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Comment by canada_dry | Hacker News Reader

Let's turn around the discussion... if Russia had decided to outsource the PCB's for some new stealth fighter to a US manufacturer you can bet that several cloak-and-dagger US agencies would be looking for any way possible to compromise and take advantage of the opportunity.

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Maybe, but their hands would be tied by the fact that a PCB isn't a very effective way to do that kind of espionage.

I'm not saying there's no possible conflict of interest here or that China wouldn't try something or that we should continue to use Shenzhen Fastprint for circuit boards to go in our super premium fancy stealth doodads.

I'm saying this is stupid and a non-issue and people should calm down.

I think you're not thinking big enough. If you have experience in the intel community, then by all means, please keep posting, but from my experience, the capabilities of the intel communities will make you chuckle to yourself with some of the ingenious methods they use. This isn't 'stupid and a non-issue' and people should rightfully question the supply chain on this one.

> isn't a very effective way to do that kind of espionage

If you know very little about someone, just examining their laundry will tell you quite a bit about them. So 'effective' is really relative.

And, I'd argue that just having their hands on a physical component gives them the ability to introduce purposeful exotic flaws which they can exploit, or just ensure failure sometime in the future yet aren't detectable by standard quality control methods. Kinda like 'zero-day' code flaws that are kept in ones back pocket until needed.

Sure, it may not be as helpful as manufacturing the ICs, but planting ICs in assembled PCBs is actually pretty straightforward, the way I see it. The marginal cost advantage, if any, of manufacturing the board with this company, is probably offset by the cost of verifying to satisfaction that there are no unwanted ICs embedded in the PCB.

So lets be as paranoid as North Korea ? national self-sufficiency ? every country that tried it went bankrupt.

If there is any country in the world that can make national self-sufficiency work, it's the USA. The economy is still the largest, and it is also the most diverse. The USA has a large and varied geography from which to generate materials. The population is large.

China is far less capable, and nobody else is even close to being able to reach national self-sufficiency without going back to a very primitive meager existence.

At least for military stuff, not consumer. ITAR is a thing still.

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