said by El Quintron:said by FFH5:The real risk to be worried about isn't phoning home. It is that, in a time of war, a signal could be sent that would cause the Chinese built hardware to self destruct, thereby turning off a huge part of US communications infrastructure.
This assumes that you're asking the same group of people to build both the hardware and software,
Uh, if you have subverted the hardware, then the software is inconsequential. Own the metal, you own the software too. If Intel put a backdoor into their chips, it wouldn't matter if you ran Windows, OSX, Linux, Unix, AIX, IRIX, whatever. It would still have ultimate control and could do all sorts of hard (or impossible) to detect things.