Perhaps my remark here is wandering into the more proper area of another forum.
But are we anxious because "IT World" published an "alarm?" Or are we -- at least in part -- driven by a "Yellow Peril" myth?
Sometime within the last decade or so, before his succession by Putin, Russia's Medvedev had remarked that no country could effectively restrain the flow of information between its citizens with the availability of cell-phones ands laptop computers.
My view of the so-called "Cold War's End:" it had less to do with the Ronald Reagan and the Pope, less to do with US defense spending, and owed more to simply the collapse of a command economy and the emergence of these devices. A USSR regime was between a rock and a hard place, knowing that they couldn't compete with their lumbering mainframes in a world where the other side was proliferating PCs and cell-phones. The writing was on the wall. Samizdat was freed from the typewriter and mass-published in PDF.
Are the "Chi-Coms" interested in putting your "precious bodily fluids" in peril? I rather doubt it.
You have more to worry about with DPRK and a little psycho like Kim Jong Un. And any pipsqueak country bent on building their own nukes so they can "stand up" to the US is tilting at windmills. They're more clueless than anyone else. Possibly "dangerous?" Sure. But also the object of hilarity and derision.
The other two major players have been described by the likes of Henry Kissinger as "rational." No less -- I'd say that about the Iranians, despite their Revolutionary Guard. The hypocrisy of it: Israel has likely had a nuclear weapon for decades -- never officially acknowledged. The Iranians know it; everyone else knows it. But anyone in their right mind knows what would happen if such a weapon were used. The biggest risk: proliferation that increases the uncertainty about who did what and with which and to whom -- and the miscalculations between the other players once the unthinkable occurs. Thus our concern that the wrong weapon will fall into the hands of criminally-insane terrorists who are nuttier than a bag of squirrel-shit.
So why are we so unsettled about the proliferation of an Intel chip, to a country that already manufacturers so many other parts for the world-wide industry?
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