[phire]

Blackmail an Executive? That's a complete overkill.

It's so much easier just to "recruit" the direct manager of the firmware engineering team. Convince them it's their patriotic duty to add "tracking dots" to the design requirements without drawing attention to where the requirement came from.

The engineers implementing it will assume the requirement came from somewhere above, or another engineering team. And if the executives ever notice, they will assume it came from somewhere below. Both will probably assume the legal department was responsible, and that there is some kind of law somewhere requiring them to implement that functionality.

[rl3]

The most unrealistic part here is that you're assuming they can even find their desired firmware manager on the org chart.

Moreover, most executives don't require blackmail; they tend to go along to get along.

[stackskipton]

Yea, just include "All printers bought by US government must have Tracking Dots" and Executives will move that feature to top of backlog without any other concerns.

Big company executives are easiest to control; they want money and all of it. US Government luckily has plenty of it to throw around.