of 412 posts

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. First of all, attitudes toward Chinese and other immigrants to the U.S. in the 20th century were formed, in part, by the language that was used by those in power. That Chinese immigrants were "dirty" was not fact , it was a racist stereotype. Second, I do not contend that describing anything in negative terms is racist. I am linking the specific history of describing Chinese immigrants as dirty with the Clean Net…

"dirty" isn't a racialized work like "chink". It's a word applied to anything we don't like and want to keep out. China already has a similar system also called (the Chinese word for) "Clean". Is the Chinese government racist against Chinese?

The Chinese cannot be racist against Chinese. But the US can, and it shows.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#252
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is my impression that modern companies that care about security assume that all networks are compromised and act accordingly. I think more to the point, Google et al assume that all networks are compromised by state level actors . As in NSA. As in the people who wrote this "Clean" policy.

Yeah I think Google calls it BeyondProd their version of a zero trust network.

I believe it's BeyondCorp: https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It is ridiculous how closely the language sounds to that of a dictatorial regime. The language is just so.. cringy. When I first read, I genuinely could not believe it was not onion or some weird caricature.

Also consistently calls out PRC as a threat without acknowledging the diversity of bad players on the net. This is more about posing and politics than countering real threats.

Gotta spice up your propaganda with some attacks attributed to North Korea, Iran and Russia.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#255
post #80

I have the same feeling about this as I did the announcement of the "Department of Homeland Security". The name sounded Soviet in origin, with only the exchange of "Homeland" in place of "Motherland". It reminded me of things my family had taught me didn't happen in the United States. "We call on all freedom-loving nations and companies to join the Clean Network." is a sentence straight out of an authoritarian playbo…

> The name sounded Soviet in origin, with only the exchange of "Homeland" in place of "Motherland". It reminded me of things my family had taught me didn't happen in the United States. Back in 2014, China launched a crackdown on illegal online content, it was named "净网行动", which literally translates to "Clean Network Campaign/Action". The targets were illegal materials, mainly materials officially considered obscene,…

:) Learning from each other will continue. Especially how to bypass govt erected half baked BS.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#256
post #80

I have the same feeling about this as I did the announcement of the "Department of Homeland Security". The name sounded Soviet in origin, with only the exchange of "Homeland" in place of "Motherland". It reminded me of things my family had taught me didn't happen in the United States. "We call on all freedom-loving nations and companies to join the Clean Network." is a sentence straight out of an authoritarian playbo…

Just read in the news this morning that the intelligence community acknowledges China has a steak in Biden being put in the Oval Office and Russia has a steak in Trump staying put. Interesting that Russia's name was not in this piece anywhere...

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#257

This really comes off as a hastily prepared political dig against China, when there are in addition so many other actors and countries trying to take advantage of poor security. The JPEGed giant logo at the top doesn't help... Other observations: -- "Remove untrusted applications from US mobile app stores": so, this would call for even tighter control by Apple, Google, over its app distribution and monopolies? -- Cle…

> The JPEGed giant logo It's almost like they ran it through jpegify.me on purpose as a joke, but really it's just another sign of the US's government technical incompetence.

I think it's more a sign of this being hastily thrown together. There's a lot of last minute stuff going on to try to boost Trump's reelection bid.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.politico.eu/article/huawei-germany-court-case-pr... Of specific concern is a 2017 intelligence law that obliges companies to "support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence services in accordance with the law, and maintain secret all knowledge on the national intelligence services." Another is China's cybersecurity law, which contains similar requirements. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…

RE the Bloomberg article, be aware that Vodafone rejected Bloomberg's reporting [1]: "The 'backdoor' that Bloomberg refers to is Telnet, which is a protocol that is commonly used by many vendors in the industry for performing diagnostic functions. It would not have been accessible from the internet. "Bloomberg is incorrect in saying that this 'could have given Huawei unauthorised access to the carrier's fixed-line ne…

And the Politico one about the German intelligence findings?

Or the fact that Huawei is a de-facto public company, with massive subsidies by the CDB?

https://www.rfi.fr/en/contenu/20190530-huawei-key-beneficiar...

Huawei inked a $10 billion credit line with the China Development Bank (CDB) in 2004 to provide low-cost financing to customers buying its telecom gear. It was tripled to $30 billion in 2009.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/state-support-helped-fuel-huawe...

And it's funny, because they admit this is normal

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3043558/huawei-sa...

“Like other tech companies that operate in China, including those from abroad, Huawei receives some policy support from the Chinese government,” Karl Song, vice-president of the company’s corporate communications department, said in a statement. “But we have never received any additional or special treatment.”

There's no large corporation in China that got there without financial backing, and board control, from the CCP.

Thus, all major Chinese corporations are a extension of the CCP.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#259

This really comes off as a hastily prepared political dig against China, when there are in addition so many other actors and countries trying to take advantage of poor security. The JPEGed giant logo at the top doesn't help... Other observations: -- "Remove untrusted applications from US mobile app stores": so, this would call for even tighter control by Apple, Google, over its app distribution and monopolies? -- Cle…

Denial of service, metadata extraction, easy path to mitm if there's a zero day. Those are just a few attacks possible without decrypting payloads. If I gave you a root CA's private key and my ip address you would not be able to mitm me unless you found a way to inject yourself in my datapath. Good luck with that unless you have nice backdoors to core infrastructure.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#260

Are there any cybersecurity professionals on here who want to comment about the pros and cons of the network? I don't have the necessary expertise to ascertain the merits of it (actual threat vs. mitigated threat) but I don't like the "clean" verbiage. Nor do I like China's own longstanding protectionism and Great Firewall.

I can think of a couple, 1) There are too many in/out points and encrypted paths in and out of the network to actually make this worth spending time on. Think of walling off the entire country, yet there is still air above the wall, movable earth below the wall. 2) It creates a false sense of security if you're on the "clean network" and may make some developers less considerate of securing apps, websites, etc, and s…

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