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.

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The media and political establishment avoids discussing these issues (and typically writes off free-trade critics as Luddites) not because the issues are insignificant, but because the corporations that own the media and buy the politicians also profit off a trade policy that helps companies cut costs by moving production to low-wage countries. Not surprisingly, then, these corporations don't want a serious public examination of the downsides of those trade policies. And so those downsides become victims of a pernicious and pervasive self-censorship -- one that presents free-trade as an exclusively economic (and exclusively positive) issue.

Appreciating the breathtaking power of that self-censorship is simply to behold the reticence on the supply chain threat, which, at its core, raises real concerns about our trade policy. In a money-dominated media and political system that otherwise loves a good scare, the silence suggests free-trade theology trumps all -- even major national security threats.