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Comment by maxander | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the issue is that, if whole classes of chips that are important for military purposes (wireless communications, for example) are made exclusively by China, they could put in backdoors and other traps that would compromise U.S. military hardware. I haven't seen anyone discuss this angle openly, though, so either I'm off base somehow or it's not something the U.S. wants to loudly discuss (because they're likely doing it too.)

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I'm not seeing it in this case, but the American exclusiveness is hardly a secret.

The government does not source critical tech to third-parties with international ties. Our soldiers only carry weapons made by American suppliers. Our police only drive American vehicles. Even government software needs to run on domestically-produced platforms (Xbox, generic PC).

It's not because we live in a Tom Clancy novel; we don't want to put ourselves in a position where services we depend on for safety or national security experience shortage or unavailability because of beefs with our suppliers. And we don't want Huawei or Lenovo backdooring things like routers and laptops that might be used in sensitive deployments.

That's a fair angle, but no need to "suspect", the reason has been provided: simply that it threatens being #1.

Nobody is looking at it from that angle because Broadcomm is not a Chinese company. So, yes, you are way off on this. The Trump admin is essentially running on exophobia to push all their trade policies (eg, steel tariff where Canada and Mexico are the top exporters.

Your implication that only Chinese companies can plant backdoors seems exophobic to me. If we are going to go with the 'only China can backdoor things', Broadcomm has corporate offices in Singapore - why couldn't someone amenable to the Chinese cause, or a lot of money, help get a backdoor in? The same is still possible with US citizens running a US enterprise in the US, but the punishment in America for treason against America is pretty severe and well known. What is the punishment in Singapore if you help put a backdoor in a product which ultimately goes to the US military?

I guess, to xenophobes, everything looks xenophobic. Sure, there are national security threats from many other foreign actors, but in this particular case, the poster to whom I responded wants to specifically discuss hypothetical threats posed by Chinese interests and companies that are geo-politically close to China.

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