In 2014 China began "wiretapping" our government's newest, most advanced video servers--thousands of 'em

Among developed nations, intelligence (the kind that IQ measures) seems pretty evenly distributed.  Thus the smartest Americans and the smartest Chinese or Russians likely have the virtually the same IQ.

If that's true, why do the Chinese consistently seem to out-maneuver the American government?

Oh wait...I hear my Democrat friends saying that's not true--just a "crazy right-wing conspiracy theory."

Ah.  What if you learned--from a huge, exhaustive investigation--that the communist government of China had been intercepting ALL classified U.S. communications for the last 8 years?

Democrats: "Dis not true!  If is true, is all Trump's fault!  Yeh, dat's it."

Our story begins before 2015, but we'll start there:  A division of Amazon called "Amazon Web Services" (AWS) was bidding on a HUGE government contract to provide "video streaming services" to the CIA and military.  As just one example, that contract would handle live video from armed drones in the mid-east to drone operators outside of Las Vegas.

This capability matched nicely with the emerging civilian video service of "streaming video," in which on-demand programming would be requested by various consumers and sent to each TV by a vast network of highly-specialized, VERY expensive servers.  

Of course it's everywhere now, but back in 2015 this was just emerging.  But it's crucial to understand that hundreds of these servers were already being used by the military and CIA to stream drone video.  Government agencies used them for supposedly secure videoconferencing, as were both houses of Congress and the Department of Homeland Security.  And I'd bet that DARPA also used 'em.

The new contract would just increase this ability by an order of magnitude.

As part of competing for the contract, AWS hired an outside company to see if the video servers could be hacked.  That examination uncovered troubling issues, which led the outside company to examine the main circuit boards that powered the video servers.

The servers were assembled by a silicon-valley company called Super Micro Computer--commonly known as Supermicro.  That company turns out to be one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips that actually do the processing.  By 2015 Supermicro had over 900 customers.

In late spring of 2015, AWS arranged to send several of the specialized video servers to the third-party security company for testing.  And unexpectedly, as part of the testing the company took X-rays of the main circuit board.

Those X-rays revealed something stunning: hidden between two layers of fiberglass on the board was a network of conductive leads connected to something resembling a grain of rice--which turned out to be a tiny electronic chip that wasn't in any of the drawings for the board.

Investigators put the servers into a test environment that simulated a connection to the internet and turned on the power.  The servers immediately did something they shouldn't have: they looked for a website--which was later determined to be in China.

Once the server thought it was communicating with the Chinese site, it downloaded everything in its memory.  But how could such a tiny chip have enough memory to execute such a complex set of instructions?

After hundreds of hours of testing, investigators found the trick: when powered up, the "grain of rice" sent the CPU a signal telling it to begin loading a change to the on-board program--a change uploaded by the Chinese website.  

In effect, the hidden grain-of-rice chip allowed the Chinese to create a hidden connection to the server, and through that server, to any network that included one of the altered machines.

But how did the sabotaged circuit boards--supposedly made by a company in silicon valley, make it into advanced video servers for the CIA and the military?

Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories in...China.  This happened because Supermicro--the company that made the servers, and the key circuit boards for other companies building similar servers--subcontracted production of its critical circuit boards to Chinese companies.

In early 2014 U.S. intelligence officials told the Obama White House that China was planning to insert malicious chips into Supermicro circuit boards sold to U.S. companies.  That information was so specific that it should have triggered immediate countermeasures.  And being so specific, it could only have come from Chinese informants, so would have had the highest possible security classification.

As Bloomberg drily put it, "The specificity of the information was remarkable."  Yep.

But as far as can be determined, the Obama regime took no action. Instead "a person familiar with the discussions" says the White House "requested periodic updates." (However, shortly thereafter Hilliary Clinton's aides at State faxed a beyond-Top-Secret cable to her unsecured email server at her home in New York, listing the names of CIA informants in China.  And a month or so after that, every one of those informants vanished.)

Eventually investigators discovered that the Chinese companies began shipping bugged circuit boards to Supermicro early in 2014.

Documents seen by Businessweek show that in 2014 Apple planned to order more than 10,000 Supermicro servers, and another 20,000 were expected to be ordered in 2015.

In May of 2015 Apple--evaluating the same servers to compete with AWS for the same contract--discovered suspicious chips in Supermicro circuit boards after detecting uncommanded network activity and firmware problems, according to a person familiar with the timeline. Two senior Apple insiders say the company reported the incident to the FBI but kept details about what it had detected tightly held.

By that date Apple already had already installed about 7,000 of the servers.  An Apple insider says all 7,000 servers were removed in the summer of 2015.  (When asked by Bloomberg, Apple denied that it ever knew any servers were bugged and that any servers were removed.  A spokesman for Supermicro said the company has never been notified of the existence of malicious chips on its motherboards,  either by customers or U.S. law enforcement.)

Government investigators were still chasing clues on their own when Amazon made its discovery--and gave them access to sabotaged hardware, according to one U.S. official.  Eventually investigators found that the bugged servers had been installed at about 30 U.S. companies.

Now if you think the story is weird to this point, it's about to get even more strange.  Here's Bloomberg:
   >>U.S. officials had been warning for years that hardware made by two Chinese telecommunications giants, Huawei and ZTE, was subject to Chinese government manipulation.  *But a similar public alert about a U.S. company was out of the question.* Instead, officials reached out to a small number of important Supermicro customers.>>

Wait, why did the government decide that "a similar public alert about a [Supermicro] was out of the question"?  Hint: the government didn't keep quiet because of concern for Supermicro, but because admitting that Apple--and the CIA, and our military--had been using bugged servers since 2014 might have triggered questions to the Obama regime as to who had known what when, and why no action had been taken to end the use of the bugged servers when the Obozo regime was first warned about the problem.

Let's see...who was Obama's "counter-terrorism advisor" and "assistant to the president for Homeland Security" from 2009 to 2013?  John Brennan.  And in 2013 Obama appointed Brennan to head the CIA, which he headed for the rest of Obama's term.

Brennan would have been THE person to brief on information from CIA assets in China if those sources learned about the plan to bug the servers (as those sources did tell us).  Brennan was the person best situated to order an examination of every video server used by any branch of the government, to see which ones were sending our classified data to China.

There is no indication that users of the compromised servers--other than Apple, Amazon and the CIA--were ever notified to uninstall their video servers--though Apple and Amazon apparently did (though they deny the entire story).

So that leaves the question: how many of those servers are still in use today?

Ah, I hear my liberal friends saying "That's preposterous!  John Brennan would nevah allow bugged servers to remain in use after the bug was discovered in thousands of 'em!  He's a good American!"

Yeah, well...You need to know something about the psychology of "elites:"  They learn early never to admit mistakes, let alone apologize for mistakes, omissions, bad judgment, anything.  Any mistakes are ignored--buried--and you threaten anyone who might start asking questions.

Amazon, Apple and the CIA knew about the bugs.  Unknown whether the CIA ever notified the military, but if so there would be records in every command that used the video servers.  If any such records are found (which I doubt), check the dates.  Obviously 2018 would be evidence of omission and negligence.

Now, how well did we learn from this debacle?  Well, we didn't learn to bring chip-making back to the U.S., and now have a shortage of all manner of electronic chips--90% of which are from either China or Taiwan.

Trump put tariffs on Chinese goods, which would be an incentive to U.S. companies to return plants to the U.S., but biden promptly removed all such tariffs, no doubt at the insistence of the Chinese.

So it goes.

Source.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies