You obviously have not been watching the news lately. If you had tried to sell the actual events of the last two years as a movie script it would be rejected as too outrageous to be believed. I mean, Donald Trump as President? Seriously?
I'm pretty sure the Chinese government would be capable of planting two or three sleepers in Apple's software division if they decided to.
The valley is a pretty incestuous place and people with specific skills are pretty small in number. It doesn’t seem wacky that someone with nation state budget wouldn’t have a network of influence to get someone hired somewhere.
That’s like saying “we hired the getaway driver, we can rob the bank now, right?” You’ve identified the first step of the plan. There are about nineteen more, and the theoretical network of conspirators required to accomplish this Oscar-winning screenplay would be quite large, which always spells trouble.
To that end, I’m amazed it took that long for the FBI to take down the network in the article. The more people who are read in to criminal activity, the risk exponentially increases, as anybody who has been on either end of investigative leverage can tell you. I’m stunned one person in the early days of this scam, particularly when it started involving colorful people, didn’t flip as a bargaining tool for other things they were into.
It's not uncommon to plant your own puppet as a president/prime minister of a country to make that country's policies favourable to you (CIA has done it numberous times). Planting a software developer cannot be harder.
One of the largest and most secretive companies in the world, the same one obsessed with preventing all leaks from exiting the company, the same one who produces ubiquitous devices with occasional national security implications that interest foreign governments, the same one who deals with serious IP problems in the very example nation you just happened to choose, has no thinking or plans around the well-known threats of industrial espionage or sabotage, is what you’re essentially saying. Consider for a moment whether that could be remotely plausible, and I think you’ll see it isn’t.
I didn't say they have no plans. Obviously they do. But unless you work for Apple, you don't know what they are.
Whatever their plans are, there is some number N of employees who could subvert those plans. It is legitimate to wonder how big that number is, and to note that there is no way for anyone outside of Apple to know.
I'm pretty sure the Chinese government would be capable of planting two or three sleepers in Apple's software division if they decided to.