Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash
Posted on 05/22/2012 8:42:58 AM PDT by the scotsman
'More than a million fake electronic parts from China have been found in US military aircraft, posing a risk to national security, an investigation has revealed.
A report by the US Senate uncovered 1,800 cases of bogus parts - including some in special operations helicopters and the US Air Force's largest cargo plane. The total number of individual components involved in these cases exceeded one million, the Committee on Armed Services publication said.
"This flood of counterfeit parts, overwhelmingly from China, threatens national security, the safety of our troops and American jobs," committee chairman Senator Carl Levin said. "It underscores China's failure to police the blatant market in counterfeit parts - a failure China should rectify," he added.
As part of a year-long investigation, the US Government Accountability Office created a fictitious company and purchased electronic parts on the internet. Of the 16 items bought, all were counterfeit and some had bogus identification numbers. The components came from suppliers based in China - which Senator Levin described as the "epicentre of electronic part counterfeiting".
The report accused Beijing of openly allowing counterfeiting operations, and said attempts by officials to get visas to travel to China as part of the probe had failed. US authorities and contract companies contributed to the problem by not detecting the fakes and routinely failing to report them, the report said.
The Defense Department was also criticised for lacking "knowledge of the scope and impact of counterfeit parts on critical defence systems".
Committee member Senator John McCain said the prevalence of bogus parts made the country vulnerable and posed a risk to "our security and the lives of the men and women who protect it".'
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.news.yahoo.com ...
LOL. I guess all those pallets of equipment that I scanned were figments of my imagination, then. Stuff went straight from PRC to the sandbox with a short stopover at our site to be inprocessed. We never even opened the boxes.
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More likely a software bug. Who wrote the code? Computers change mask O2 concentrations with altitude and it doesn't sound as if that is happening as it should. Regardless, it's amazing what I find on eBay when looking for vintage electronics. The stuff just isn't stored in attics anymore. You have to get it from the Ukraine, Russia, or China.
You both right, and very, very wrong.
You are correct in that there are no trojans, or secret backdoors. These are things like PROMS, transistors, capacitors, resistors and even obsolete 8 bit processors and assorted gates.
However, often these designs are very crude and poorly made copies, that can pass very basic functionality tests, but fail later on - far earlier than a ‘legitimate’ part. I’ve heard of brake pads that ‘looked’ like the real thing, but were compressed asphalt, paint and yak dung. It wasn’t until they were damp that one box of these brake pads started smelling really bad.
There are microprocessors that only have partially functional portions of the chip. Again, passing tests like continuity, gross functionality - but incapable of executing certain commands. Just enough to get past the incoming inspection screen.
It’s not unusual to buy a reel of chips, with the first 50 units being Bin fails for speed (work great on a 1 MHz tester, but fail at full operational speed), and the rest of the reel is literally “empty” packages with no die in them at all.
The threat is that when a device is “needed”, that is may fail unexpectedly - thus jeopardizing the life of the crew. This is a legitmate threat, and a serious one.
So we have nothing to worry about?
No automatic test can test every set of inputs on a modern microprocessor. It is very possible that a determined and patient enemy can imbed a back door or remote kill in enough systems to cripple an opponent’s ability to effectively respond to a threat.
these are just the fake parts
wait until we end up in direct conflict with china and all sorts of electronic parts start ‘misbehaving’ on command
They are probabaly the same people I worked for at DoD. They used to tell me the same thing.
There ya go again Sam, making and putting reason into a purely emotional debate... damn you sam, damn you to hell..... :)
“The capitalist will sell us the rope on which we will hang them” V I Lenin
You’re right.
We got walkers in the wire Cap’n.
I hate expansions, but the US needs to create electronic “arsenals” to make chips for US military applications.
"Fake Chinese parts" would mean that the parts were supposed to be from China but actually originated elsewhere.
Setting aside all of the reasons they might see this as beneficial to their ends, a) does it really matter whether they did so intentionally? and b) is there anything wrong with being concerned about it?
Breathtaking idiocracy.
This is tammany hall corrupt.
Why would we as a nation allow this? China (officials who don’t speak freely, so therefore their speech is condoned if not called for, by the top) even now and then threatens to nuke us. We are insane. /rhetorical
Our enemies have taken advantage of our greed and stupidity. We R so skrewd.
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