The terrorist threat we're ignoring

How the high-tech software we import from China is setting us up for potential cyberattacks

By David Sirota

According to the U.S. government, the list of known boogeymen working to compromise American national security is long and getting longer by the day. By my back of the envelope count, we have shoe bombers, underwear bombers, train bombers, cargo bombers, dirty bombers, car bombers and, never to be forgotten, box-cutter hijackers. Now, as of last week, we are told to fear the brand new "implant bomber" -- the terrorist who will surgically stitch explosives to his innards for the purposes of a suicide attack.

All of these threats are, indeed, scary -- and the last one, which sounds like something out of "Saw" movie, is especially creepy. But the fear of individual terrorist acts has diverted attention from a more systemic threat that is taking the implant idea to a much bigger platform. I'm talking about the threat of terrorists or foreign governments exploiting our economy's penchant for job outsourcing/offshoring. How? By using our corresponding reliance on imports to secretly stitch security-compromising technology into our society's central IT nervous system.