could you fill me in on what threats Huawei poses to I, a random poor person going about my day in the US?

One example: You are likely employed by a business here in the USA. If you were to lose your job, that would be a large negative in your life. The NSA isn't going to ruin an American business unless its the extremely small chance that there's a national security reason. The CCP would absolutely ruin an American business if it helped a Chinese one. Unless you work for a Chinese employer, the NSA snooping on you would be more beneficial to you than the CCP.

I've read that DJI drones periodically send an encrypted data-payload to China, of the sites they've been, & what their camera has seen, as 1 little example.

I've read that chips whose implimentation was completed in China had extra logic added into them, to backdoor them, so that the computers they were put into ( the were networking chips ) could be entered by whomever had the backdoor key.

IF you have China make your infrastructure, and China declared last-century that "the destruction of the West is the midwife of Chinese dominion", THEN you are handing the CCP the keys to your empire.

Modi, in India, has "bet the farm" that Russia will fight with it, provisioning India with military-means, to fight China .. but Russia's now an economic-vassal-state of China, so that can't even be possible .. which means that India has now bet its life on .. nothing.

Delusion, including self-delusion, isn't strategy.

Don't think it goes only 1-way, though:

Do all the cars in Canada have remote-kill-switches which their manufacturers can activate? TTBOMK, yes, they do.

Apparently collection-agencies & banks use these, sometimes.. & the police want the complete access to the same kill-switches..

Diebold voting-machines which were involved in some absurdly-obvious vote-manipulation, complete with coded-in back-doors, a few years ago, are another example: US company, helping highjack US elections.

There is good reason why security-geeks prefer Abloy physical-discs locks to electronic "locks", where security is required: disc-key locks are not "bumpable", & they have no back-doors or battery-for-security bullshit.

The brainwashed-by-propaganda just invest in the "security" that is pushed on them, endlessly, removing all alternative from the market.

That many Ukrainians still rely on Telegram, a Russian operation, for their "secret" sharing, is proof of non-viability of entire-populations of humankind.

Platforms are predators/parasites, & that includes hardware as well as software.

The world isn't operating for humankind's benefit: humankind is corporate-narcissism-machiavellianism-psychopathy's prey.

Same as humankind is oligarchy's prey, same as humankind was monarchy's prey.

Ever since agriculture put-in-place a stable feudalism/class-system, then it's been the same polarization-trying-to-extinguish-all-alternatives ( like there being any middle-class who has self-determination ), everywhere.

There's a profoundly important book by Thom Hartmann, called "Screwed", whose beginning ( the only part I've read ) SHOWS how national-economic-strength ONLY exists when the majority of the population is economically-autonomous ( ie a strong middle-class ), and FINALLY I understood economics, because all the "economics" stuff I'd read, until that, contradicted something fundamental..

it isn't economic strength, when the majority are crushed-prey!

That the majority of the population need to be doing-well for the national economy to be doing-well,

is completely contradictory to the "so long as the top stocks are doing well, & the wealthy are doing well, THEN the country's thriving" gaslighting, of normal "economics".

Anyways, cynicism is a more-useful, more survival-oriented default, nowadays, evidence shows..

https://www.techspot.com/news/107073-researchers-uncover-hidden-backdoor-widely-used-esp32-microchip.html

https://cdml.com/dangers-of-chinese-made-smart-devices/

https://semiengineering.com/chip-backdoors-assessing-the-threat/

The BIG problem, is that it COST$$ to even discover if one's chips got trojan'd in Chinese manufacture, & if one has to choose between profit vs security, profit nearly-always wins, in moneyarchy.

So, it only "becomes a problem" when it's discovered by someone, out in the wild.

And THAT means that we've globally rejected "prevention is cheaper than cure" paradigm, opting-instead for "we can't afford to prevent, so if a cure is needed, our magical-Entitlement-power will save us, of course", which is relying-on-bogus-belief, instead of relying-on-integrity.

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it's a game of influence and data collection. Even when you work at McDonalds they still can use you either as data point or leverage information gathered influence/coerce you to do things on their behalf. Look at their control level in China - your behaviour is constantly monitored and your life options get limited in life if your behaviour does not align with CPP expectations. Given that lots of stuff originates in China, would you like prices online be higher for you just because you've criticised CCP? Or, more invasively - some content disappearing from your device while bring substituted with some form of fake news etc? Randsomware is still a vector as well. Opportunities for benefiting CCP are endless once they own key device(s) in today's economy: your smartphone, that is used for company logon, bank operations, personal information storage. Imagine dataset they can feed AI yo simulate you and sll the fraud they can perpetrate under your name. Or they can wipe you off internet, closing your accounts pretending to be you and intercepting all communications. India and China already been proven using coercive powers to silence dissent abroad. So, no, it's not just specific industries. It's collective Western citizens.

Exactly, I was shocked that this was on the economist, it seems like a highly biased while mostly irrelevant article.

Very bizarre.

Oh, okay. Thanks.

https://medium.economist.com/why-are-the-economists-writers-anonymous-8f573745631d

I actually like that reasoning, that what is written is more important than who wrote it.

This article is so poorly written and reasoned that I was curious, though.

I mostly agree, although this particular case was my ignorance showing.

I've never noticed before that economist articles don't list their authors.

The economist uniquely states on their website that they deliberately don't post the author s for their articles because many of them are collaborative and they think that the content of the article should be more important than who wrote it.

Which in most cases is a very admirable mission statement, but can obviously be frustrating in cases like this where you want to hold a party responsible and the only recourse is to wait for a possible internal investigation by the new source themselves.

There are obviously a lot of pros and cons there, and I'm not. Convinced that the cons outweigh the pros, but at least they aren't deliberately hiding this specific author. The economist authors publish from anonymity as a matter of course.