Last year, the U.S. Navy bought 59,000 microchips for use in everything from missiles to transponders and all of them turned out to be counterfeits from China.

Wired reports the chips weren't only low-quality fakes, they had been made with a "back-door" and could have been remotely shut down at any time.

If left undiscovered the result could have rendered useless U.S. missiles and killed the signal from aircraft that tells everyone whether it's friend or foe.

Apparently foreign chip makers are often better at making cheap microchips and U.S. defense contractors are loathe to pass up the better deal.

The problem remains with these "trojan-horse" circuits that can be built into the chip and are almost impossible to detect -- especially without the original plans to compare them to.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) is now looking for ways to check the chips to make sure they haven't been hacked in the production process.

Expect to see a whole lot more funding directed to this goal. Or, considering  IARPA is the research and development section of the intelligence community -- expect the money to be spent -- don't expect to see where.

ROFL, oh man now I've read it all. The US govt is really THAT stupid and greedy that they would risk getting themselves and the rest of the population killed for some paper, it is sad.

It sounds like the middle men taking a large chunk of "profit".

it reminds me Saddam Hussein had great Italian tanks to show his mighty troups on US satelites..... inflatable tanks :p (though he didn't get tricked, he tricked the satelite views)

Can you buy anything from China that is NOT fake?

That's completly diffrent case.

Countries that were under soviet influence have mastered the art of making makets and models that trick sattelites and planes perfectly.

It's natural responce against enemy with total air superiority.

The correct question is, can you buy anything fake in China?

No, it's all on export LULZ!

Really though, it depends where you look... the enforcement varies by region.

The US did the same thing to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The Soviets never could fabricate ICs like we could, so they would steal all their designs from Intel. Our engineers would always write little messages to the Soviets on the chips, as well as back-door programs where available. Fun times.

In this case, I can't believe the military would ever buy ANYTHING from the Chinese. Its not like our budget is low enough to where we must buy cheap stuff. Methinks its do to the military's corrupt procurement practices which drives up the cost of goods, and rarely results in good quality/

spending cuts at there cheapest.
Oboma sure knows how to win republicant's over.