Slashdot Mirror
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."
While Levono insists that their computers pose no security risk, we need to remember that they do run the Windows OS which is a significant hole:-) On a more serious note, this is obviously a purely political step - but why? No one with any technical savvy is going to believe that these systems pose a greater security risk, unless someone independently confirms this and demonstrates how a backdoor exists. Is a mere accusation enough to get a company dumped from secure contracts, if so I have dirt on Halliburton, KBR, CACI and a host of companies who are defrauding government agencies. Isolationism doesn't score political points the way it used to, and these are the same people that will happily defend moving jobs off shore. Who are they trying to appeal to here? There can't be that many blindly stupis people in the country ( 29%, or so, it seems)...
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
It's not like the PCs weren't made in China when the division was owned by IBM.
"No one with any technical savvy is going to believe that these systems pose a greater security risk, unless someone independently confirms this and demonstrates how a backdoor exists."
....) wouldn't do the same on their hardware?
Why would you think this has not already happened? Add to that the fact the the government buys these things in bulk and even IF a sample posessed no backdoor, how hard would it be to put a backdoor in 1 out of 1000 and hope it gets by?
Paranoid? I think not, you haven't had night shift cleaning crews hired by the chinese into your business have you? It happens.
If Windows has US government demanded backdoors as so many Slahdotters insist, why would ANYONE think the Chinese (or the Russians or the French or the Germans or the English or the Japanese or the Koreans
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
There's definitely a lot of politics and money in play here. Practically speaking, it would be difficult to impossible to exclude products made by any country that may be a present or future enemy of the US from use in govt agencies. And ironically the US govt has aided and abetted the rise of Chinese economic and political power that now they suddenly fear. If they really cared so much, they should have said something before IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo. So given that everyone spies on everyone else, the real trick is not to stop the spying, but to make sure that your enemy (and sometimes your friends) only get inaccurate or junk info.
For the current matter, I would guess that some domestic PC maker is trying to take advantage of the situation, *cough*Dell*cough*HP*cough, pardon me!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Acctually I consider that to be a very serious threat to national security. What happens if someday we do go to war with China, suddenly the shelves of Walmart are completley bare. We have no production base in the United States anymore, and it was that production base that won us the last World War. China doesn't have to embed gremlins in there products to take the USA down, they just have to stop selling their products to us and our economy/society would colapse.
And if you want to be really paranoid, the "minority stakeholder" is in fact the People's Liberation Army.
Y'see, the PLA, unlike the armed forces of every other country on the planet, doesn't get its funding from the central government. They have their own business ventures, be it a stake in Lenovo or agricultural exports produced with slave labor. (Oops, I mean "re-education camps", silly me.)
If you want to know why this is so, read up on the Cultural Revolution, and how it almost tore China apart. Had the PLA not stepped in, China could have devolved into civil war yet again. The top general staff of the PLA obviously has every interest in maintaining control, so they would rather manage their own purse strings. It beats relying on the caprice of the leader of the People's Central Committee.
Getting back to the original question: Is it possible that some "extra" circuitry is in every Lenovo laptop? Certainly. Is it likely? I don't think so. (One thing to consider is how the U.S. Government is buying these laptops. We're addicted to deficit spending, and selling bonds to the China's central bank.)
Should every Lenovo laptop be inspected before use in government offices, just in case some enterprising intelligence officer in the PLA is really that stupid?
Umm.... can't hurt.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
I don't believe in Windows backdoors any more that I believe that the Lenovo people are able to pull this off without anyone detecting it.
Agreed, for now, MS would most likely not be able to hide such things. But what about when Treacherous Computing comes around?
I don't know about you, but Microsoft having their own hardware encrypted little processing enclaves, communicating over an encrypted channel with Microsoft, on most of the computers in the world gives me the shivers in a bad way.