I'm glad to see someone call out the WSJ... I was a subscriber for many years and it was a conservative yet outstanding source of information. Today it's crap, yet still trades on its historic reputation. Really breaks my heart as I've not been able to find a replacement.
I think the downhill started when Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought it. Anything they touch turns into ... bad things. Why is that? Because there are people who crave propagandists news. It is good business, tell us what we want to hear ..
Bloomberg has major problems; they have no proper separation between advertising and editorial (a high-profile article on corruption in the Chinese government, following up on an article that had narrowly missed out on the Pulitzer the year before, was spiked in what very much appeared to be a move to protect Bloomberg terminal sales in China), and they still haven't retracted (or clearly stated that they're standing behind) their dubious "hack chip" story.
It shocks me that people believe manufacturer denials on this particular issue but still claim to be immune to commercial propaganda.
It's unlikely there will ever be undeniable proof available to the general public one way or the other on this. But the story was well sourced, was definitely technical credible and the parts that could be checked all checked out. Literally the only thing against it was manufacturer statements saying "nah".
In particular, check out page 71 of [1], where a former US Marine testifies under oath in a federal case about a similar things happening with Lenovo laptops in 2008 in Iraq. Quote:
A large amount of Lenovo laptops were sold to the
US military that had a chip encrypted on the motherboard that
would record all the data that was being inputted into that
laptop and send it back to China.
I'm glad to hear that Bloomberg is still talking about this - there was a point where it looked like they were just going to wait for it to fade away.
If it's real, it really shouldn't be that hard to prove conclusively - find the chip, scan it, dump what's in it. The technical parts are possible but not that plausible - not just the manufacturer but large internet companies with the right expertise were sceptical, and most of the people who thought it was genuine seemed to be non-technical. E.g. "had a chip encrypted on the motherboard" does not inspire confidence that this is someone who knows what they're talking about.
