The Clean Network – United States Department of State

https://www.state.gov/5g-clean-network/

by sysoleg • 6 years ago

347 365 6 years ago

state.gov

ProAm• 6 years ago

We now have our own "Great Firewall"

JumpCrisscross• 6 years ago

We now have our own "Great Firewall"

I don’t see anything about content filtering. Just transport integrity.

The closest we come to that is the prohibition on apps, but that’s still an ocean away from censoring text messages mentioning the Tiananmen massacre.

komali22• 6 years ago

Or arresting a Hong Kong democratic leader for "uttering seditious words" (exact phrasing of the CCP today).

GaryNumanVevo3• 6 years ago

It's fairly simple. Did the app you download have anti-American sentiment posted on it? Banned. It could have been Chinese propaganda after all. Same goes for video hosting, web hosting, etc.

consultutah• 6 years ago

It looks like we are breaking the internet up along the lines of political boundaries. The US will have one internet, the EU another, China yet another... Hopefully the pendulum will swing back in the other direction soon...

cmckn• 6 years ago

Hopefully, none of this will be implemented and we can all forget Mike Pompeo exists in 6 months.

slater• 6 years ago

84 more days till election... fingers & toes crossed

dominotw2• 6 years ago

how will Chinese internet "swing back" if Pompeo stops existing. Chinese invented their great firewall for trump, that your logic?

golem14• 6 years ago

Hope is not a strategy. AFAICT, both parties basically support stronger state control and more surveillance.

It will be interesting to see how EU/China/Russia/USA spheres of influence will develop. With the pandemic, a lot of "unthinkable" things have happened (travel prohibition from US to EU etc), so I think the various factions are emboldened to double down on

- keeping their data in their sphere - improve surveillance of own citizenry

* China of course has been pretty much on this track for years.

* EU is using privacy as the good cause to sell this

* US is now doing the same with national security as excuse.

I don't see the big picture changing just because the president and administration change (if they do).

9HZZRfNlpR• 6 years ago

Judging by your politics the other party will do the same citing Russian interference, you will always be slaves to your two party system abs continue fighting with each other.

bobajeff• 6 years ago

Hopefully the pendulum will swing back in the other direction soon

Narrator: "It didn't."

socraticmethod• 6 years ago

Narrator: "It didn't."

Yuck. I read HN to avoid these kind of low effort canned responses.

clevergadget• 6 years ago

it swings back when we invent new protocols - which is to say it never swings back. From traditional publishing to radio to tv to the internet to gentrification once the bastards get control you gotta make the next thing.

52-6F-627• 6 years ago

This isn't just protocols, though.

At least to me it sounds like an announcement that they plan to "cut the lines" to countries that don't adhere to the standards of the current American administration.

A new protocol won't allow you to communicate with people in the United States if you're on a "blacklisted" comms company's network.

intotheabyss• 6 years ago

There are new protocols being invented; namely the decentralized web protocols (IPFS, web3, dat (Breaker), etc. ). Whether you think cryptocurrencies are useful or not, there is a push to build a new open decentralized internet using these protocols and IPFS + ENS domains and the web3 protocol stack on Ethereum.

munificent4• 6 years ago

Power naturally consolidates. If you have a little more power than the next person, the first thing you do is use it to get a little more power. Let that feedback loop run for several thousand iterations and you end up with the massive inequality that has been a hallmark of human civilization since the agricultural revolution.

The only force I know of that has been able to moderate that feedback loop is organization. By very definition, what the elite few who consolidate power don't have is numbers. They are massively outnumbered, which is why they are constantly sowing discord (like fomenting racism). Because they know the only thing keeping them in power is the disorganization of the masses.

x3n0ph3n3• 6 years ago

China already has their own internet.

adsjhdashkj2• 6 years ago

Yea, i'd rather not follow suit.

typon2• 6 years ago

The whole point is for the US to be a leader, not a follower. If China wants their own internet, let them suffer.

zolosa• 6 years ago

Hopefully that would end the monopoly of US tech Giants.

jamiek88• 6 years ago

Oh jeez. No good can come from this Balkanization of the net. This is how Russia started its control.

Same playbook.

wyuenho10• 6 years ago

China has already Balkanized their "Internet" for over 20 years now.

chillacy4• 6 years ago

That was their loss. If China does something, does the US have to follow?

As it is, this just makes it seem like China was right this whole time and the US ideals of an open internet were a failure.

Fordec• 6 years ago

The solution isn't more added on top. When China is your example of somewhere that is leading the way in doing something on the internet first, it's time to look at yourself long and hard in the mirror.

asdff• 6 years ago

Isn't it already pretty balkanized? Different countries have different censors and copyright laws. I post a video here in the U.S., it might be legal here but illegal in the EU, or vis versa. And people in Europe enjoy tighter consumer privacy protections than me. And being in CA, I enjoy better protections than other Americans in other states, on the same 'national' internet. The internet has been balkanized for probably 30-40 years, whenever the lawyers first entered the chat. The countries that do highly censor content, like china or russia, censor all forms of media, not just the internet.

entropea• 6 years ago

The Clean Network program is the Trump Administration’s comprehensive approach to safeguarding the nation’s assets including citizens’ privacy and companies’ most sensitive information from aggressive intrusions by malign actors, such as the Chinese Communist Party.

Straight up consent manufacturing.

bananabreakfast• 6 years ago

The intention of cutting out bad actors seems to be in the right place, but using "Clean" for the terminology is really unnecessarily inflammatory.

52-6F-627• 6 years ago

I'd add that the collection of telecom companies at the bottom of the page is grossly misleading. It makes them appear as signatories or as if they're following America's lead.

bilbo0s• 6 years ago

Probably true. At the same time, they may have no choice. This sort of thing is not elective.

There are a lot of people around me taking that as a list of companies not to do business with. As if this will save them from the global surveillance dragnet. But here's the thing, you either submit to american surveillance and tracking, or you submit to some other nation's surveillance and tracking. You will not be able to choose companies that don't partner with their national governments for surveillance and tracking. So people taking this as a list of cooperating companies, and asking how to avoid this system, are being a little naive. Thinking that somehow, not being on our network will save them from surveillance. It won't. Best case, it saves them from surveillance by us.

It is a sad future. I'll concede you that.

waihtis7• 6 years ago

All I can think of is the story about how toothpaste was made popular.

jayd162• 6 years ago

There's no good intention here. Its clearly a political document. It even calls out hiding covid research from China as if that helps humanity in any way.

non-entity• 6 years ago

I think the current administration has seen major success, in part by being inflammatory and is just trying to keep up the publicity.

javier10e6• 6 years ago

Behold! The Clean World Wide Web will be known as Patriot One Web or pow.

52-6F-627• 6 years ago

All run on clean, clean coal

Kidding aside, this is so blatant I can hardly believe I'm seeing it happen.

