This is exactly why Australia is very leery of letting the Chinese telecom hardware manufacturer Huawei have any of the contracts for networking hardware on the nascent National Broadband Network -- they are suspected of having ties to the Chinese government / army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Security_concerns

My sister in law works for Huawei in Kenya. Her job (so far) has largely involved ripping out Siemens made mobile-telephony infrastructure and replacing it with Huawei-made mobile-telephony infrastructure. Such are today's instruments of empire.

You can packet-trace networking equipment you own.

You can't packet-trace a cloned switch port you don't know about.

That's very unlikely nobody would have noticed them by now, if it were the case.

Do you mean - as unlikely as not spotting the weakening of encryption standards - for example by another branch of the same government (NIST/NSA)?

Those were spotted.

eventually.

So can the US.