To be honest on my end I see this as a PR Disaster first and foremost?

Like, I generally prefer to assume incompetence over malice where it is possible, and in the incompetence hypothesis – This is just some extremely bad room-reading skills considering who RPi caters to (Open Source people) and our personality (fundamental distrust of any authority, hatred for anything perceived as ‘control’, further intensified by the constant surveillance in modern proprietary software, etc.) – I don’t think having this man in the team or not is going to change what RPi is like in any way… Not because I assume he’s a good dude, but because presuming imperial governments have any interest in backdooring and surveilling projects like the Pi, then that backdoor either already exists and has existed since the first model ever OR it was added much earlier, quietly, without them blabbering about hiring an ex-spy. That’s just how it be with those things.

I generally assume anything I don’t personally understand is going to have something insidious, to be honest. Like I told the other person, the only way to make sure your hardware isn’t compromised is to have its schematics and the know-how to understand everything that goes on inside it.