Naac• 6 years ago

What's up with the incredible low resolution jpeg at the top of the article? It really stands out from the other images ( which seem fine )

ipsin• 6 years ago

I was curious about that too.

The img tag has a "srcset" attribute with resolutions from 85x48 to 1920x1080, but the "sizes" attribute is "(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px".

vlovich123• 6 years ago

Isn't it ridiculously easy to set up attacks from within a "clean" network? It probably does increase costs marginally (you have to fly people to "clean" countries, set up ISP access with third parties, etc) but are there any public estimates how much it does that vs the increased costs to run this network? I would think it's marginal.

Seeing the partner list this seems like more of a ploy by telecoms to attack tech companies than any legitimate attempt to secure networks.

To prevent U.S. citizens’ most sensitive personal information and our businesses’ most valuable intellectual property, including COVID-19 vaccine research, from being stored and processed on cloud-based systems accessible to our foreign adversaries through companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom, and Tencent.

Am I missing something?

gpm6• 6 years ago

There's a bunch of different measures discussed, but they all seem to remove some attack surface that we have seen exploited.

Securing the routers and network cables removes the means for man in the middle attacks (or at least makes them preventable with router security). Not connecting to telecos does the same (because of bgp highjacking and the like).

Removing chinese apps and not storing data on Chinese servers makes decreases the amount of data that can be extracted from large portions of the population by the CCP. E.g. preventing the "who knows who" graph from leaking wholesale (even if individual nodes can still be investigated via other means).

This doesn't fix all security problems, but it removes some of China's current advantages in cyberwarfare.

Not putting apps in Chinese app stores and devices looks to be an outlier in that it's a form of sanction (in response to human rights abuses) rather than a defensive measure.

matthewdgreen• 6 years ago

Securing routers and network cables is basic stuff that we should be doing anyway (and probably are, at a classified level.) You don't need to balkanize the net in order to do those things.

Removing "Chinese apps" just means that different Candy Crush clones will be collecting that data, either directly or through their advertising networks. Or it means the Chinese companies who need to collect data will collect it through data breaches.

The best thing you can say is that this puts a speed bump in front of attackers, but since speed bumps aren't a security measure the reality is that it won't do anything.

luckylion5• 6 years ago

This doesn't fix all security problems, but it removes some of China's current advantages in cyberwarfare.

How? It makes attacks slightly more expensive (because you need to use infrastructure in a "clean" country), but it doesn't stop anyone that's dedicated and has money to spend.

Want your spy-app on the app store? Don't register your company in China, just do it in the US. Voila, you're "clean."

adsjhdashkj2• 6 years ago

What i don't get is why we should care about this (care as in, advocate for). MITM is a great argument for distrusting the everyone in the middle, not trying to increase trust in the middle man - no?

This just feels like an attempt to control who is the middleman spying on data, not actually securing Americans data. Which makes sense, coming from the government and whatnot - but i'm just trying to make sense of if there's an actual reason i should like this "Clean Network" (which is to say, my comment is an honest question, not an attack on the proposal).

Perhaps i'm just biased because of my (pet) passion for distributed systems. I don't trust any MITM, so i think i struggle to understand the concern for _who_ is in the middle.

I'd be far more interested in this type of pitch if it came with heavy support for encryption, distribution, etc.

loceng3• 6 years ago

No, this is propaganda by the current admin who's succeeding step by step to create a tyrannical position that has control-censorship abilities like the CCP et al.

This information has already been had by hackers (e.g. Equifax) and/or people from within US companies doing corporate sabotage to steal trade secrets from within a company, etc.

52-6F-627• 6 years ago

Some of the companies listed in the photo are only companies that do not (or have never) used Huawei equipment in their network infrastructure.

For instance, Rogers (Canadian telecom company) hasn't released any statements [as far as I'm aware—to date] following Pompeo's announcement. They've been set up to use Ericcson for their 5G rollout for several years.

It's misleading on the part of whoever drafted the document.

mthoms3• 6 years ago

Opinion: The only reason Canadian telecoms and the Canadian government haven't officially announced an outright ban is because of the delicate situation with Meng + the two Michaels. They've almost certainly, behind the scenes, committed to it.

kayson• 6 years ago

Has anyone published the evidence of Huawei being an "arm of the PRC surveillance state"? I've seen a lot of claims and a lot of out-of-court-settled lawsuits, but nothing really showing that they're using their devices or software infrastructure for surveillance.

hammock2• 6 years ago

Here is some https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/04/25/huawei-xi...

xster• 6 years ago

Is it referencing something specific? It's an editorial referencing other editorials. Is there something direct like PRISM type wikileaks?

Considering the NSA hacked and had backdoors in Huawei servers for almost a decade, I imagine direct evidence shouldn't be difficult to produce.

https://mashable.com/2014/03/22/nsa-huawei/

wyuenho10• 6 years ago

The connection is made from:

1. The Chinese National Intelligence Law requiring every citizen to "intelligence work".

2. Huawei had the potential to reach mass adoption outside of China.

3. Huawei is a company deeply connected to the PLA.

4. Therefore Huawei, not only is its HQ required to spy for China, but that it is very likely to work with the PLA to spy for China.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law

[2]. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/08/huawei-staff-and-chinese-mil...

_lsq2• 6 years ago

These are all valid reasons for concerns yet these do not qualify as proof of wrongdoing from Huawai. For 2) specifically, I'm not sure it would be helpful to declare all private companies started by veterans as "sharing deep ties to $Country's military operations".

There's no shortage of "guesses" and "plausible connections" around but the parent comment is specifically asking for actual proof in this instance.

lettergram2• 6 years ago

There’s such a long list of this stuff from various companies. It’s not hard to research this at all.

In terms of an anecdotal evidence... My father used to work for molex, one of his biggest complaints were fixing the molds after they were sent to Chinese factories. They would try to deconstruct them and couldn’t put them back together (this was the 90’s, early 2000’s). So they would be shipped back to the US operations to fix.

Eventually, he ended up spending years training up Chinese to replace him (my father, in China). Molex moved much of its tool making shop to China and shut down most US tool and die making operations.

Anyway, China has people who are trained, on factory floors, who are there to reverse engineer processes.

This has been known for decades, companies don’t really seem to care or know (I guess that’s possible as they are outsourcing manufacturing).

I have no doubt this is designed across all their industries and systems. It’s in their interest to do this.

EDIT: I want to point out, there’s no longer a need for China to reverse engineer. US companies ship the designs straight to China. This is probably why we’ve seen China catch up so fast. We trained their workforce and now provide them all the IP before we build it.

wyuenho10• 6 years ago

This has been known for decades, companies knew, and the way they dealt with this was to only give China obsolete tech or tech about to get out of date, so they didn't care. That's no longer the case as China is catching up fast and really threatening the competitive advantage of truly innovative companies all around the world.

nitrobeast2• 6 years ago

This seems irrelevant.

oasisbob• 6 years ago

That Molex story is great. Can only imagine how much magic is in some of those molds... trying to think through many molex connectors in terms of relief angles, tolerances, and manufacturability boggles the mind.

a9h74j• 6 years ago

people who are trained, on factory floors, who are there to reverse engineer processes.

