Friday, October 05, 2018

"We are going to need more than tariffs to contain the dragon!"

Have you read about the discovery of a microchip the size of a grain of rice being implanted by China in secret American motherboards? Spengler writes in PJ Media,
Bloomberg/Business Week this morning broke the most disturbing spy story in years: Chinese cyber-spies embedded a secret back door onto computer motherboards intended for super-secret CIA cloud computing. The techies at Amazon Web Services discovered one particular back door in hardware built by Chinese subcontractors for Supermicro of San Jose California, one of the world's biggest suppliers of motherboards.

Bloomberg reports:

Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.
One country in particular has an advantage executing this
kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent

of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs.

Let that sink in: the US Department of Defense uses Chinese computer components because they are NOT manufactured in the United States of America. US counterintelligence found one back door. We have no idea how many more back doors are out here.

...China manufactures 90% of the computers used in the United States. US companies like Cisco manufacture virtually all of their telecommunications equipment in China. There's no way to stop China from embedding secret points of access in hardware, except to produce it here.

...We tend to forget that beating the Russians in the Cold War wasn't easy. We were losing the Cold War during the 1970s. Russian surface-to-air-missiles decimated Israel's American-built air force during the 1973 war, and Russia was convinced that it had a technological edge that would enable it to win any conventional war in the world. The tide began to turn exactly 50 years ago when the US installed look-down radar in F-15's. By 1982, Israel demonstrated the power of American (as well as some Israeli) avionics when it destroyed most of the Syrian air force. But that required revolution in technology, including the invention of CMOS chip manufacturing at RCA Labs in 1976.

Back then, America spent double what it does now on federal R&D and major corporations maintained their own research labs -- Bell, RCA, GE, IBM, Hughes and many others. We had the only top-rate universities in the world for physics and computer science and we drew in the world's to talent. It's tougher today. We can win this one, but it won't be cheap or easy. It will require a national mobilization on the scale of the Eisenhower response to Sputnik, the Kennedy moonshot or the Reagan SDI. Failing that, China will win, just as Russia almost won before Ronald Reagan took office.
Read more here.

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