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Chinese spies reportedly infiltrated the supply chain and installed tiny chips the size of a pencil tip on the motherboards built by Supermicro, which are used in data center servers across the U.S. tech industry — from Apple to Amazon. That chip can compromise data on the server, allowing China to spy on some of the world’s most wealthy and powerful companies. Apple, Amazon and Supermicro — and the Chinese government — strenuously denied the allegations. Apple also released its own standalone statement later in the day, as did Supermicro.

Welcome to the murky world of national security reporting.

I’ve covered cybersecurity and national security for about five years, most recently at CBS, where I reported exclusively on several stories — including the U.S. government’s covert efforts to force tech companies to hand over their source code in an effort to find vulnerabilities and conduct surveillance. And last year I revealed that the National Security Agency had its fifth data breach in as many years, and classified documents showed that a government data collection program was far wider than first thought and was collecting data on U.S. citizens.

Even with this story, my gut is mixed.

In the aftermath of the disclosure of PRISM, the NSA’s data pulling program that implicated several tech companies — including Apple, but not Amazon — the companies came out fighting, vehemently denying any involvement or connection. Was it a failure of reporting? Partially, yes. But the companies also had plausible deniability by cherry picking what they rebuffed. Despite a claim by the government that PRISM had “direct access” to tech companies’ servers, the companies responded that this wasn’t true. They didn’t, however, refute indirect access — which the companies wouldn’t be allowed to say in any case.