25 V8 IS wrote Here's a question for everyone posting in here: Have any of you ever even BEEN to China?
Show of hands please. I went in 2023 and what I witnessed was a society that is far more advanced, cleaner, safer, etc. than it is here in the US.
Am I moving to China? No, I am not. I love the US. But let's stop acting like China is this horrible enemy trying to destroy the US from within.
Actually, when WAS the last time China started a war? I'll wait.
Back in 2008, the FBI was investigating counterfeit Cisco product originating from China. The extent of this investigation was wide spread involving many different individuals. The briefing that is linked below was the unclassified presentation given by Section Chief Raul Roldan. This presentation was leaked out to the public before the FBI was ready to execute warrants and arrests. It forced the FBI to move earlier than they wanted.
The issues that were shown in the presentation are parts that look authentic that would fail in significant numbers in a short amount of time. Or the counterfeit parts would cause network issues as these components would all have the same MAC address causing network conflict issues if two of the same counterfeit products were put on the same layer 2 network segment.
I have worked in IT for a long time. Used to do lots of Cisco routers/firewalls deployments during that time period. The pictures the FBI presented on what a counterfeit WIC-1DSU-T1 card looked like compared to an authentic card was mind blowing. I've handled tons of those cards and I wouldn't have notice the subtle differences. This issue goes beyond lost Cisco profits as many of these devices were deployed in mission critical systems. These parts somehow found their way into legitimate supply chain sources so even buying from a reputable reseller such as CDW didn't guarantee you were safe. All these parts were manufactured in Chinese plants for Cisco. These issues caused a big push to have manufacturers of IT systems to have better supply chain that can be trusted to not have any tampering of the components called TAA. Many Federal agencies now have a requirement that products bid in response to RFPs must be TAA certified.
A good friend of mine who works for Cisco told me at the time, the workers trained to produce these components for Cisco would somehow disappear after a certain amount of time working in the production lines and a whole new crew of workers would be presented that would require Cisco to train the new batch of workers again. It was no secret where those trained workers went and what they were doing.
This is an online hosting of the full FBI briefing:
https://www.slideserve.com/marvel/fbi-criminal-investigation-cisco-routers
In addition to my reply about Huawei being blocked from providing 5G equipment as part of the cellular upgrade for the US, other concerns have been raised by various people in the know about critical infrastructure equipment being manufactured in China. An example of a critical component are the large power transformers that make up our power grid backbone. From what I recall, there are only three countries that manufacture these transformers: Germany, South Korea, and China. The backlog in fulfilling orders of the transformers are a year to year and a half as of the documentary I'm going to link below. China is starting to provide a large number of transformers that are being installed in the power grid. The concern is the software that is part of the operation of the transformer may contain back doors or malware exposing the power grid to foreign attack.
The documentary is called Grid Down Power Up:
https://vimeo.com/742372251
ETA: After posting my reply, for some reason, the Vimeo link isn't showing up properly even with the Vimeo tags. So I removed the tags for the URL and you'll have to copy and paste to see the video.
These two examples are just the tip of the various concerns and hostile activities China that has been made public. There are much more that have not been made public.
Back to the topic of Chinese EVs, I can see concerns of these cars capturing video images that can be sent back to a Chinese collector. Say a Federal worker buys one of these EVs and then drives that car to work. Think of all the data intel that China can collect. Heck, the Feds announced this year a ban on importing consumer grade routers that are manufactured in China. Whether the concerns are real or warranted is up to one's discretion. But companies such as Asus, TP Link, etc now have to convince the Feds that their products conform to whatever the Feds are using to evaluate data safety. Netgear was subjected to this ban until they were able to get an exemption....we can read between the lines on how that happened.
This topic isn't an easy one due to all the hot buttons it presses such as INFOSEC, free market capitalism, national security, fair competition, etc, etc.
