What? This is exactly where an intelligence agency would step in and add an extra little chip onto the board. There's tons of precedence for this.
Unless the government inspected every board individually, there's no way to guarantee supply chain. At least from a national defense perspective, everything that comes out of China is a possible risk.
To flip the debate around, if the US manufactured PCBs for China, don't you think we would do the same thing?
Depends on where the chip is and what it did. It's possible to hide chips between layers, hide chips under chips, replace an existing chip with something that looks almost just like it with additional functions.
It's really not hard to imagine some smart people being told to make it work.
Unless the government inspected every board individually, there's no way to guarantee supply chain. At least from a national defense perspective, everything that comes out of China is a possible risk.
To flip the debate around, if the US manufactured PCBs for China, don't you think we would do the same thing?