Comment by Cieplak

$100 billion is not unrealistic for typical defense budgets. Modern warfare is transitioning from lead to silicon. It takes 6 lines of VHDL to backdoor a CPU. Modern chips have billions of transistors. It would be irresponsible of any modern superpower not to ensure their nation's machines are secure. I am a US citizen, but if I were a Chinese national, I might be worried about things like Intel Active Management Technology. Maybe mutual defense is a good thing if it prevents escalation. I'm still outraged that members of my Congress proposed violent conflict with China as an appropriate reaction to a data breech, as if their own organization had never accessed Chinese systems without authorization. It's probably just theatrics of elected officials from states with large military presence, but how evil is it to propose killing people for sneaking into your computers which you failed to secure properly?