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."

Comments

Re:Protectionism? Why?

[lgw]

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.