I only read this once and don't know if it is true. Supposedly Technology Transfer was/is a distinct engineering specialty in China, up there perhaps with Civil, Electrical.

Coincidentally this was while working with a US manufacturer which somehow could never satisfy a Tech Transfer arrangement completely enough to get the final contracted payment. (Mixed reasons there.)

Frankly I wonder if China will [thus] preserve aspects of industrial civilization while the US works and/or collapses toward a relative dark age. (One case in point: nuclear power generation.)

bassman90004• 6 years ago

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/2019-04-30/vodafone-...

Vodafone asked Huawei to remove backdoors in home internet routers in 2011 and received assurances from the supplier that the issues were fixed, but further testing revealed that the security vulnerabilities remained, the documents show. Vodafone also identified backdoors in parts of its fixed-access network known as optical service nodes, which are responsible for transporting internet traffic over optical fibers, and other parts called broadband network gateways, which handle subscriber authentication and access to the internet, the people said. The people asked not to be identified because the matter was confidential.

luckylion5• 6 years ago

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 network in Italy'.

"In addition, we have no evidence of any unauthorised access. This was nothing more than a failure to remove a diagnostic function after development.

"The issues were identified by independent security testing, initiated by Vodafone as part of our routine security measures, and fixed at the time by Huawei."

That's a nice way of saying that Bloomberg made up most of the article.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48103430

waihtis7• 6 years ago

It doesn't matter whether there's good evidence or not. The risk potential is there and that is what most of this is based on.

colechristensen• 6 years ago

The impression put out there by many people is that in China, the state, the military, and the corporations should be thought about as part of the same whole, not separate interests.

austinl• 6 years ago

This section on Wikipedia covers the history of the concerns. I wouldn't say there's a definitive smoking gun that's public knowledge. Instead, there are several instances of vulnerabilities discovered in Huawei systems that may have been taken advantage of (by the PRC or other parties). My guess is that there's more to a few of these stories that only the intelligence community knows about.

One other point of concern from Western governments is that Chinese law compels Huawei to cooperate with Chinese intelligence services, which presents a vulnerability whether that law has been taken advantage of or not. This is much different than say, Apple, which has refused (or it has been simply impossible due to E2E) for them to cooperate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei#Espionage_...

throwaway432334• 6 years ago

There's not a meaningful distinction between the party and companies.

mindslight4• 6 years ago

Corporations are inherently organs of government, being incorporated under a specific jurisdiction and receiving liability limitations in return. At the very least, Huawei is an arm of the PRC surveillance state in the same way that Google is an arm of the USG surveillance state.

The problem is not that the claim is false, but rather the one-sided focus on it that justifies the USG surveillance state continuing to turn on its own people. If this were just some defense contractor pork for internal USG networks nobody would really care, but it sounds like they intend to fork most common Internet features while dictating how they operate.

Spooky23• 6 years ago

Back in 1982, the CIA is alleged to have modified some computers that ultimately blew up a gas pipeline.

Spies to spy things. It's safe to assume that everyone with the power to do so is exploiting any advantage that they have.

thesuitonym2• 6 years ago

Not only is it safe to assume such, it's unsafe to assume they aren't.

YarickR22• 6 years ago

CIA-staged gas pipeline explosion is an urban myth. I guess the same can be said about a lot of other casually known spy stories cited in this very discussion

jonathanyc• 6 years ago

Why has no one actually provided evidence of a single backdoor in the replies? The top reply is currently some anecdote that while interesting does not answer the question at all.

Surely we can be less shitty about answering the OP’s question. As a start, it sounds like at some point there were unsecured Telnet servers in some Huawei devices: https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/30/huawei_enterprise_rou... It’s not entirely satisfying evidence because the Register believes it was legitimately for diagnostics. They also point out that there were comparable “backdoors” in Cisco equipment: https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/02/cisco_vulnerabilities...

If anyone replies with an example of an actual unambiguous Huawei backdoor for which there isn’t a corresponding Cisco “backdoor” I’ll be happy to buy them a coffee. But why are so many of the replies to the parent comment just pure noise?

SenoraRaton• 6 years ago

Because propaganda and nationalism are one hell of a drug.

mabbo2• 6 years ago

I grew up in Ottawa, Nortel HQ, and had lots of friends with parents working at Nortel. That's a town that does not buy a lot of Huawei.

What kept happening, from the perspective of people who worked there that I've talked to, was that Nortel would do heavy R&D investments and then a few months later Huawei would be selling identical hardware with zero R&D budget- for lower cost, naturally. It took Nortel years to finally figure out their network was highly compromised, likely by the PLA[0]. The PLA would steal industrial secrets and hand them to companies owned or controlled by the Chinese government, like Huawei.

One fellow I met at a wedding party once told me how he had actually read Huawei source code that included Nortel copyright notices. It was a joke by the end. Everyone knew.

As for as being an arm of the PRC, Huawei claims they're owned by their employees Trade Union. But Trade Unions in China, by law, are highly controlled and managed by the party. You can't have a trade union that isn't highly associated with the Communist Party. Huawei counter these arguments by saying it's very complex- but provide no evidence to the contrary.[1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei#Nortel

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei#Opaque_own...

codekansas• 6 years ago

Bloomberg did a writeup of this a few weeks ago: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-01/did-china...

ww520• 6 years ago

China’s National Intelligence Law from 2017 requires companies, organizations and citizens to “support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work.”

Yes, Huawei is an arm of the PRC surveillance state.

stx• 6 years ago

There is the story about a man who invented a way to coat glass with diamonds. He was negotiating to sell his invention to Huawei when they shipped one of his samples to China even though he instructed them not to because it was export controlled technology. The reason it is export controlled is that such an invention has applications in military laser weapons. I am summarizing from memory but you can read this article to learn more.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-04/huawei-st...

cs702• 6 years ago

In case it's not obvious after you read the text in that page, the word "Clean" in the context of that text actually means:

* balkanized/siloed instead of globally standardized;

* permissioned instead of permissionless; and

* monitored via backdoors instead of optionally secure.

I'm reminded of this passage from George Orwell's classic piece, "Politics and the English Language" (http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/72/30.pdf):

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question−begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine−gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."

EDITS: Simplified language, and removed quotes from OP as well as several paragraphs from the Orwell quote to make my comment shorter and easier to digest.

A4ET8a8uTh03• 6 years ago

I am not sure why you got downvoted. This is absolutely the interpretation you can easily reach after reading it. Maybe readers perceive Orwell reference as too dramatic?

