Your Sentinel, Manchurian Candidate 200703

      There is a good story here, but I need to give you some background first and then you will understand my story.
      The Manchurian Candidate was a 1962 film about soldiers captured near the end of the Korean war and what happened afterward. The film was a psychological thriller with Frank Sinatra as the lead actor. He was very good in the part. I just discovered there was a remake in 2004 with Denzel Washington that follows with a similar plot but updated to captured soldiers in the Gulf War.
      In the 1962 version captured soldiers are sent to Manchuria for brainwashing and indoctrination. They are set to be perfectly normal until they received a trigger signal. That trigger forces them to commit horrific acts of violence and not remember what they have done afterward. In 1962 the trigger was seeing a card with the queen of diamonds on it.
      And now, my story begins.
      In 2006 the first touch screen cell phone was put on the market. I know what you are thinking, oh it was way before that and the first was an I PHONE. Wrong on both counts. It was 2006 and it was an LG phone. Here is where things get interesting. The makers of cell phones rely on an ingrained trick from days gone by when the old hand dial phones were first in homes. The phone would ring and Americans rushed to answer it before the caller hung up. Today we have our phone at our side or at our ear 24 hours a day so we are always ready to answer whomever would call. We are now fully trained (or perhaps conditioned) to answer the phone.
      There is a Chinese manufacturer Huawei, that makes and sells a lot of phones. They are supposed to work well, but the US government claims there are back doors in their software that allows Huawei to spy on users. The military services banned Huawei sales on military bases in 2018 for that reason. Our president put a ban on Huawei in May of 2019 because of the security risk but 3 days later he said he could lift the ban if a trade deal could be made.
      Okay now, just suppose for a moment that the spying claim is true. The company would know all about the phone's user and who the user was. They could put subliminal messages in there to brainwash users to do horrible assassinations and they would not even know that they committed the crimes. They could also put a tiny amount of C-4 explosive in the phone and when the user committed all the heinous acts they were told to commit the manufacturer could send a signal, the phone would explode right into the user's ear and kill him instantly.
      I know that sounds like something that would never be done... or could it happen?