Beijing moved on four fronts on Wednesday and only one of them made the headlines. Exports of drones, their key components and related technologies now face case-by-case scrutiny when the destination is the United States, effective immediately, with no access to the licence facilitation measures that normally speed shipments through. Six American entities went onto the countermeasures list. A seventh was added under a separate justification. An investigation opened into imported office equipment running foreign system software.

I think the security case about foreign-made connected devices is real. A camera-equipped, always-on machine that maps the interior of a home and phones a server abroad is a genuine collection platform, and the people who spent a decade warning about this were not being paranoid. I’ve written that a network of them inside government buildings would be an intelligence problem worth acting on. So I should be the natural audience for the FCC’s new rule.