According to this, Chinese equipment makers have built backdoors into their hardware (which may be the root of Mr. Panetta's remarks). First, a little perspective: Most intelligent networking equipment, manufactured by almost any vendor anywhere in the past 20 years have been shown to contain some kind of a backdoor. Master passwords for routers and secret technician codes for mobile phones or set top boxes have been published over the year (not to mention those secret key combination in Microsoft products that invoke flight simulator games). This development begs two questions: What percentage of infrastructure, civilian as well as military,...
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