According to a new report from Bloomberg , federal authorities have quietly been digging into Bitmain, the Beijing-based bitcoin mining hardware manufacturing giant, over fears that its devices could serve as a backdoor for Chinese espionage or even deliberate blackouts on the U.S. electrical grid. The Department of Homeland Security is said to have been running a secretive probe dubbed “Operation Red Sunset” for months, with agents tearing apart imported machines at ports in search of hidden kill switches or remote-access tricks.

The worry is these application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) bitcoin mining computers, which are often deployed in massive data centers near energy hot spots that double as sites for military bases, could theoretically be flipped from afar to spy on

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