Putting hardware in place isn't about the public, it's about using the public as the distribution method. As you should well know working in IT, the car outside your office can be listening to devices on your network, and that widget / device on the accounts payable desk might not be yours to control. Some $2 novelty gadget the Billy bought Betty for Valentines Day!
We were recently alerted to stop using circuit boards manufactured in China, these are supposed to be bare boards without components, but security groups have found serial decode chips embedded within multilayer boards. You have to X-ray these boards to find them. Tiny chips capable of parroting away your data, and they cost a few cents per thousand devices, they are inconsequential like gains of sand.
Do you really think a country that spends billions of nuclear weapons or military hardware will blink at the trivial cost of adding millions of serial decode chips to devices distributed everywhere? Billions of such tiny devices would cost less than one warhead.
As you point out it's not just about military or politics, actually it's probably more about stealing IP, because that is the high cost high value proposition.
All nations would be doing this stuff given the opportunity, the naivety is thinking they wouldn't!
We were recently alerted to stop using circuit boards manufactured in China, these are supposed to be bare boards without components, but security groups have found serial decode chips embedded within multilayer boards. You have to X-ray these boards to find them. Tiny chips capable of parroting away your data, and they cost a few cents per thousand devices, they are inconsequential like gains of sand.
Do you really think a country that spends billions of nuclear weapons or military hardware will blink at the trivial cost of adding millions of serial decode chips to devices distributed everywhere? Billions of such tiny devices would cost less than one warhead.
As you point out it's not just about military or politics, actually it's probably more about stealing IP, because that is the high cost high value proposition.
All nations would be doing this stuff given the opportunity, the naivety is thinking they wouldn't!
"Ruck, ruck, ruck, ruck ....... Ruck, ruck, ruck, ruck"