Such a law would be sick. It would accomplish nothing, but perhaps moving bullet-making industry outside of the country. Also there is a difference between identifying a manufacturer of the goods and proving he sold them to the evil-doers.
Moving responsibility for action from user to manufacturer is against basic logic.
In software, this topic has been discussed extensively by FSF, OSI, and others, and they came to the conlusion that is “No discrimination against fields of endeavor” - which boils down to: If your license forbids using a software to kill people - then it is not a free license.
This sounds shocking, but either you held users responsible for their actions, or you run into arbitrarily killing[1] the hardware manufacturers or software developers for something that they have no control of.
As for the hardware with remote killing switches - If I was a manufacturer, I would never do such thing. First it is against my view of the world, as explained above. Second, I don’t like the perspective of being held accountable for actions not of my own, should the remote switch fail.
To sum up, the kill-switch on a CPU is a terrible idea:
- It is against the freedom of people to use computers as they wish,
- It moves responsibility into wrong place - from actual performer of evil action to the manufacturer of an all-purpose tool,
- Hardware manufacturers (or software developers, social media platforms, etc) are not law enforcement institutions and should not be,
- It gives governments yet another tool to oppress their own citizens; it feels awfully similar to the anti-terrorist “solutions” that have been deployed after 9/11 and are now being abused,
- It will backfire on you sooner or later - backdoors tend to be discovered and used by third parties,
- It most probably be rendered ineffective for all the cases when it would actually matter - Russia may be a sinking ship, but it still has considerable resources. Or, the very thought of using such a tech against China just makes me laugh.
[1] Or imprisoning, or making bankrupt… Same thing really.