That was, after all, at the heart of the fight by the Trump Administration to ban the popular social networking app TikTok, or at least to force a sale of it. The U.S. government has also cracked down on the manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, and the omnibus/coronavirus rescue package recently passed by Congress even included $1.9 billion to help companies remove equipment from those two companies.

Recently, a pair of security researchers raised the alarm about another Chinese tech company, the TV manufacturer TCL, which makes some of the most popular televisions available in the U.S.

The website of the researcher and hacker known as Sick Codes, in a blog post in November, pointed out "extraordinary vulnerabilities" in TCL's Android TVs.