DiabloD3• 6 years ago

Vote.org

Make sure you're registered, and make sure you vote in November.

tick_tock_tick3• 6 years ago

What would possible make you think Biden would change course on this? Neither party likes China and the whole idea that a new administration is going to roll back a hardline policy vs them is crazy.

jahabrewer• 6 years ago

We know the risk of an adversary running comms because we did it for a while with Crypto AG

hijinks• 6 years ago

only the NSA is allowed to backdoor US networking hardware

codemonkey-zeta7• 6 years ago

I laughed, but also ... yes? As a lover of liberty I would much rather just my own government (by which I am ostensibly represented) have the ability to infringe on that liberty than 2 governments. I would want to support regulations that protect myself and neighbors from the influence of those other infringers, no?

mindslight4• 6 years ago

The actions required to shut out that second attacker are blunt tools that impinge upon your personal freedom far beyond their stated purpose. And since you still have that primary attacker, then you still have to defend against them anyway.

The proper solutions to protect us from "China" are the same as the solutions to protect us from NSA - E2E encryption, P2P communication, decentralized namespaces, and making data transmission (ie trust) as non-interactive as possible.

chillacy4• 6 years ago

Your own government also has more tools to use against you. You'll pass through your own border more frequently, you're more available to be arrested, harassed by LE, etc.

How about as a lover of liberty, _nobody_ snoops on our data?

remus2• 6 years ago

For sure, but this page is also trying to position the US government as a trustworthy provider of equipment for other governments. Given some of the historical work done by the US secret services [1] it's laughable that another government would take this seriously.

[1] For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

bassman90004• 6 years ago

Does the CCP and its security agency share tips to avoid tracking?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108461

evidencebased• 6 years ago

The NSA didn't reveal any secrets that couldn't be looked up by anyone who cares about privacy. Is Thief A more trustworthy than Thief B because Thief A told you to lock your doors and windows and Thief B didn't, when both already have keys to your house?

motohagiography2• 6 years ago

The question I think this is an answer to is how you can have a reasonable expectation of freedom and privacy while sharing an internet with a CCP who has militarized their technology sector as a means to facilitate colonial expansion.

I'm no fan of anyone involved, but we should accept that the Internet as we may have known it has been compromised by exogenous governance structures and their gatekeepers in service of non- and even anti-internet agendas, and it can no longer seriously be considered a free territory for divergence and innovation. The U.S. and their Clean network seems naive in a way, but in this case, I don't object because I think it is the devil we know.

lostmsu2• 6 years ago

Is it the devil we know though? Until the talks about TikTok started, I assumed nothing like this could ever happen in this country.

waihtis7• 6 years ago

That's just how politics works in general, is it not? Big issues can underlie for ages and a single mass media event may trigger a big change.

mindslight4• 6 years ago

Computer security does not operate around large sweeping claims of some party doing something bad, and so doing something bad in retaliation. And it's impossible for the "Internet" to be compromised - by definition it's an open network that gets packets from A to B while letting most anyone listen in. So then, what are the specific problems?

If the problem is that China is copying designs, then the solution is to stop moving sensitive production there.

If it is that Chinese manufacturers are putting remote backdoors in products, then the solution is to make trustable designs with open firmware, and domestic production of sensitive parts to avoid hardware backdoors.

If the problem is apps with built in surveillance, then the solution is to secure mobile OSs to prevent data leakage.

If the problem is that Chinese groups are shitposting to manufacture political consent, the solution is better social media filters, reputation systems, and fixing our domestic institutions (eg the press) thus hindering the ability for anyone to manufacture consent.

None of these things are solved by top-down imposition of some blunt firewall, or whatever other misguided heavy handed ideas the politicians have in mind. From the perspective of network security, it's really no big deal if Internet addresses become 64 bits with the addition of a proxy.

motohagiography2• 6 years ago

This appears to be a rare example of a government providing a secure perimeter for its citizens to create and innovate without being subject to a foreign totalitarian machine's global spying operation. It's not a top down imposition.

Reality is, if the U.S. govt doesn't protect its networks, people and companies will have to protect themselves with encryption and hardware key management that keeps China out, which by extension means keeping US law enforcement out as well. It's a sovereignty issue.

coldcode• 6 years ago

If they weren't serious about this claptrap it would be downright hilarious. "Clean" means nothing, other than "Approved by us" which of course can mean anything they want, including shutting down anything they disagree with even internally, and changing day by day. In practicality there isn't much they can do legally to make any of this actually exist.

coliveira6• 6 years ago

there isn't much they can do legally to make any of this actually exist.

Please, let's stop the whole thing of "he doesn't have the power to do this". Maybe he cannot do everything, but the last four years have proved that he can do pretty much everything he wants with a few minor problems with justice that he will also disregard. Think about mass imprisonment of immigrants, travel bans, attacking protestors in major cities with unidentified military units, diverting money fro the military to build a wall against congress wishes, not allowing his co-conspirators to testify in Congress, affirm he will not accept the election results, etc. All of these things supposedly were not legal. But he doesn't care about the constitution, and the constitution only has any power if the government is willing to uphold it.

yters2• 6 years ago

What is a better way to prevent mass IP theft the CCP is doing?

GaryNumanVevo3• 6 years ago

Simple, stop outsourcing manufacturing to China. Companies regularly get contracts which require an IP transfer in return for cheap mass labor. Of course there's IP which is stolen, but that's the cost of doing business when manufacturing at home has been shuttered.

codemonkey-zeta7• 6 years ago

But, wouldn't this need to be enforced by the government? How else are companies going to agree to stop outsourcing manufacturing to China? And if you agree that the correct solution involves government regulation, then what specifically about this plan doesn't accomplish your preferred outcome of "stop outsourcing manufacturing to China"? I may be naive but I also fail to see exactly how this plan is bad. Do you not feel the Chinese government is using technology to undermine the US, or that this isn't actually a legitimate and compelling issue of national defense?

8note7• 6 years ago

Get rid of IP as a concept?

yters2• 6 years ago

the concept isn't the problem

it is what's done with ip especially military and national security secrets

throwyawayy2020• 6 years ago

The US is ran & staffed by the hyper-partisan “Z-team” right now.

This is tragic & dangerous bc we need shrewd & wise people to make decisions + build coalitions in the opening decades of 21st century, not hyper-partisan kooks.

Some of the worst actors in cyber space rn is the Russian gov’t & their intelligence + “security” services —- it sure is funny (funny as in strange, not humorous) how difficult it is to get any of these apparatchiks to publicly acknowledge that

ETHisso20172• 6 years ago

What is the Z-team?

advaita• 6 years ago

I am _guessing_ they wanted to mean pollar opposite of A-Team.

(As non-native speaker) I always interpret A-Team as your most competent team for a given task.

keenmaster• 6 years ago

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.

radium3d2• 6 years ago

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 some consumers of questioning the security and privacy of the apps they install. I.e. it weakens those within the "clean" firewall.

typon2• 6 years ago

This writing is so Orwellian it seems like a parody

Kapura• 6 years ago

This is disgusting. Anybody working at an American firm that's supporting this initiative should be ashamed. Anybody working on this project is actively contributing to the destruction of international trust and cooperation.

