According to a new report by Bloomberg, these thousands of companies are granting sensitive data on equipment, specifications, zero-day bugs, and yes, private customer information to U.S. national security agencies and are in return receiving benefits like early access to classified information.

Those companies reportedly include Microsoft, Intel, McAfee, AT&T, Verizon, Level 3 Communications, and more.

China has to be viewing these reports with a mixture of glee, anger, and frustration.

It was not too long ago that the U.S. accused China of attempting to infiltrate government and corporate networks by placing backdoors into communications equipment: network switches built by Chinese manufacturer Huawei. Congress said that Huawei and ZTE switches can’t be trusted, Los Alamos National Laboratory ripped out two Huawei switches, and Australia banned Huawei from a lucrative government bid.

There have long been rumors of a Windows backdoor allowing government agents access to computers running Windows, which Microsoft has always denied. But those backdoors might not even be necessary if companies like Microsoft and McAfee provide government agencies early access to zero-day exploits that allow official hackers to infiltrate other nations’ computer systems … and American ones.

It’s become increasingly clear that we need more Edward Snowdens  – and much more oversight over what our three-letter agencies are doing supposedly on our behalf.

And it’s becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. calling out China for hacking overseas is the pot calling the kettle black. Or the dirty cop calling the thief a criminal.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the largest shadowy international hacking organization is probably right here at home.

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Just like your old desktop machine.

Roadrunner came online in 2008 to help nuclear scientists model and understand how nuclear weapons age and degrade. It occupied 6,000 square feet, cost $125 million to build, and reached a top speed of 1.45 petaflops with a hybrid processor model that combined 6,563 modified Playstation 3  processors with the same number of AMD Opteron CPUs.

One of the reasons it’s being shut down? While it’s still a fast computer — globally ranked at number 22 last year — Roadrunner is an energy hog, consuming 2.3 megawatts to reach peak operating speeds. That’s as much as a large house consumes in a month. The super-computer that is replacing Roadrunner cost $54 million, takes up much less space, and uses less energy.

“Future supercomputers will need to improve on Roadrunner’s energy efficiency to make the power bill affordable,” Los Alamos National Laboratory said in a statement.

While Roadrunner’s primary job was nuclear physics, scientists also used the supercomputer to investigate nanowire material, lasers, HIV genetics, and a complete simulation of the universe — at a 70-billion particle scale.

And there’s still a little more work for the shut-down supercomputer:

“Even in death, we are trying to learn from Roadrunner,” said Gary Grider of the Laboratory’s High Performance Computing Division.

Scientists will be studying memory compression techniques as well as optimized data routings for another month before dismantling the computer.

Anyone looking for some heavily used Opteron and Playstation 3 chips, cheap?

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Reuters is reporting that Los Alamos discovered and removed at least two switches which were in the process of being installed at the lab.

The fear is that China’s military — which does have notoriously close relationships with the nation’s top companies — has infiltrated the company and potentially put backdoors into communications equipment, which China can then use to spy on the U.S and its top companies.

That exactly what Congress said just a few months ago, releasing a draft report that stated, in part, that Huawei and other Chinese vendors “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence” and that, therefore, U.S. companies should “seek other vendors.” Australia’s government has similar concerns, having banned Huawei products from its new nationwide high-speed Internet network early last year, and as far back as seven years ago, Huawei was blocked from Indian government telecommunications projects.

So what’s a poor Chinese-based multinational to do?

Well, call in the Chinese government, for one. The Chinese government’s commerce ministry struck back at that Congress report, saying it was “suggestive guesswork” and obliquely warning of trade consequences for the “speculative” claims.

Huawei VP of external affairs William Plummer also struck back, telling Reuters that “there has never been a shred of substantive proof that Huawei gear is any less secure than that of our competitors, all of which rely on common global standards, supply chains, coding and manufacturing.”

A little more of that might help — repeated calls to Huawei’s press contacts in North America were not returned in time to add their comments to this story.

Even better, Huawei might consider allowing trusted third parties — or even government inspectors — review their equipment and code in full detail to prove or disprove their innocence once and for all.