I think the story is interesting, but in one way it is nothing new. Every intelligence service installs bugs on their targets. There was a true story, not questioned, that our intelligence agencies were capturing machines and devices in transit because we were interested in the conversations of so-and-so in countries where we have little insight into what they're up to. We need to know. Phishing attacks don't work well in National Security organizations, so why not custom hardware? A secret fab somewhere, you know what the Minister of Secret Stuff is saying, and they detect no software. But this has been done before by custom chips, put into the target computer within a short time, repackaged and sent to its destination.
This story presumes a kind of mass deployment, involving one of the foremost sources of our wealth, the Chinese supply chain. That's something else. To end our relationship with China over this, or go back to real hostility, would be very bad for our economy and for the world's. Trying to create that supply chan in the U.S., after hearing from conservatives for YEARS that our television and chip industry was inefficient, so it was a good thing that we sold it, piece by piece, to China. But if we have to build everything in New Jersey again, it will be years tooling up, and meanwhile, the iPhone would cost $2,000, not $1,000.
What they never did was show us the device. Prove their case. They worked on it for years, but they never got anybody to talk, or anything to say that was more than a "they could," or "some say." That's not "fake news," but it's less than the impact it needs. Imagine, Pearl Harbor, and for some reason, the strongest story you got was, "The Japanese May Have Dropped Some Bombs," or, "Some Say There Was a Lot of Destruction." They'd be laughed out of time. If they had just covered the story with, "This may happen in the future, and some think it already has," which is the actual story they have. But they swung for the fences, and the story was too ambitious.
