U.S. government sides with Apple and Amazon, effectively denying Bloombergreport | Hacker News Reader

U.S. government sides with Apple and Amazon, effectively denying Bloombergreport

techcrunch.com

17 pointsevo_910 comments

I highly recommend Noam Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent' for a good look at the United States propaganda model and how big newspapers play a very large role in forming the public's opinion on both domestic & foreign issues.

How is Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model applicable here?

Right, that was a bizarre connection to make.

It's been pointed out that the Bloomberg story was possibly a failed attempt at propaganda during a trade war with China.

I’m of the opinion that this story was designed and planted through a Machiavellian scheme to cause panic and to generate more suspicion on China (specifically) and any other country (generally). The denials by the companies and the government arms are quite strong, suggesting that this is a highly secretive disinformation campaign.

If the Bloomberg story is indeed true and the denials by the others false, I don’t expect to find out about it for at least another 30 years or longer, when this probably gets declassified or revealed in detail by some other source.

Whatever the truth, it’s undeniable that the report has planted giant seeds of doubt on electronic hardware, and many countries can only continue to worry while not being able to handle this kind of threat at scale in the coming years.

We humans want and desire for closure, but I suspect we won’t get it on this matter anytime soon.

Dupe/Not original source of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18158560

I'll bet you that behind the scenes a different story is being told.

If there was a secret agreement, the quickness of responses from both implicated parties here reads well. I could definitely see the NSA having contractual language like "Upon suspicion by members of the media, the communications department of Company X should fully deny any and all implications of working with the NSA within 24 hours"

I think the simplest answer is probably the real answer here. An article had inaccurate information, and all involved parties responded with the same story because they were all responding with the truth.

The alternative is the Chinese government inserted a chip onto boards. Which would have required a modification to the board as well as bypassing all of Apple's own hardware security measures. This sounds like an interesting story, but seems a lot less likely. Would the people planting an additional component not expect a company to inspect their own boards when doing normal checks?

> Would the people planting an additional component not expect a company to inspect their own boards when doing normal checks?

Absolutely.

I often miss assembly errors on boards that I, personally, design and debug.

Unless someone has an automated tester doing optical examination of every single part, it's really easy to miss.

Even moreso if it was just a small batch that had the change.

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