Are Governments Up to the Task?

According to this paper Chinese government plans to institute a mandatory security accreditation program for consumer and business digital electronics products developed by foreign firms for export to or manufacture in China. The Chinese government claims that it needs access to source code-an admittedly sensitive form of intellectual property-to assess the vulnerability of products to malware, such as computer viruses. The ubiquity of such products in our daily lives, as well as the interplay among them, raises national security concerns, not just in China but around the globe. Similarly, companies and private citizens also assume unknown risk in using digital electronics products, such as the introduction into the supply chain of counterfeit Cisco Systems routers and mass-marketed digital picture frames manufactured in China containing malware. These and the large number of reported incidents that digital electronics products have shipped with embedded malware lend credence to the concerns China has expressed.