So who lied? Was it Bloomberg Business Week? Or is the liar Apple, Amazon and Supermicro?
Last Thursday October 4th Bloomberg posted a story called “The Big Hack” their sources told them that China used a tiny chip to infiltrate top tech companies.
Article by Micah Blumberg, Journalist, Analyst Researcher, Neurohacker
The article was astonishing, I shared this article in all the best channels on social media, because miniaturized tech that small and that capable sounds amazing. I had never heard of such technology: something so tiny and capable of not only listening to every thing running on a server, but also capable of transmitting all that data as well, transmitting that data all the way to China without being noticed. Well except one time there was this April fools joke from PCWorld https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e06SEAFoEc8
But I follow technology, there is literally no technology on earth like that described in the Bloomberg article, if there was it would be used commercially, it would be sold by a chip maker rivaling chip makers like AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. The reality is that nobody has the kind of technology featured in the Bloomberg article, and even if this tech was being produced underground in secret, that level of expertise doesn’t exist, the best technology experts in the world, who are working on artificial intelligence, still can’t help governments the size of China and the US actually manage all the data they are collecting. Intelligence agencies world wide are overwhelmed with the amount of data they are collecting, it would be absolutely unnecessary for China or any government to install tiny chips like the ones described in the Bloomberg article because they can’t even handle the massive amounts of data ON EVERYONE that they are collecting anyways even without special tiny chips.
Bloomberg’s article says that the government, meaning the US Government, informed them about Chinese spying. (Bloomberg isn’t talking about the British Government or the Australian Government or the Russian Government) “The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.”
Which part of the US Government would be concerned with Chinese spying? Well I believe that would be the CIA. So basically the CIA was telling Bloomberg that the Chinese were installing a super tiny microchip capable of spying on American companies.
Also on Thursday, October 4th, (same date as the Bloomberg article) we had this speech from Mike Pence lashing out against China to bolster American support for the Trade Wars that Trump started. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/04/politics/pence-china-trump-intl/index.html
Then the news got really interesting when technology news blogs started reporting that Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro were all denying the story by Bloomberg
But you really have to read Apple’s blog post to really appreciate how weird this story really is.
Read Apple’s full blog post here:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/what-businessweek-got-wrong-about-apple/
“Bloomberg’s reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed”
So this particular statement caught my eye, because Apple is confessing that they don’t know who Bloomberg’s sources are, and the rest of their statement indicates that they have almost desperately been trying to find out who at Apple might be telling this story to Bloomberg. Apple has, according to Apple, refuted Bloomberg’s claims publicly time after time.
So I thought about this scenario, what if someone working at Apple actually is telling this story to Bloomberg, and what if the part of Apple that wrote the blog knows that they have a mole who is giving this story not only to Bloomberg but also to the US Government? It’s clear that Apple tried really hard to find out which Apple employee might be saying these things to Bloomberg and to the Government, but if so who is that person? Is Apple trying to find the leak so they can cover it up or so they can fix the problem?
Then I tried to consider another what if: what if the people at Apple and Amazon and Supermicro (who refuted the story) are all actually on the double payroll of China’s government, writing a counter intelligence story to contradict a CIA intelligence story? That seems far fetched, possible, but also unnecessary. If there was a conspiracy between Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro to rebut the Bloomberg/Government story about Chinese Spying then perhaps its enough motivation for these corporations to collaborate just to protect their bottom line, ie their ability to keep making money.
A real Spy vs Spy scenario started to emerge in my imagination. So who are the spies I asked myself, and what are the lies?
So imagine for a moment that Apple is lying and that Bloomberg is correct? Just imagine for the sake of argument that Apple is trying to cover up a true story. Why would they do that? That would be some amazingly deep bald face lying, like they should deserve an academy award for great lying that’s how strange it would be if Apple was actually lying about this.
