[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“China has irked US wireless manufacturers by insisting that
they conform to the PRC’s encryption technology, we reported last
week. Some commentators have castigated China for protecting its
own fledgling tech industry. But that excludes the country’s very
understandable security concerns.“A reminder of how important these are came last week with a
revelation from the Cold War era, contained in a new book by a
senior US national security official. Thomas Reed’s At The
Abyss recounts how the United States exported control software
that included a Trojan Horse, and used the software to detonate the
Trans Siberian gas pipeline in 1982. The Trojan ran a test on the
pipeline that doubled the usual pressure, causing the explosion.
Reed was Reagan’s special assistant for National Security Policy at
the time; he had also served as Secretary of the Air Force from
1966 to 1977 and was a former nuclear physicist at the Lawrence
Livermore laboratory in California. The software subterfuge was so
secret that Reed didn’t know about it until he began researching
the book, twenty years later…”