Let’s size up the options.

Bloomberg is wrong. Apple and Amazing have every incentive to strongly deny the story.

Bloomberg is right. Multiple employees up to executive level at 30 US companies and the government know about it and are actively leaking to Bloomberg about it. Numerous boards are out there at 30+ companies as physical evidence. There’s no way Apple and Amazon could risk denying this so strongly. It’s already being widely leaked - according to Bloomberg - the cat is well and truly out of the bag and wailing it’s ass off.

It just doesn’t make any sense for Apple and Amazon to put their reputations on the line in that second scenario.

Or option 3: Bloomberg is was fed false information by the US government to cultivate distrust of Chinese sourced electronics. Not a bad tactic if you want to prevent Chinese infiltration in sensitive industries while also using it for political and economic leverage.

Option 4: Bloomberg is working on another story and the government is trying to taint their credibility by feeding them false information, so nobody will believe them when the real story comes out.

(I just wanted to point out all options)

Option 5: A journalist that really wants to land a scoop has a hunch that something is going on, and collects all the rumors and theories about hardware hacks, blurs the lines between speculation and facts, creates a plausible narrative that is too good to pass, and somehow persuades the editor that a dozen sketchy rumors must be enough to run a story.

That's why editors exist. Then, the journalist could also have been fed information that was fed to their leaky source in order to find out who the leaker would be.

OTOH, no experienced intelligence professional would leak information they are not absolutely sure other people have.

If they were instructed to do so by the government they would not really have a choice, which would very likely produce leaks.

If true, this is vastly different from the government requesting a backdoor or various warrant canaries, this would be an actual national security threat.

Is there any mechanism that the government can use to force you to lie? I know they can keep you silent but forcing you to say anything, true or otherwise, feels like a huge 1st amendment issue as the government can't typically compel speech, can it? I'm not a lawyer so curious on the perspective of someone who might know the details better.

Under certain circumstances the government can force a person or corporation to produce speech that is true - for instance, they are allowed to force you to file your taxes. However, there has never been a case to my knowledge where the government has been able to compel a lie - and any attempt to do so would immediately be subject to a legal case over constitutionality.

It would also be compelled speech, and from what I've read,

> governments have the right to mandate corporate speech “if the information in the disclosure is reasonably related to a substantial governmental interest and is purely factual.”

(https://www.reuters.com/article/us-otc-speech/when-the-gover...)

Since that would not be the case here, I do not believe it would be legally defensible for the government to compel false statements out of both Apple and Amazon.

(IANAL, so do take this with a grain of salt)

Why would it have to be compelled?

The government could say "look here, this is an actual national security issue" and Apple, Amazon, etc could say "oh shit, you're right - how can we help?"

If this were a real national security risk, what incentive would Apple, Amazon, etc have to tell divulge the truth rather than cooperating with the government? This is vastly different than saying no to a requested NSA backdoor.

Actually, that's not the latest news on that. I looked up that case on scotusblog & it was vacated based on the result of "National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra" which I believe overturns the 9th Circuit's ruling on this although I'm not totally sure. Regardless, you're right. No ruling has held the government has the right to compel factually incorrect speech.

Or the government told them to strongly deny the allegations and the fact that the government can do that is just one of the many powers that we already know get granted to intelligence agencies in secret by rubber-stamp classified court systems not held publicly accountable and already infamous for suppressing criticism of their practices under the guise of national security. If the three letter agencies don't want Bloomberg reporting on a hardware hack, they already have the power to tell Amazon and Apple that they can't legally confirm the story. I see no plausible reason why they couldn't get a judge to tell them they had to make it look sincere.

Apple has been known to use warrant canaries and other methods of communicating when they have had to cooperate with intelligence bureaus. They've never come out and lied because the government told them to, at least, not that has been proven.

Do a search on the case law around “compelled speech”. tl;dr the government can force you to not talk, but they can’t force you to blatantly lie either. As an example, check out the difference between the denials of PRISM vs this.

> they have more incentive to lie than Bloomberg does

The other way around. Apple and Amazon have very strong incentives to tell the truth. This has significant implications for their business (i.e. stock price) and if there is one thing that executives want to avoid, it's SEC filings based on false information given to the market.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg has the reputation of journalists with patchy histories of security news reporting. Perhaps they've been fed a line by government sources, but there is little financial incentive to fix any errors.

While something like this will no doubt be damaging to some large American tech companies, it is way worse for China. Are they really going to potentially devastate their entire economy over the long term over such an easy to detect hack?

> Are they really going to potentially devastate their entire economy over the long term over such an easy to detect hack?

That didn't make the NSA afraid of targeted interception campaigns.

I believe that secret services are doing everything we normal people dream of already, including stuff such as the hardware injections either in the Supermicro case or in the stuff the NSA did, and a good bunch more which we don't even know of yet.

Cyber warfare is all too real now.

We already know that they're constantly trying to hack American IP. Our economies are symbiotic. Hurting theirs would be hurting our own.