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Lenovo Banned by U.S. State Department
chrplace writes "The BBC is reporting that the Chinese-made Lenovo PCs are not allowed inside secure US networks." From the article: "Assistant Secretary of State Richard Griffin said the department would also alter its procurement process to ensure US information security was guaranteed. His comments came after Rep Frank Wolf expressed national security concerns. The company Lenovo insisted such concerns were unwarranted and said the computers posed no security risk."
"It's not like the PCs weren't made in China when the division was owned by IBM."
:)
That truely is the ironic part of Wolf's concern. As if the upper management, the part of IBM PCs that changed when they were pruchased by Lenovo, would have ever noticed if the Chinese made PCs were bugged before leaving the factory.
That said, there should be proper due diligence for any equipment that is purchased and used in sensitive work. In the 1960s the Soviet embassy in Washington purchased/leased a Xerox copier and didn't realize that it was bugged with a CIA camera that took pictures of every document they copied. When the Xerox repairman came in to do routine maintenance on the equipment he would replace the film and take the exposed roll to the CIA.
http://www.parascope.com/articles/0197/xerox.htm
Dell laptops are assembled in Malaysia and shipped to the US from there. Components are mostly Taiwan, Singapore, and Korea. I'm sure there is China in there too, but there doesn't seem to be a lot.
One reason the US government is so paraoid about hardware backdoor is the number of times we've done this to other countries! Line printers (line-at-a-time impact printers) sold to Iraq in the 80s had radio transponders secretly embedded, so that they could be located at some distance. As such printers are only used in large data centers, we had a targets list of a significant portion of the Iraqi communications infrastructure, which we bombed at the start of Gulf War I.
Xerox machines sold to the USSR during the cold war often had cameras embedded, and service technicians would take great risk in retreiving the data (I think it was actual film) when servicing the machines, but we had pictures of everything copied.
These are just 2 very simple examples that have been made public, who knows what sort of stuff we've done that's clever enough that we still keep it secret. If the Chinese got busted the consequences wouldn't be much worse than where we already are today. The CHinese government could, after all, argue that they're not crossing the line any more than the US government has repeatedly done.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm not sure that many of you all remember this, but a while back the US actually sold China a Boeing 767 with at LEAST 27 different spying devices on board. Both China and the US were mostly quiet about this though, which kept things under wrap. The BBC has articles here and here.
Looks like America has every right to be paranoid, if it expects China to treat it as it has been treated.
We are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world....