I am beyond disgusted at my government. This Republican administration has been an unprecedented disaster on every front.

waihtis7• 6 years ago

Why do you think it's 'disgusting'?

edit: in case someone was confused, talking about the initiative, not the government in general

alyoshaK• 6 years ago

I would hardly evoke shame on a 9 to 5 worker at a telecommunications corporation for the political decisions made by a CEO or board of directors...

ajkjk• 6 years ago

Could you explain why?

scohesc• 6 years ago

How would you suggest we limit the surveillance and active attacks on American infrastructure by the Chinese government? They show no signs of letting up and/or respecting how America works in the slightest.

DethNinja2• 6 years ago

Easy, USA can invest in open hardware/software. It would destroy Intel/AMD but who cares, national security is more important, no?

tick_tock_tick3• 6 years ago

Biden is going to be 110% behind this too. I don't have the slightest idea of why you'd think otherwise. People have been playing nice with China for the last few decades hoping they'd change and it hasn't happened maybe a different approach is needed.

nitrobeast2• 6 years ago

It will be interesting to see how many telecoms in EU would join this.

tomc1985• 6 years ago

Why the hell does any of this have to be China specific? Tomorrow the bugbear could be anyone else

Like, we want clean networks free of foreign influence and sruveillance, full stop. Or are they implying that Five Eyes surveillance is good and OK?

waihtis7• 6 years ago

This is more about Huawei in general. Russia, for instance, doesn't have a technology provider of similar magnitude and influence.

chillacy4• 6 years ago

I think the parent commenter's point is that making laws based on objective rules would make it more future-proof. Laws once passed usually stay for a long time. Huawei wasn't a big deal 15 years ago. 15 years from now someone else their place.

SkyMarshal• 6 years ago

As with most things the Trump admin does, this one too is sloppy.

There was no need to call out the CCP in the document, it's obvious who this measure is primarily directed at. Also, characterizing it as an initiative of the "Trump Administration", instead of the United States Government or State Department, was unnecessarily political and also obvious.

Also as mentioned above, China already has a Clean Network initiative. I wonder if the Trump admin copied that name, or chose it accidentally.

A4ET8a8uTh03• 6 years ago

I am surprised it did not make bigger news. I am genuinely annoyed that US, of all places, is contributing to the splintering of the internet as we knew it.

But what surprises me more people are not up in arms about it. I mean, who would not love only government approved code floating around and only child appropriate messages being visible before 10PM.

If there is a real reason to dislike this administration, this is it.

ISL2• 6 years ago

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 playbook. Top-down imposition of standards is not what made America's melting pot great. Free and open discourse, with redundant structures designed to ensure that governance required the consent of the governed, did.

Furthermore, State is a decade or more behind the game. It is my impression that modern companies that care about security assume that all networks are compromised and act accordingly. See https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp as an example.

Balkanizing the Internet will not make us free; we will instead tie our own hands. This is not the same as banning the import of presumed-compromised hardware.

Vote.

waihtis7• 6 years ago

Furthermore, State is a decade or more behind the game. It is my impression that modern companies that care about security assume that all networks are compromised and act accordingly.

Unfortunately far from true. There's a small percentage who have the resource to run this kind of ops. Don't look at FAANG on how security is in companies, they're outliers by far.

ISL2• 6 years ago

State's 2020 budget is $52B. It has direct-collaboration access to DOD and NIST.

We should expect our national-security infrastructure to be more resilient than commercial infrastructure, not less.

novok• 6 years ago

FANMAG is also the infrastructure that most of these companies are running on, so in a way, they are delivering it bit by bit to most companies. Especially as companies move from doing things like 'running their own exchange server' to 'buying a microsoft 365 subscription'.

Chromebook + google apps is what most companies need, and really good security for the most part.

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

There's also massive amounts of variation between the companies in that group. Some are prohibited from taking source code off a computer located on premises (employees' take-home machines are "dumb" to the extreme in that they basically connect directly to their computers at work); others encourage their employees to use pre-production and internal products for personal use. As you can guess, they have dramatically different models for how to approach corporate security.

pathseeker2• 6 years ago

It is my impression that modern companies that care about security assume that all networks are compromised and act accordingly. See https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp as an example.

No, you assume the network can be compromised like any other device in the system. You still defend the network and add in layers of access control. Employees of Google still use VPNs to connect into sensitive networks.

With the prevalence of 0-days and demonstration of usage by nation-state actors, you have to have multiple layers of defense to try to have any reasonable chance of preventing a compromise.

taldo• 6 years ago

Employees of Google still use VPNs to connect into sensitive networks.

Not really. Maybe the people that keep BeyondCorp-related systems running, if at all. There are VPNs, obviously, but not directly accessed by 99.9% of employees.

sukilot3• 6 years ago

BeyondCorp is essentially a VPN but a different structure. That puts security on all the machine nodes. It's more secure than a VPN because it doesn't have a gooey center being a single entry point.

A4ET8a8uTh03• 6 years ago

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.

resters• 6 years ago

In some sense all governments are the same. Any government trying to create a great firewall will use the same kind of propagandistic, utopian-seeming verbiage and metaphors.

munificent4• 6 years ago

This document looks like a prop from Starship Troopers or Robocop.

m0llusk• 6 years ago

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.

Angostura3• 6 years ago

The first sentence really stood out to me...

"The Clean Network program is the Trump Administration’s comprehensive approach to..."

Isn't that a bit odd? Surely these things would be worded as 'is the United States Government approach..' It almost smacks of 'errr, don't blame us guys, it wasn't our idea.

Love the low res images of the logos too.

hn_throwaway_99• 6 years ago

Thanks for posting this, I was looking for this comment. I had to check the URL multiple times because the more I read the more I was convinced it was a parody site. Even the "Clean" typeface evoking the Mr. Clean brand, I thought surely this must be a joke.

hojjat12000• 6 years ago

To be honest they are forcing a "National Internet" in Iran, and the language in this document just reminded me of that. Huh.

dylz• 6 years ago

This has more or less existed in Iran since forever. As far as I can tell everything has been chokepointed through TIC/ITC ASNs for connectivity.

dannyw• 6 years ago

The Chinese has shown no interest in co-operating with the world. They are an enemy. What’s wrong with keeping them out of our internet when they have their own?

To put it another way; this is like allowing your enemy to design and manfacture your military jets.

nyxtom• 6 years ago

But they do manufacture quite a bit else

elliekelly2• 6 years ago

The Chinese government has shown no interest in cooperating with many western governments. Even though the Chinese government is, in some ways, an “enemy”, most of the 1.5 billion people living in China are not. We should be interested in what the people have to say and I’m sure the people of China are interested in what we have to say, too. We should be building connections amongst the people, not walls.

