The story was very light on details, which made me wonder the same thing. Was China trying to arm an "insurgency" in the US? Or were these parts headed for retail sale to regular Americans?
I have a number of hobbies that involve building things - PCB design and fabrication, desktop CNC milling, 3D printing, etc. About a dozen years ago I started to notice that nearly everything I bought from Digikey could be bought from China, on ebay, for a fraction of the cost.
(Some were the actual same parts, from the actual same factories, just shipped out the side door. Others were cheap knockoffs. Others were pulls and recycles cleaned and sold as "new" or "NOS" - that last one is the plague among people trying to restore vintage gaming consoles, mostly Commodores.)
Not thinking much of it at the time, I started buying those parts. Half of them had customs forms on them that were clearly machine printed, but printed to look like they had been hand written. I don't know how many parcels I received that claimed to be "free samples" or "gifts" but were actually bundles of microcontrollers or industrial chemicals, but it was a lot.
I think that a lot of people, even those of us here who are fairly "woke" to the China problem, underestimate just how slimy these people are. Putting aside the question about whether our genes dictate what kinds of cultures people create, the Chinese people have created a culture and a government with nearly zero values in common with Western Civilization.
The story was very light on details, which made me wonder the same thing. Was China trying to arm an "insurgency" in the US? Or were these parts headed for retail sale to regular Americans?
I have a number of hobbies that involve building things - PCB design and fabrication, desktop CNC milling, 3D printing, etc. About a dozen years ago I started to notice that nearly everything I bought from Digikey could be bought from China, on ebay, for a fraction of the cost.
(Some were the actual same parts, from the actual same factories, just shipped out the side door. Others were cheap knockoffs. Others were pulls and recycles cleaned and sold as "new" or "NOS" - that last one is the plague among people trying to restore vintage gaming consoles, mostly Commodores.)
Not thinking much of it at the time, I started buying those parts. Half of them had customs forms on them that were clearly machine printed, but printed to look like they had been hand written. I don't know how many parcels I received that claimed to be "free samples" or "gifts" but were actually bundles of microcontrollers or industrial chemicals, but it was a lot.
I think that a lot of people, even those of us here who are fairly "woke" to the China problem, underestimate just how slimy these people are. Putting aside the question about whether our genes dictate what kinds of cultures people create, the Chinese people have created a culture and a government with nearly zero values in common with Western Civilization.
I know someone who ordered a 3G cell phone jammer from overseas, it arrived labeled as a cable box.