Slashdot Mirror
Lenovo Under U.S. Probe for Spying
BigControversy writes "The DailyTech has a report indicating that Lenovo, the giant Chinese PC manufacturer, is under a probe by the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission (USCC) for possible bugging. Apparently, the government has ordered 16,000 PCs from Lenovo but is now requesting that Lenovo be investigated by intelligence agencies. The fear is of foreign intelligence applying pressure to Lenovo to equip its PCs so that the U.S. can be spied on." From the article: "Despite the probe, Lenovo says that its international business, especially those that deal with the US, follow strictly laid out government regulations and rules. Lenovo also claims that even after purchasing IBM's PC division, its international business has not been affected negatively. Interestingly, in an interview with the BBC, Lenovo mentioned that an open investigation or probe may negatively affect the way that the company deals with future government contracts or bids." There just has to be better uses of our intelligence community's time.
Nice doing! Now we all shold start investigations about US companies like Dell, HP and Microsoft, because the government of George "I can spy without judicial order" Bush can pressure them to spy on us (you know, us! that small part know by people as "the rest").
The United States Government, that same stalwart agency that wanted to cap all civilian encryption at 56-bits, that wanted escrow technology built into every hardware encryption device, that prosecuted (persecuted?) the author of PGP for posting his work on the WWW - the same staunch defenders of freedom, champions of fairness and all that is good and right in the world; now they must contend with the possibility of somebody pissing in their soup!
Is it just me, or does anybody else feel the urge to shout "The circle is complete"?
Lenovo oughtta incorporate a fritz chip in all PC sales to the U. S. government - it should be tuned to permit only the manufacturer pre-loaded OS to boot, and to reject all attempts at modification of the encryption protocols. They should further lock the homepages on such machines to "www.whitehouse.com" and actively refuse to load any encryption technologies such as PGP, insisting instead that the hardware encryption kindly included by Lenovo be used for all security purposes. Of course, Lenovo would never install escrow technology on these machines, so the U. S. government should trust them implicitly.
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Your are so right. A country that is mostly white should never defend itself from a country that is mostly people with skin color. It was okay to defend ourselves from the Soviet Union because they were mostly white. It is kneejerk racism to protect ourselves from China because they are Asians.