"Federal Security Officials Fear That Beijing May Squeeze Device Companies In The Future To Let China Snoop On The US, Even If There Is No Evidence That Is Happening At The Moment"

Well, if they are striving to become possibly the next mega world power you can expect a lot more than device snooping.

I remember when people were freaking out about a camera in the cable box.

Certainly Beijing can make Hik or Dahua or whatever Chinese company they want add a back door (thru a firmware update*) to their products, irrespective of whether they are formally owned by the government or not.

However, I don’t think this will happen for a few reasons.

1) The current environment for Chinese firmware is busybox on Linux, a well understood and relatively easy platform to reverse engineer, no offense to bashis.  Putting a backdoor in the firmware therefore runs a substantial risk of detection.

2) The number of insiders that might have knowledge of some piece of code they were forced to include would grow with every release and every company required to include it.

3) There is a better way for a goverment that is intent on controlling these devices forever.

The better way is to corrupt the SOC microcode which the majority of these devices run on.  From say Hisilicon, a Huawei subsidiary and maker of the ubiquitous chipset used by Hik and Dahua etc al.

That way the backdoor code need only be protected at Hisilicon and contained in a more obtuse form than stuff that runs on busybox.

Then all devices using the SOC become unwitting accomplices in distribution.

More speculation on microcode can be found here.

*which ironically would probably be one that patched some “major” vulnerability, so as to insure wide adoption, yet would also introduce another stealthier one.