I’d even say that’s the entire point of the internet - sharing and inclusion. There isn’t “our” internet and “their” internet - there’s just the internet.

8note7• 6 years ago

They're cooperating with many countries in the world. What is this supposed to mean?

yencabulator• 6 years ago

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.

bhewes• 6 years ago

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

azinman2• 6 years ago

Do you want to add the CCP to that list?

segfaultbuserr2• 6 years ago

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, but also included unwanted cultural and political materials considered harmful. Since then, the name became a codename for most government crackdowns, and can be referred to in a satirical manner by the people. Naturally, after Michael Pompeo announced The Clean Network Campaign in the United States, it has immediately became a meme in China, comparisons were also made by the international press like the BBC in their Chinese editions. Now, if you search this keyword in Chinese, it's extremely amusing that you'll see news reports on both governments.

op032• 6 years ago

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

Barrin92• 6 years ago

Baudrillard made the observation that the Soviet Union as well as the US during the Cold War really should be seen as a larger reinforcing system of deterrence that is used to map out and control rather than a conflict, two sides of the same coin.

Rather than being afraid of a single hegemon, it's the internal opposition that stabilizes systems of control, and he also pointed out that this is even mirrored within the oppositional two party system of the United States, which while looking like it advances freedom and debate and so on really advances security, and it's much more efficient in doing so than monolithic autocratic governments which tend to collapse in on themselves.

imglorp• 6 years ago

"Build the Firewall" and get China to pay for it?

jppope• 6 years ago

+100 points for this quip.

smithza• 6 years ago

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...

YarickR22• 6 years ago

s/steak/stake medium rare and well done puns are omitted

chrisco2553• 6 years ago

Why would it be? There are no plausible 5G competitors coming from Russia. There are very few (if any) electronics manufactured in Russia and imported to the U.S.

blaser-waffle7• 6 years ago

Mmmmm office steak.

China has an interest in anyone not Donald Trump being in office, since he's picked fights with the CCP and started a trade war.

Russia got him there in the first place, and wants to keep flexing, as it allows them to damage both China and the US.

dheera• 6 years ago

Yep. This "Clean Network" BS reminds me of the "Golden Shield" project (official name of the project that China's firewall is part of). Not something I'd expect from the US.

glenstein5• 6 years ago

If the Clean Network lasts even so much as a few months as an infrastructure with a non-trivial amount of activity, it will be a fascinating time capsule. It will reflect a very strange kind of culture and bizarre set of national security assumptions and political constraints.

When we look back at the archive.org copies of Clean Net, it will be like visiting a bizarre short lived theme park.

nabla9• 6 years ago

Washington Talk; Prickly Roots of 'Homeland Security' https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/31/us/washington-talk-prickl...

''People find it a little quaint, a little forced,'' said Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University and author of ''You Just Don't Understand'' (William Morrow, 1990).
At worst, Ms. Tannen said, the phrase is associated with sinister historical precedents.
''There is one particular group -- American Jews, and I am Jewish -- for whom it has a menacing association,'' she said.
Nazis favored the word ''heimat,'' or ''homeland,'' and homeland defense forces were known as Heimwehr or Heimatschutz in Austria and Germany from the late 1920's.

chrisco2553• 6 years ago

Yes, let's find the six degrees of Nazism in every single topic. I'm sure we can connect Kevin Bacon to Hitler while we're at it.

_jal• 6 years ago

The parallel effort is the demonization of Section 230. Subjecting web companies to liability for users' speech is the surest way to squelch all that messy, hard to control speech.

Things will certainly be much cleaner when your public information comes from a short list of large companies with a lot to lose.

8note7• 6 years ago

As a Canadian, I learned about the American melting pot as "drop your culture and adopt ours" in contrast to the Canadian multiculturalism.

The melting pot makes non-white people idealize white people, which is hard to imagine as anything but a top down imposition of standards

blaser-waffle7• 6 years ago

I'm an American in Canada and this is bunk. "I learned about" translates to "I've never spent any time below the border".

It's literally 99% American culture here. There isn't any "love and tolerance" that you couldn't find in any Blue State, and most of hard left types take their cues from what they see in the US; e.g. the prevalence of BLM wankery despite the fact they're in a different country with wildly different histories regarding slaves. The only things you can't find in the US are Nanaimo bars and banknotes with the Queen's face on them.

xenospn• 6 years ago

Well said.

arminiusreturns• 6 years ago

I also personally agree with Fletcher Prouty (rip) that the naming of the department of war to the department of defense falls under this same category.

topkai22• 6 years ago

I should find this more mortifying, but with the EU Court of Justice's decision on the privacy shield, India's ban on Chinese apps, and the great firewall + other nationalized internets, the US just seems like a late mover on nationalizing the internet.

dustingetz• 6 years ago

I support the unity of all nations. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.

dillon• 6 years ago

I guess I'm confused. I clicked the link and read through it really quick. I didn't really have a lot of strong opinions. This seems to be a response to how powerful China is becoming and that's scary for many reasons. This almost seems like a natural reaction of one government trying to abuse the internet and another government trying to protect it's citizens. It might even be irresponsible for the U.S. not to react. Obviously, there's no mention of Russia, but let's shelve that for now.

I wasn't totally alarmed by what I read. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but I take this as a sort of stamp of approval that a cloud/network/platform isn't compromised by China. It doesn't seem to say, "Only use the U.S. internet" as other commenters have mentioned. The stamp of approval seems to be global (if you look at the list that was mentioned it's worldwide, not just the US).

When I came back to look at the comments I was surprised to see a lot of noise. I feel like something must have flew over my head and maybe someone can explain it to me. I went ahead and read the link again but slower and I still don't understand the reaction I'm seeing on HN.

Maybe it's some sort of state of idealism. People want the internet to be a place that's free from tyranny or government, but that's not what's happening. China/Russia/US/whoever is abusing the internet to gain an upper-hand. The best solution is to reinvent the internet, which I know there are a quite a few projects going on that are trying to accomplish that, but in the meantime what is a government supposed to do? Let other governments siphon their citizen's data without a cost?

Again, I could use an explanation as I must have missed something that a lot of other people are finding very obvious. When a top level comment just says "Make sure you vote in November". I don't understand the context.

Disclaimer: I am definitely not voting for Trump and dislike pretty much everything the administration has done. Yet, I do try to look at everything in silos.

ru552• 6 years ago

I'm not really sure what's going on here either. Reading the article, it looks like there will be a list of approved providers of telco equipment and all services to US govt facilities will be required to use the approved list of gear. Same for 5g networks. I don't see how that splits up the internet. The app store thing could be fishy or maybe is just leads to a disclaimer in the app store that an app is "clean" or not.

supernova87a3• 6 years ago

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?

-- Clean Apps: "Prevent untrusted PRC OEMs from installing trusted apps on their apps store... should remove apps to ensure they are not partnering with a human rights abuser." Umm, seriously, we're going to open this can of worms?

