What backdoors? Didn't the UK audit telecoms and networking equipment and say that they have shoddy security in some places ( like having telnet) but aren't worse than the shoddy security in "good" vendors like Cisco and Juniper.
Indeed. As someone somewhat familiar with "underhanded code" contests (not as a participant) and publicly known espionage norms. I'm unsure why people expect backdoors to have massive MOTD banners and not be reintroduced OpenSSL vulns from 2006 that "accidentally" got into the build process for certain releases of firmware 11 years later (this happened with the UK Huawei audit iirc). I'm also unsure why people expect specific examples of known backdoors when that in itself hurts counter espionage efforts.
> Cozying up to bad actors like North Korea and Iran?
You'll probably feel a need to shit on a flag when you realise that an allied Swiss company (ABB) sold North Korea a two nuclear power plants when Rumsfeld was on the board of directors.
Backdoors? Being caught red handed doing espionage? Cozying up to bad actors like North Korea and Iran?