Targeting Huawei: NSA Spied on Chinese Government and Networking Firm
Source: Der Spiegel
The American government conducted a major intelligence offensive against China, with targets including the Chinese government and networking company Huawei, according to documents from former NSA worker Edward Snowden that have been viewed by SPIEGEL. Among the American intelligence service's targets were former Chinese President Hu Jintao, the Chinese Trade Ministry, banks, as well as telecommunications companies.
But the NSA made a special effort to target Huawei. With 150,000 employees and €28 billion ($38.6 billion) in annual revenues, the company is the world's second largest network equipment supplier. At the beginning of 2009, the NSA began an extensive operation, referred to internally as "Shotgiant," against the company, which is considered a major competitor to US-based Cisco. The company produces smartphones and tablets, but also mobile phone infrastructure, WLAN routers and fiber optic cable -- the kind of technology that is decisive in the NSA's battle for data supremacy.
A special unit with the US intelligence agency succeeded in infiltrating Huwaei's network and copied a list of 1,400 customers as well as internal documents providing training to engineers on the use of Huwaei products, among other things.
... "We currently have good access and so much data that we don't know what to do with it," states one internal document. As justification for targeting the company, an NSA document claims that "many of our targets communicate over Huawei produced products, we want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products."
Read more: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-spied-on-chinese-government-and-networking-firm-huawei-a-960199.html
N.S.A. Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security Threat
Source: New York Times
... Washington’s concerns about Huawei date back nearly a decade, since the RAND Corporation, the research organization, evaluated the potential threat of China for the American military. RAND concluded that “private Chinese companies such as Huawei” were part of a new “digital triangle” of companies, institutes and government agencies that worked together secretly.
... The man behind its strategy is Ren Zhengfei, the company’s elusive founder, who was a P.L.A. engineer in the 1970s. To the Chinese, he is something akin to Steve Jobs — an entrepreneur who started a digital empire with little more than $3,000 in the mid-1980s, and took on both state-owned companies and foreign competitors. But to American officials, he is a link to the People’s Liberation Army.
... As long ago as 2007, the N.S.A. began a covert program against Huawei, the documents show. By 2010, the agency’s Tailored Access Operations unit — which breaks into hard-to-access networks — found a way into Huawei’s headquarters. The agency collected Mr. Ren’s communications, one document noted, though analysts feared they might be missing many of them.
... The N.S.A.’s operations against China do not stop at Huawei. Last year, the agency cracked two of China’s biggest cellphone networks, allowing it to track strategically important Chinese military units, according to an April 2013 document leaked by Mr. Snowden. Other major targets, the document said, are the locations where the Chinese leadership works. The country’s leaders, like everyone else, are constantly upgrading to better, faster Wi-Fi — and the N.S.A. is constantly finding new ways in.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-chinese-servers-seen-as-spy-peril.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Which is why at least FIVE(!) countries were listening in:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/26/merkel_phone_tapped_by_5_countries/
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/merkels-phone-tapped-by-at-least-5-countries-2013-11-24
Of course only for the USA was the faux outrage dial turned up to 11....
And in a laughably under-reported story a few weeks later, Merkel joined the 21st century and got a secure phone...All of a sudden all the eavesdropping ended...
Poor you.
on China(good) while Leaking from Russia..
So, they're releasing this now while the First Lady, Malia, Sasha, and her mother, Marion Robinson, are visiting China on a good will trip?
take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.. not that we're not. 
Snowden's a fucking shit-stirrer for Russia.
Just upthread, I'm being told that Snowden isn't doing the leaking!!! 
That he doesn't have "control" of those documents anymore!!!!
He can't "stop" the leaking, even if he wanted to!!!!!
So why bring him home? What difference will it make? Leave him in his Russian prison, in a land where he can really enjoy the Russian definition of "freedom."
People are already "ho-humming" over this stuff. Why? Because everytime Snowden's li'l buddies leak something, we learn something very similar about the targets of the NSA's investigation. We're spying on our allies? They are spying on us, AND each other--and SHARING their data! Ooooh, we're spying on poor widdle China? They're probably already IN your computer, to say nothing of half the platforms in the frigging Pentagon.
No one--and I mean no one--does more computer hacking/spying/intruding than the Chinese. They make us look like total pikers.
Now more people will realize it.
Eddie--unintentionally or otherwise, aware or not--has finally done the NSA a solid. This lastest "leak" --aimed at Obama in an effort to embarrass the nation as his wife and children are on a goodwill tour -- has had the opposite effect and has benefitted their battered reputation.
Ain't that peculiar?
Now, the question is this--was that serendipity, an accident, a tactical mistake ... or part of a strategic roll-out?
(considered a major competitor to US-based Cisco)
Somebody wrote that 