Edit to add a last thought:

I have yet to understand or read a coherent description about how we do not have the technical ability to protect against eavesdropping/etc regardless of who owns the physical hardware. Why is CCP-owned infrastructure uniquely susceptible to this? If we can't protect our transmissions with encryption, secure data storage techniques, what does it matter that the equipment is supplied by China? What unusual attack do they get access to by owning or manufacturing the equipment?

gpm6• 6 years ago

so, this would call for even tighter control by Apple, Google, over its app distribution and monopolies?

I think it does the opposite. It says "if you're going to vouch for software, really vouch for it". Not "only let users install software you can vouch for". It means that non-app store distribution becomes more of a thing, not less.

apazzolini• 6 years ago

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.

24gttghh3• 6 years ago

"CleanNetwork_NewCleans-300x169.jpg"

300x169, blown up to at least double that size.

sjs382• 6 years ago

The site uses WordPress and the post author decided to include a thumbnail, scaled up to regular size, rather than using the original: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/CleanNetwor...

cbm-vic-20• 6 years ago

Or, the government employee tasked with putting this thing up did it intentionally as a subtle form of protest.

reaperducer• 6 years ago

it's just another sign of the US's government technical incompetence.

Not "the government." "A person in the government."

The federal government has a very good design system. But for some reason, whoever built this page chose not to follow it.

https://designsystem.digital.gov

rtkwe4• 6 years ago

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.

monoideism3• 6 years ago

What unusual attack do they get access to by owning or manufacturing the equipment?

It is incredibly easy to add almost undetectable backdoors to hardware, particularly inside ICs. Here's one particularly clever attack described by security researchers at U of Michigan, but there are many:

https://www.wired.com/2016/06/demonically-clever-backdoor-hi...

supernova87a3• 6 years ago

How would a hardware vulnerability on router equipment handling traffic compromise data flowing over that router which has already been encrypted properly at the source/destination?

matthewaveryusa• 6 years ago

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.

glenstein5• 6 years ago

This really comes off as a hastily prepared political dig against China

I think 'Clean net' is a horrific, short sighted, dystopian joke that will be the subject of ridicule and fascination as a historical subject.

I also think there's no surveillance operation in the world as vast and as troubling as China's, and there's nothing fundamentally inaccurate or misleading about pointing that out.

colordrops• 6 years ago

there's no surveillance operation in the world as vast and as troubling as China's

Replace "China" with "US".

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

Why is CCP-owned infrastructure uniquely susceptible to this? If we can't protect our transmissions with encryption, secure data storage techniques, what does it matter that the equipment is supplied by China? What unusual attack do they get access to by owning or manufacturing the equipment?

Their companies are by law forced to cooperate.

thephyber3• 6 years ago

All companies are forced to cooperate by law.

We Americans like to think we have the moral high ground against China. For some things, we do. For many others, they are just following in our footsteps.

The US has scarcely not been at war since I've been alive and the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Force has no end in sight. Wartime powers vested in the Executive Branch are far more expansive than we would like to think.

Who do you think re-routes shipments of Cisco networking hardware to the NSA TAO group? Cisco and FedEx/UPS. Same with any computing hardware and likely many other products.

Who do you think complies with National Security Letters? 99%+ of the companies that receive them. QWest tried to challenge their legality and that CEO wasted away in prison.

Patriot Act and Anti-Money Laundering statutes require that lots of industries participate with the USA government: financial, travel, hotel, telecom, etc.

breck• 6 years ago

our businesses’ most valuable intellectual property, including COVID-19 vaccine research

1. If we have some valuable Covid-19 research, shouldn't we like, um, not keep that a secret?

2. Also, if we're going to take this farcical notion of "IP" seriously, it's only right that we give up all our guns, since gunpowder was invented in China, and we are infringing on their "intellectual property".

mas3god• 6 years ago

Is it really that big of a deal to try to cut china out of the internet?

PaulAJ• 6 years ago

Follow the link in "Digital Trust Standards" to the "Criteria for Security and Trust in Telecommunications Networks and Services" (https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publi...). Political & Governance Criteria numbers 8 and 9 would seem to present problems for companies in the UK and US, both of which require suppliers to cooperate with the government in secret and unchallengeable ways.

kyberias• 6 years ago

Robert C. Martin is thrilled.

anm89• 6 years ago

Well, that's terrifying. I wouldn't be surprised if they get away with it though.

kyawzazaw• 6 years ago

I wonder how this is feasible for US embassies in countries like Myanmar where basically all telecom and connections are ZTE/Huawei related.

mthoms3• 6 years ago

Satellites perhaps?

legulere• 6 years ago

Huawei, an arm of the PRC surveillance state, is trading on the innovations and reputations of leading U.S. and foreign companies. These companies should remove their apps from Huawei’s app store to ensure they are not partnering with a human rights abuser.

So should European Companies also pull apps from Google and Apple?

I‘m all for standing up against the horrible human rights abuses of China, but it sounds unbelievably hollow from the US, which has a track record of putting their own interest before democracy and human rights abroad.

The whole website is pitched for other countries to join in, but I really don’t see that happening except maybe the UK and Canada.

mabbo2• 6 years ago

except maybe ... Canada

Relations aren't great right now. Just last week Trump began yet another trade war with Canada. I don't really see Canada taking part in this.

cardamomo4• 6 years ago

If you're not already familiar with the history of labeling immigrants (particularly non-European immigrants) as unclean or dirty, I'd urge you to read up. This article seems to be a good start: https://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/1011

In short, calling this a "clean" network continues a long history of racist and xenophobic language in the U.S.

thaumasiotes3• 6 years ago

Step 1: immigrants who are viewed negatively are described in negative terms.

Step 2: describing anything in negative terms is racist?

cardamomo4• 6 years ago

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 Network's choice of names. It behooves us not to think of it as a benign coincidence but rather an intentional act to signal the Trump administration's commitment to xenophobia.

artificial• 6 years ago

Europeans got it too, Irish, Italians, Germans (post WW1 and 2), pretty much the "last ones" to the party get crapped on.

cardamomo4• 6 years ago

Yes. I don't think its repeated usage in this way diminishes my point, however. In all of these contexts it's been used to put down foreigners or immigrants.

LatteLazy• 6 years ago

We should cautiously support this on the 1% chance that it's not a publicity stunt and actually could lead to some action on China.

annoyingnoob• 6 years ago

Can we get a clean government? Free from hyper-partisan politics, where there can be more than two sides and folks on other sides are still on the same overall team and not the enemy?

Together we stand, divided we fall.

coliveira6• 6 years ago

The whole goal of trumpism is to create slaves to the ideology of white and western supremacy. It has so clear racial undertones that it's not a surprise they want to attack China: they see it more as a racial target, poorly disguised with "homeland security" excuses.

k33n2• 6 years ago

Actually Trump is just fighting for the interests of Americans. Interesting fan-fiction though!

