[Dailydave] Civil, fact-based conversation welcomed

[William Plummer]

About a month ago (March 31), a post on this list was brought to my attention - link to that post: https://lists.immunityinc.com/pipermail/dailydave/2014-March/000635.html. 
  
It seems Dave was commenting on the NSA’s Shotgiant program that was purported to have involved the penetration of my employer’s corporate network, the monitoring of confidential communications, and the theft of proprietary product information with the intent to use that information to compromise telecom networks deployed in certain markets.
 
The reason a friend sent the post to me was because he was tickled that Dave had wondered: “Do you think William Plummer ever feels like he made a bad life decision working as Huawei's patsy?”
 
I’m that Bill Plummer.  I work for Huawei, a world-leading provider of telecom network gear, smartphones and enterprise solutions, and I have no hard feelings in terms of Dave’s “patsy” comment…
 
…But it did get me to read his post, which led to a brief email exchange between the two of us. 
 
I asked Dave to clarify the conclusion of his post which suggested that Huawei had somehow risked its future by “allowing” the NSA to penetrate its gear. 
 
Dave responded: “Huawei, and others (including RSA, it appears) have bent to trojaning their products or otherwise cooperating with governments in ways that do not benefit their customers. This risks their market position (and in fact, their whole company)…”
 
I replied: “Wrong.  Huawei has not cooperated with any government to compromise our own product - that, as you rightly point out, would be corporate suicide.  If there is in fact any truth to what the NYT reported about the NSA and Shotgiant, then Huawei was unwittingly penetrated and compromised - this is distinctly different than what has been reported about RSA and others.” 
 
Referencing a 2012 U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigation and report on Huawei, Dave suggested “you can infer with high accuracy what the NSA found when they penetrated Huawei based simply on what Congressional actions have been taken (by people clearly read into the classified results).”  And, in corollary, Dave wondered: “How much access does Huawei give you into their strategy, connections to the PRC Government, Army, etc? In other words, how can you know it to be true? How do you know you are not being used?”  (That is a very reasonable question). 
 
I responded by explaining that I have been with the company for four years and lived through multiple U.S. Government investigations, including the sham run by HPSCI.  I explained that these investigations - and the information requested by the U.S. Government - required diving deep into Huawei’s organization, its history, documents, operations, financing, etc. - at a very granular level - for months at a time, for each investigation.  I implied that there is simply no way that some purported grand conspiracy could stand up to that level or probing.  It’s just not feasible: Huawei is not some shadowy, back-alley operation.  It’s a $40 billion company with 150,000 employees of diverse nationality doing business in 150 markets, serving over 500 telecom operators, including nationwide carriers in virtually every OECD market.
 
As to Dave’s reference to what the NSA may have "found," I commented that if they had in fact “found” anything, Huawei would not be deployed, proven and trusted across every NATO country - if the NSA had found anything, they'd have relayed it to allies and forced us out....  In terms of the Congressional actions, I relayed that “I have heard from multiple sources - on the Hill, in think tanks, in media - who have seen the Committee's so-called "classified" version of their report and that it is just as vapid and vacant as the unclassified version.”
 
Dave and I finished our email exchange agreeing that we should continue the dialogue, with Dave suggesting we could do so on the list.
 
Other business intervened and, while I subscribed to the list and began receiving emails, I didn’t follow up on maintaining the dialogue, on the list or otherwise.
 
But then, about a week ago (April 23), there was another random thread referencing Huawei, one post which threw out the Congressional Report and a couple of other documents as “additional information” about the company, another which quite pithily dismissed those documents, saying: “I'll dispute that these cited references are propaganda as they lack tangible evidence and are further negated by the recent unproven allegation of the NSA involving Huawei.”
 
Spot on.  I could not have put it better myself.
 
So, what’s the point of this post?  Well, having presented all of the above as backdrop, I’d like to offer myself as a resource to this list to ensure a fact-based dialogue if and when my employer is referenced.  I would welcome questions.  I would welcome civil and informed conversation.
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