What if the greatest national security threat facing the United States isn’t a missile, a warship, or even artificial intelligence—but your refrigerator?

As technology becomes more “convenient,” it’s also becoming more invasive. On Breaking Battlegrounds, Sam Stone, Chuck Warren, and Dr. Mike Waller expose how China has quietly embedded surveillance and control capabilities into critical infrastructure and everyday consumer products around the world—often hiding behind the promise of efficiency, connectivity, and low cost.

This isn’t paranoia.
It’s architecture.

China’s Embedded Threat Is Everywhere

China doesn’t just sell products.
It builds systems.

According to Dr. Mike Waller, Chinese-manufactured technologies—ranging from massive electrical transformers to household appliances—often contain embedded cameras, microphones, transponders, and unknown components whose true functions remain unclear.

Some are obvious data collectors.
Others raise darker questions.

What if those systems could be remotely activated?
What if they could disrupt power grids, shut down communications, or surveil populations at scale?

The uncomfortable truth is that we don’t know—because we don’t control the manufacturing.

The Power Grid Problem No One Wants to Talk About

The conversation turned especially alarming when Waller confirmed that the U.S. power grid relies on thousands of Chinese-made transformers.

Even worse?
America no longer manufactures many of these critical components domestically.

That means the backbone of modern life—electricity—depends on foreign-built hardware with opaque designs and unknown embedded capabilities.

This isn’t a hypothetical vulnerability.
It’s an existing one.

When “Smart” Becomes Surveillance

Why does a dishwasher need internet access?
Why does a refrigerator need sensors?
Why is it nearly impossible to buy “dumb” appliances anymore?

As Waller explained, every camera, microphone, and connected device is a sensor. And every sensor can be exploited.

Smartphones.
Computers.
Wearables.
Home assistants.

We’ve normalized living inside a web of constant observation—and China has mastered how to exploit that reality.

In this model, you become the surveillance device.

From Wellness Tech to Military AI

Perhaps the most chilling revelation came from a seemingly harmless product: wellness headbands.

Marketed for meditation and brainwave monitoring, these devices are sold online through familiar platforms like Amazon. But one company, BrainCo, has deep ties to China’s People’s Liberation Army and origins at Harvard University before relocating to China.

The same brainwave data collected for “wellness” is now reportedly being used to train AI-powered humanoid robots.

What begins as self-care ends as military capability.

A Familiar Mistake, Repeated

Sam Stone made the comparison clear:
America once underestimated the Soviet Union—until it couldn’t.

Today, China is treated as a trade partner, a competitor, or a nuisance. Rarely as what it is: a systemic global adversary embedding itself into infrastructure, technology, and daily life.

This is not a future threat.
It’s a present condition.

And ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.

The Bottom Line

China doesn’t need to invade to control.
It just needs to connect.

Until the U.S. treats technological dependency as a national security issue—and rebuilds domestic manufacturing and oversight—we remain exposed.

Convenience came with a cost.
We’re just starting to see the bill.

Transcript

Sam Stone: Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. We’re continuing on now with Dr. Mike Waller, journalist and investigative writer on national security affairs, including intelligence, counterintelligence and counterterrorism. Dr. Waller, right when we went to the break, were, we were bringing up that China has embedded like in the cranes at the ports, technology that essentially makes them giant spy towers. They’re, surveilling everything that they can touch. How we want to get into the future conflict in AI, but before we move there.

How much has China embedded potentially very dangerous technologies into major systems around the world, including potentially life-threatening systems?

Mike Waller: They embed cameras, microphones, transponders, all kinds of things in the technologies that are built in there over in China. Whether it is electrical transformers, we don’t even know what some of these parts are for. What if they’re designed to be remotely activated to blow our power grid? We don’t know.

Sam Stone: We have thousands of those transformers in our grid right now, right?

Mike Waller: Right, and we can’t manufacture our own.

Sam Stone: Unbelievable.

Mike Waller: Why do our dishwashers need to be connected to the internet?

Chuck Warren: Exactly. Or- or refri- or refrigerators.

Mike Waller: Right, right. And all of these things that everything’s connected to the internet and we think it’s such a convenience, but why? And you can’t, you have a hard time buying things that aren’t connected, but if you view every camera, every microphone as a sensor, meaning it can take pictures of you. So you become your own device on which others can spy on you, whether it’s through your smartphone or your computer or anything else.

Imagine if there was a way, which there is, to activate those to monitor your communications, your behaviors, your facial expressions, everything you say and do. China embeds these things in the products that they make. these are, let’s say our normal commercial computers are one thing, but all this off-brand stuff that you can buy on Amazon.

Which is really made of the same factory in China. It’s not a name brand, American brand, but it’s something catchy. so like a, like a headband for wellness and it can measure your brainwaves and so forth. They’re, they’re being sold on Amazon by now. It’s a company called BrainCo that was started at Harvard university funded by the people’s liberation army of China. And then they moved to China. They’re taking your brainwave technology from, you know, meditation and wellness headbands and so forth.

They’re using it to train their own artificial intelligence humanoid robots.

Sam Stone: This stuff’s insane, Chuck. And I know you and I have talked about this a lot of times, but we’ve got to push back. We really have to start treating China like a true global adversary.

Chuck Warren: Absolutely.

Sam Stone: And not take this seriously the way we did with the Soviet Union.

Chuck Warren: I agree.

Listen to the full episode of Breaking Battlegrounds anywhere you stream your podcasts!