[eridius]

The Bloomberg article specifically claimed that Apple themselves discovered the chip in a random spot check. If an Apple employee discovered it, it would have been communicated all the way up to the executive level prior to notifying anyone outside the company (such as the FBI), which means you can't just chalk this up to a handful of lower-level Apple employees being covered by a gag order and the executives not knowing.

[mokus]

It also claimed Apple removed 7000 SuperMicro servers in a few weeks. That seems especially unlikely to happen without at least some explanations to upper management. Sure, they could lie to management about why but either way management can’t then claim no servers were removed without lying themselves.

[eridius]

Apple also said they didn’t even have 7000 SuperMicro servers to begin with.

[OverlordXenu]

unless the NSA or another intelligence agency has an insider that could catch that before it made it up high enough to cause trouble. conceivably, someone below the insider could leak to Bloomberg realizing that they have limited options.

[nickodell]

That seems like a lot of work. What would be the point of that?

If Amazon is being spied on by foreign intelligence, wouldn't the NSA want Amazon to know about it? Particularly since government data is hosted on Amazon's servers.

[Zeklandia]

Because now the NSA has a strategic foothold. If they acknowledge the hack, then the adversary will move on to something else. If they don't acknowledge it, they can secretly mitigate it, by feeding false data, for example, and waste the adversary's time.