So I thought about it, who would that person at Apple actually be, someone that powerful, who would know everything about Apple’s dealings, who would have a high level access to information, and yet could be so ruthlessly dishonest cold and calculating all at the same time. Sure any company the size of Apple would have plenty of motivation, after all Google had motivation to hide the fact that that data from Google plus users had been stolen. (or was the data sold? maybe that information was sold by someone working at Google, or maybe the thieves were on the payroll of governments, maybe the people who stole it were working at Google and on the payroll of one or more governments? but which governments would have infiltrated Google and Facebook to steal data on people?)
Hmm… I’m remembering a story about Cambridge Analytica and Russian Hacking and how Cambridge Analytica collaborated with the Russian hackers to elect Donald Trump.) https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/cambridge-analytica-shared-data-with-russia-whistleblower
With all these leaks, and all the hacks like the joint election hacks between Russia and Cambridge Analytica, why would China or any government need supermicro chipsets for spy work?
The point of what I’m saying is that Google lied about Google Plus. So it is absolutely possible and plausible for major corporations the size of Google and Apple to lie about big issues like this in order to protect themselves, to protect their income from customers, protect their liability from government regulation, protect their suppliers like Supermicro, and protect their stock prices.
Hmm wasn’t there also a story in April about Trump targeting Amazon? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ConQzLUUNds
Then there was a story about Trump targeting Apple https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/trumps-poison-apple/
So is the target really China? Or is the target of the Bloomberg/Government article really Amazon and Apple?
The story that seems to be emerging for me is that Trump and Pence have enlisted the US Government, the CIA specifically, to hire actors to represent Apple employees, or to hire CIA agents who actually work at Apple to create a false story for Bloomberg News, maybe the person working on this story at Bloomberg News is also working for the CIA? So they planted this false story, and the pretense is that this is about bolstering American support for Trump’s trade wars against China.
However if China is not really the target here, then perhaps this is about a shakedown of Apple and Amazon stock. Perhaps the real game here is to short Apple and Amazon stock. So Trump and his friends can profit from using the US Government to trigger a failure in stock prices.
It really seems like all of the Trump administrations actions, the trade wars, the attacks on companies, even the rhetoric against North Korea is all designed to shake down the big players in the world, to get them to cough up money, bribes, to get them to fall in line, to enrich Trump personally, perhaps so he can pay off Russian Oligarchs who helped him win the election, perhaps so he can fund the hacking of the 2018 election as well.
Trump seems to be winning. Will anyone stop this villain, this great deceiver and his cabal of super predators that include people like Mike Pence, Brett Kavanaugh, Susan Collins and most Republicans in Congress?
Is the CIA really going to let themselves be used like this? Turned into a mockery? Bloomberg News may have destroyed their own credibility (as a tech blog) for reporting on such an implausible and unlikely technology, but I suspect they were probably deliberately deceived by Mike Pence and America’s best and brightest at the US State Department so I can’t really blame them.
In final analysis I’m inclined to believe Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro. Corporations have plenty of reason to lie, but in this case it really does seem more likely that Trump and Pence are trying to shake down these companies, hit their stock prices, to profit from their stock falling, all in the pretense of supporting a trade war with China.
The weirdest part is that the Bloomberg story may have nothing to do with China. I’m just imagining the folks in the Government of China in their offices reading the Bloomberg story last Thursday and scratching their heads trying to figure it out. I mean it’s pretty clear to everyone that the US Government is behind the story, the people at Bloomberg said so, in print, (I underlined it in red at the top) but why invent all this fuss around an implausible and unnecessary technology that no spying agency in the world needs? Add to that all this focus on three particular companies (all of whom refuted the story and have been refuting variations of this story for some time?) This isn’t an action that reflects the brilliance of the United States of America, it’s the action that speaks of small minds trying to make small sums of money by causing the stock market to fall so they can buy stocks at sale prices.
The biggest evidence against the Bloomberg Business Week “China used a tiny chip to infiltrate top tech companies.” story is that they haven’t been able to produce this chip to demonstrate its capabilities for the public. They can’t product this chip because it doesn’t exist.
