To use your metaphor, yes if the military installed a single model of identical, network-connected engine in every vehicle they own, they would absolutely be fo

To use your metaphor, yes if the military installed a single model of identical, network-connected engine in every vehicle they own, they would absolutely be fools. A single hack could, in a strategically critical moment, disable all motorized assets - every vehicle and generator in the US military shutting down at the same time. That's a disaster. And you don't have to put in the backdoor just for the election. You can put one in and use it opportunistically. Someone backdoored a huge amount of Juniper VPN hardware, in hopes that it might be useful some day: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/juniper-drops-nsa-developed-code-following-new-backdoor-revelations/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/juniper-drops-nsa-de... And to answer your question, this is how you get silicon like a CPU to do what you want: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/backdoor_found.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/backdoor_foun... These are just two examples that made the news. It's a practical certainty that there's backdoors in all sorts of COTS components that we don't know about yet. At this point there's nothing above suspicion. For the scheme in TFA to work, they need a unhackable computer. If there is a single exploit or backdoor that happens to be in it, whoever controls it can pick the US congress, the senate, and the POTUS. Not metaphorically, literally. How is taking that degree of risk, when you know that backdoors and exploits are commonplace, not incredibly foolish?