In 1989 the Chinese military ran tanks over peacefully demonstrating students. It didn’t pepper-spray them or arrest them or make them feel bad. Under specific government instruction, the Chinese military murdered Chinese citizens for defying their government.

The Chinese government has tried and executed people for sending spam.

The Chinese government will arrest and forcibly perform abortions on women if they try and give birth to more than their one alloted child.

Before you dismiss the concerns about handing over our entire supply chain process to a nation that is, for all intents and purposes, sociopathic and perhaps psychopathic, please read up on the history of China in the past 50 years. China is far, far more dangerous to the US than any number of terrorists or the whole of Islam.

Why aren’t there fish anymore? Why don’t our weapons work? Why are there no jobs? Why are they trying to kill us? Why do they hate us? Why Why Why? 

How wonderful for the US and it’s people – life is full of surprises!

-or-

You didn’t think “going pee pee in your coke” was the only time they “played a joke”, did you?

If you want really secure then electronic security isn’t enough. You need physical security, eg locked rooms, epoxy over parts, burning out the reprogramming section of chips…

And here I thought it was just everyone buying what they want, and everyone also being cheap as $H!7.

It’s pretty simple: the wealthy who have more incentive to keep the global trade flowing are more power than the wealthy who have the opposite incentive.

National security.  You’re doing it wrong.

We’re all one big happy family, with our hands in each other’s back pockets. There’s a lot of covert nonsense that goes on before a shooting war, and we’ll probably be seeing this type of story for a few more years before the department of propoganda decides the public is appropriately primed and we can start shooting off fireworks. 

I hope by then we will have gotten rid of infantry entirely, and moved to strategic robot assassinations. But, with the state of our drone tech, it’ll be a long time before we can actually replace the military with a less wasteful organization.

Normal diplomacy by normal means, &c.

Hell, Intel puts out CPUs that can be shut down by remote control. That’s much worse than FPGAs that can be reprogrammed by someone who has managed to extract them from military hardware and doesn’t happen to have the vendor key!

Clearly, we should outsource our military to China and be done with it. It would prevent americans from being wounded in american wars, after all.

Not that it’s enforced. I suppose they’ll use it when they find somebody they want to lock up who can’t be pinned on any legitimate charge, and who has used encryption to talk to some machine overseas or exported an igpay atinlay text filter or something.

Keep in mind that a large portion of being covert is flying a false flag. If something seems to come from China, it is just as likely that it comes from (say) Israel or the United Kingdom, or even (gasp!) domestically.

This is to say nothing of a rumour I heard about five years ago that some naval installations had to downgrade their machines to Win98SE on account of some higher-up who insisted upon transmitting orders via Microsoft Comic Chat.

Let’s just say that there are people who make decisions on subjects upon which they lack the competence to decide, and that the military seems to be no more immune to sturgeon’s law than any civilian organization.

For instance, you might criticize your landlord’s response time when the pipes leak, but you are fairly unlikely (unless you are a dangerous psychotic) to kill his children.

The problem, of course, is that ONLY hackers are interested in them. So, they have approximately the same effect upon the everyday life of non-hackers as AmigaOS and DragonflyBSD do (and less than OS/2, which at least still runs ATMs!)

In other words, this story is nothing to be concerned about.

Had these chips been manufactured in the United States, they would also have ‘backdoors’ like this (probably JTAG-compatible!). The difference is that the Chinese chips are cheaper and actually up to spec.

~”We chose an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard”.
~”We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time”.
~”Further funding is needed”.
~”Currently there is no economical or timely way”. 
~”This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport.”

Also, I live in Phoenix Arizona, so I question the 99% claim. Recently “President Obama visited a Phoenix suburb to tour Intel’s still-under-construction computer chip manufacturing plant. Its price tag – $5.2 billion – making it the largest construction project in the world outside this summer’s London Olympics.”

SCAM!

Watch out! We’re getting leakage from alternate timestreams!