It's not beyond the realm of possibility that in the event of a real war between China and the US that our Chinese-made smartphones and drone toys would suddenly not be trustworthy. The NATO IC's (and SV) software wizardry (like super clever driver weaknesses snuck into mainline linux) always gets trumped by a little this and that added to hardware (an extra component on the pcb or worse, a tiny corner of a chip image).<p>To what extent do the industrial designers of consumer hardware take into account the threat of a last second modification of the design to suit the needs of the manufacturer? To what extent would such modifications be detectable by...anyone, ever? And what would it look like? The software version would be a bad network driver that examines all traffic for a specific triggering pattern that would take over the machine at first as uninvasively as possible, starting by modifying the kernel and the boot image (to stay activated). Establish contact with attacker and examine the user and their accounts. Some users are more valuable than others, having privileged positions in large companies, control or knowledge about important infrastructure, and so on. Or they may be celebrities or other people of note. Or they may be friends of those people. It would be useful to undermine everyone at once, but using a stochastic process that minimizes a torrent of data. Oh and it's probably better for china to maintain at least some of their C&C outside of China to make it less obvious who the actor is, and to maintain connectivity for longer. Ideally the adversary C&C would exist within the target country. In the USA you'd want a confusing relationship that is plausibly legitimate, and turn it into a free speech issue, slowing down the legal system, and so working to China's benefit. While the justice system tries to do it's job, you use the data you gather to build a very accurate and detailed picture of the nation's capabilities, all with names and leverage attached. Over a short period of time, say a few days, what havoc could such an entity do to our nation, if it could send messages as anyone to anyone and be undetectable as illegitimate?<p>And we worry about DDOS botnets!<p>(Note: if we had on-shore manufacturing it wouldn't solve the fundamental issue which is that humans can mass manufacture invisible machines that can't be inspected. These machines are so small they cannot be perceived, not even with the most powerful magnifying instruments[0].)<p>Of course, all of this could be way off base. An equally valid (if more cynical) reason for sanctions like this is that regulatory capture and campaign generosity is finally paying off for someone.<p>0 - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_microscope" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_microscope</a> And the preparation methods required destroy the object under test, such as a chip image.