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Comment by thirdsight | Hacker News Reader

I doubt this is possible. Every item that goes up is assembled and signed off piecemeal so every bit of hardware will be checked by multiple eyes. The buyer will have people on site checking this. From a software perspective, things are a little more uncertain but the workflows are tightly locked down. It would be extremely difficult to get anything shipped which isn't known about by everyone. Even attempting this is illogical.

I agree with the assertion that this is to secure a better deal.

(I wrote software to manage assembly and versioning of components on space and military equipment).

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Why go through the trouble of accusing them of implanting a backdoor, if all they wanted is to review other countries' offers, which they're doing now anyway (Russia, China)? Are you saying that now they will go back, and say "ok, since you removed the backdoor, we're going to accept your 30 percent discounted offer."? That seems highly unlikely.

If anything Russia and China will charge them more than the French now, to "guarantee" there's no backdoor, and since they are in a better negotiation position now than they would've been if UAE reviewed their offers pre-accusing France/US of backdooring the other offer.

I like your entirely-appropriate scare quotes there. I can't see any reason to believe that Chinese or Russian hardware (or French for that matter) would be any less likely to be backdoored. I wouldn't trust any of it further than I could audit it myself--which makes it a tricky situation for second- or third-party users, since auditing the internal state of modern electronic gear is difficult-to-impossible. You can audit the communications, and hope you can detect any out-of-spec activity, but that's not easy either.

There's more political maneuvering going on here than any legitimate technical concern.

Right, so I'm guessing that there are two possible explanations:

1) There is something (HW or SW) on the satellite and it was installed with full knowledge of the assembly group.

2) There's nothing unusual on the satellite and something else, politics perhaps, are at play here. I wouldn't count out a desire to not have U.S. sourced parts on a military bird. Just like the U.S. doesn't want to have Chinese sourced hardware (even if it's just door handles).

I had the thought that perhaps how folks are more willing to call the US out on practices that have up-to-now been accepted wholesale or common practice?

Do not they having cushons, overprovisions, dummy weights, tolerance ranges to account for unexpected spec changes?

I imagine the systems are very complex, so the components are made modular, defining functionality and specs (size, weight, mass balance) and letting the implementation details to subcontractors.

While the subcontractor fullfills the contractual functionality, any eastereggs can be discovered only in a very late phase (qc, assembly), upon delivery.

The wording "discovery was reported" can be read as if it was a surprise discovery for all.

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