Do Your Electronics Have A “Kill Switch” Buried In Them?… Or Worse?
Can the Government Shut Down Your Computer And Cell Phone Just By Broadcasting A Signal?
Even worse… could our military be crippled by off the shelf electronics made in foreign countries that have secret “Trojan Horse” software built in?
There’s a growing worry at the Pentagon and within government circles that millions of computers, cell phones and other vital electronic controllers have been compromised by having secret backdoor software embedded into the chips that are largely manufactured overseas.
There are stories circulating that the Israeli strike at the suspected Syrian nuclear facility last September… Word is that the state of the art Syrian antiaircraft radar simply didn’t work… Is this an example of the new electronic warfare?
IEEE Spectrum says that the Pentagon is now seriously rethinking it’s reliance on foreign made chips… Something that it puts into it’s weapon systems by the thousands:
” The dwindling of domestic chip and electronics manufacturing in the United States, combined with the phenomenal growth of suppliers in countries like China, has only deepened the U.S. military’s concern. ”
“Recognizing this enormous vulnerability, the DOD recently launched its most ambitious program yet to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin future additions to its arsenal. In December, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s R&D wing, released details about a three-year initiative it calls the Trust in Integrated Circuits program. The findings from the program could give the military-and defense contractors who make sensitive microelectronics like the weapons systems for the F‑35-a guaranteed method of determining whether their chips have been compromised. In January, the Trust program started its prequalifying rounds by sending to three contractors four identical versions of a chip that contained unspecified malicious circuitry. The teams have until the end of this month to ferret out as many of the devious insertions as they can.”
“But these days, the U.S. military consumes only about 1 percent of the world’s integrated circuits. “Now,” says Coleman, “all they can do is buy stuff.” Nearly every military system today contains some commercial hardware. It’s a pretty sure bet that the National Security Agency doesn’t fabricate its encryption chips in China. But no entity, no matter how well funded, can afford to manufacture its own safe version of every chip in every piece of equipment.”
“The Pentagon is now caught in a bind. It likes the cheap, cutting-edge devices emerging from commercial foundries and the regular leaps in IC performance the commercial sector is known for. But with those improvements comes the potential for sabotage. “The economy is globalized, but defense is not globalized,” says Coleman. “How do you reconcile the two?”
Rumors of the French installing backdoors and kill switches in all military equipment for sale to outside countries have been circulating since the 1980′s… The Falklands War and The USS Stark Incident provided plenty of fodder for theories that persist to this day.
The U.S. used a printer to deliver a knockout blow to Iraq before the 1991 War… New U.S. Currency contains symbols that alerts software apparently already in your computer, scanner and printer not to make copies of money… What else is embedded into your equipment that you don’t know about? Could a scenario similar to Stephen King’s “Cell” be less than unthinkable?… After all… Nearly all cell phones are assembled in a country that is technically an ideological enemy of the U.S..
Essays, Information | TheFourEyes May 4, 2008
