(I think you started a thought and then forgot about it, there)

Yes, it's definitely harder for the NSA to do NSA stuff than it would be for... eh, the CAC, apparently (maybe?), but obviously it hasn't stopped the Americans. What we really should be doing is our own counterintelligence work, where we sweep imports for funny business. And importantly, impose the basic expectation that our hardware and software isn't spying on us in the first place, although that would be a huge shift.