How China’s Huawei spooked Germany into launching a probe.

The latest freak-out over Chinese telecommunications equipment in Germany, which led to the announcement of a probe in March, has its origins in a little-known piece of Huawei technology that is supposed to control power consumption, POLITICO can reveal.

While much of the fear around Huawei in the West has focused on espionage and the risk of data leaking to Beijing, Germany’s latest investigation — and the intelligence that triggered it — point to another risk: the potential of sabotage through critical components that could collapse telecoms networks.
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The revelations suggest security officials feared such a component could be used to disrupt telecoms operations or — in a worst case scenario — be exploited to bring down a network.

If God forbid there’s a Third World War, it seems more and more likely to begin with a digital Pearl Harbor — except the attack would come at “everything, everywhere, all at once,” to coin a phrase.