alt Hacker NewsIf US manufacturers (or manufacturers in allied countries) do this, legal avenues exist to hold those manufacturers accountable. Not so with China.
(That is not to say that the FCC change will move the needle on the underlying issue of router security; as some of the ancestor comments have said, lax security practices are common industry-wide, irrespective of country of development/manufacture.)
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> legal avenues exist to hold those manufacturers accountable
Maybe in theory. I think the practical chance of enforcing anything meaningful through those legal avenues against a US manufacturer is not meaningfully higher than the chance of doing so against a Chinese manufacturer, so it doesn't make sense to treat them differently on these grounds.
When was the last time American intelligence agencies were held accountable?
Literally your own Congress is not even allowed to review their budget! Not that any US politician even WANTS to know.
> legal avenues exist to hold those manufacturers accountable
Oh, sweet summer child. Disclaiming these possible avenues of liability is the main goal of clickwrap "terms of service".
The Snowden leak showed that Cisco routers had been altered to enable surveillance [1]. Whether or not the manufacturer is complicit, or how the alteration is performed is ultimately irrelevant to the end user. Ultimately, the only people that got in legal trouble for this were Snowden and people who provided service to him.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...