@rslade wrote:
Since it seems likely that China can surveil basically any Zoom meeting/call/chat, I think it would be a good idea, in national security terms, for everyone, as much as possible, to use Zoom for inconsequential family parties and so forth, so that important business and government meetings might get lost in the chaff ...
Once upon a time, Webex was an early contender in the group video meeting market. The US Department of Defense (DoD) was using them to test group communication services capabilities and procedures. Several large corporations, like Lockheed around the time they were developing the F-35, used them for remote communication. They were nominally a San Francisco company, but some careful study revealed that the company was owned in China, their San Francisco employees were primarily Chinese nationals, and most of the developer team, as well as primary servers, were in China. As the DoD moved forward to field a full communication service, Webex was not on the list of finalists, possibly because of the foreign ownership.
A year or two later, DoD put out a request for proposals on a communication service, By that time Citrix had bought Webex, so Webex was allowed to participate, as a US owned company. However, much of the sales, support, and developer staff were the same folks as before; only the corporate ownership had changed.
Move forward many years. Eric Yuan was on the Webex team at Citrix. He saw an opportunity to build a better mousetrap for group communication, so he left Citrix and started Zoom. From my superficial reading of history own Yuan, Zoom, and Webex, I have not been able to tell if he was a pre-Citrix Webex employee. According to a Forbes bio article, he joined Webex in 1997, and Cisco acquired Webex in 2007. [edited 4/13/2020] I do find it interesting that he apparently was not bound by a no-compete contract at Webex/Citrix, allowing him to launch Zoom in direct competition with Webex.
Now we learn that Zoom has developers and servers in China, just as Webex did. And that occasionally encryption keys and communication streams get "accidentally" routed through China, even for US-to-US conversation sessions. (If you buy that story, I have a bridge for sale I want to talk about with you.)
Kinda makes you think, dunnit?
Craig
