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

Protectionism? Why?

[denissmith]

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)...

Dumb

[homer_ca]

It's not like the PCs weren't made in China when the division was owned by IBM.

Re:Protectionism? Why?

[blueZhift]

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!