8note7• 6 years ago

I don't think it's racial, more geopolitical.

The US wants to maintain dominance over Asia. Can't do that with China, the usual Asian power, getting stronger

coliveira6• 6 years ago

Welcome to the great firewall of the US. The trump regime seems to be adamant in copying the worst of digital surveillance and anti-competitive prohibitions from communist countries.

AlleyTrotter• 6 years ago

you would all be in love with the idea if it was proposed by the obama administration

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

I'm a bit skeptical that this will go anywhere.

Many reasons, which I won't go into, but...ya never know...

pulse73• 6 years ago

So the country whose national security and intelligence agencies have gathered the largest database of sensitive information in the world is proposing to "safeguard sensitive information from aggressive intrusions by malign actors"... If U.S. is some kind of role model / example for other countries to follow (in terms of freedoms, democracy, prosperity, etc) then other countries will also gather sensitive information to the largest extent possible... So this "we can, but you shouldn't" is just a shameless hypocrisy. What would the U.S. founding fathers say to all this? Is there any William Penn living in the U.S. today to give basic freedoms like privacy back to the people? Or will the "controlling party" take everything away - including the freedom to think and say?

zepto• 6 years ago

We actually don’t know that the US has gathered the largest database of sensitive information.

Only that it used to gather a lot before Snowden.

remus2• 6 years ago

I'd bet a lot of money that the NSA didn't just turn off their servers and sit their twiddling their thumbs after the Snowden leaks.

pulse73• 6 years ago

So why then are so many BigData job offerings at those US agencies? I am speaking of hundreds and thousands here...

beepboopbeep• 6 years ago

This particular administration has gone out of its way to gaslight everyone and thing it possibly can. It is to the point that everything they do is consider suspicious and/or a lie at face value. That they have the gall to name this "The Clean Network" and encourage the allies they have been bludgeoning for the past 4 years to join it is both laughable and insulting.

ahmedfromtunis• 6 years ago

The general wording of the proposal is way more US-vs-China centered to be a call to "all freedom-loving nations and companies".

bo1024• 6 years ago

Amazing how end-to-end encryption would solve all the problems they claim to care about here.

MentallyRetired• 6 years ago

How do we accelerate this process?

Angostura3• 6 years ago

Saw the headline and I assumed it was an international iniative to promote clean, sustainable energy. I should have known.

csense• 6 years ago

Chinese government mandated pre-installed spyware on all phones made in China is certainly a huge problem.

But on the other hand, isn't it a violation of First Amendment protections if the US government can dictate certain apps aren't allowed to be distributed in the US?

Since software's subject to copyright, doesn't it logically follow that banning software is legally similar to banning a book?

AmericanChopper• 6 years ago

Imported goods and services aren’t protected by 1A.

Software is protected by 1A, so there’s nothing the government could do to prevent China from publishing software or source code, and allowing people in the US to download it. But it can certainly prevent a Chinese entity from providing services to US customers.

sequoia• 6 years ago

The Clean Network program is the Trump Administration’s comprehensive approach to safeguarding the nation’s assets including citizens’ privacy and companies’ most sensitive information from aggressive intrusions by malign actors, such as the Chinese Communist Party.

What bunkum. What about intrusion by parties such as Russian intelligence using legal methods, targeting ads using our "most sensitive information" on Facebook to benefit Trump? Trump wants to talk about the Chinese digging tunnels under the house while his cronies (domestic and Russian) walk right in the front door.

This is such an obvious ploy to change the conversation away from the now >160,000 Covid-19 deaths in the USA resulting from his disastrous management of the crisis.

coliveira6• 6 years ago

Trump plans are the musings of a rambling idiot. He and his enablers don't know anything about technology and the impact this can have on American companies.

bmitc2• 6 years ago

We call on all freedom-loving nations and companies to join the Clean Network.

This makes me physically sick. The only freedom you have in the U.S. is being poor, controlled, and oh yea, you can Tweet whatever you want. While the U.S., both citizens and the government, have pointed fingers at Russia, China, and <name a country>, we've been under the assault of propaganda and control for decades, at increasing rates, all under the guise of so-called freedom and democracy. Instead of propelling us into the future, our government has dragged its feet to pull us back all in the name of pure greed and control, giving itself and corporations near limitless power by sacrificing the common people.

dane-pgp2• 6 years ago

oh yea, you can Tweet whatever you want.

I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but:

https://www.cracked.com/article_25266_6-totally-stupid-thing...

bmitc2• 6 years ago

Edge cases for an obvious hyperbole is not really bad news. Of course you can't Tweet whatever you want, and you can't even say whatever you want. That's obvious. The hyperbole was a jab at people, often commenters on this very site, justifying "freedom" in the U.S. as being able to Tweet the president whatever you want, within reason, as opposed to other authoritarian countries.

devteambravo• 6 years ago

Is there where we start piling up books and burning them? The Sanitized Network. Looks bleak.

drivingmenuts• 6 years ago

Almost the last people I would trust to keep my information safe.

And I live here.

alexmingoia• 6 years ago

1) This won’t stop or significantly mitigate hacking from China. China is perfectly capable of hacking US software on US networks.

2) China has the intellectual capacity to meet the US technologically without stealing IP. Putting pressure on them will just encourage faster technological development.

3) At this point, it seems China will continue to expand control of South China Sea, or US will go to war with China to stop them. Any middle ground is fast disappearing. Hawks in US seem to have won control of strategy.

xg15• 6 years ago

Aside:

To prevent U.S. citizens’ most sensitive personal information and our businesses’ most valuable intellectual property, including COVID-19 vaccine research, from being stored and processed on cloud-based systems accessible to our foreign adversaries

I find it an interesting choice to specifically use COVID-19 vaccine research as an example of intellectual property.

What about all the talk that COVID-19 vaccines should be developed in global collaboration and that vaccines should become available to everyone worldwide?

rsa25519• 6 years ago

Steelmanning the web page, maybe they meant protecting the research against tampering?

Regardless, I think the site mentioning COVID-19 is needlessly inflammatory.

cutler• 6 years ago

I wonder how the recently announced 400 vulns in Qualcom mobile chips fits into all this?

codethief• 6 years ago

Clean Cable: To ensure the undersea cables connecting our country to the global internet are not subverted for intelligence gathering by the PRC at hyper scale

What is hyper scale? Did Trump write the copy for this site?

badpenny• 6 years ago

The Clean Network being the same network that Edward Snowden spoke out about?

biolurker1• 6 years ago

Election year. Instead of saying USA government's program its Trump program.

creativeCak3• 6 years ago

Fuck. This is really terrifying. The internet has connected all of us, which has been mostly for the better, and these idiots want to ruin it. I really hope none of this shit sees the light of day.

bblough• 6 years ago

The link is now returning 404.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200808170849/https://www.state...

The Clean Network – United States Department of State

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