I like your opinion, Markus/Stonius.
The difference is when government agencies are found out it is perceived as "for national security purposes" and therefor deemed a "necessary nuisance" and negligible. No one assumes the NSA and equivalents would do industrial espionage. I think that's a wrong assumption. (Snowden leaks shed light on NSA spying on Siemens, if I recall correctly) But it's nonetheless a prevailing one.
With China it's different. Their access to company data of SAP, Siemens, Apple etc. raises the immediate suspicion of industrial espionage.
And that is a circumstance where government agencies are supposed to step in and stop it from happening. It's their job description to protect natural people and corporations from theft of their property. That's what taxes are paid for. We pay tax and meet our end of the bargain - and they fail to protect us. So... we could basically stop meeting our end of the bargain, as well, stop paying taxes and go back to Neandertal societal conduct: Hiring hordes of Foreign Legion thugs and go to war with China on our own.
Unless our failed agencies make us believe that they kept their end of our contract.
If Bloomberg is right and wasn't force fed false info, all (western) governments have a) - as I assume - abused the very same Chinese-built vulnerability for their own agenda. And b) have therefore knowingly, wilfully failed in their job to protect us from property theft.
I strongly believe that the rebuttal articles - as you rightly say, "opinion pieces" - are all made up by our agencies.
Surely, SAP, Siemens, Volkswagen or RWE in Germany (or their international sites) have bought those servers in question, as well. And still have at least some in operation. So opening them up is possible. For German IT-Magazines' journalists, as well.
Yet, they're not doing so but strictly stick to writing opinion pieces. Funny. When in other cases those same IT journalists are keen to open up anything as long as it's fancy, and write about it in details with actual specimen photos and performance graphs and whatnot. And this time only opinion pieces? Very weird.
On Tuesday Oct 9th, Bloomberg came out with another piece. This time fed by the disclosed source Yossi Appleboum who claims to have found "rice corns" at a different location on a server board after having been called in for expert investigation of an actual logged data leak.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...in-u-s-telecom
Now this is kinda tricky. Given that Appleboum used to work in Israel on spy software for military/governments - and is now CEO of a security company in the US.
... old ties to Mossad, US-Israel friendship... I'd rather not trust someone with his CV not having a hidden agenda ... but then again: who would be the best security expert if not someone who knows his stuff inside and out?
That's where I'd have to trust Bloomberg's natural professional suspicion during vetting of their source.
And I do trust them. Bloomberg is not Fox News, right?.