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

Not necessarily...

[WebHostingGuy]

It is not the software they are worried about. They are worried about a hardware compromise. Now that a Chinese company can control what happens within the computer they can "do" a lot.

The representative is not crying wolf. If you speak with anyone in the intelligence business China has a very aggressive spying program and they will stop at nothing. (I know because I have heard this first hand from the people who do counter-intelligence.) Put it this way, if the Chinese government could put spying ability into Leveno laptops they would.

Re:Protectionism? Why?

[spun]

Who says the American execs know? I mean, it's good cover, you open plants in the US and Mexico, hire a bunch of American execs, and put in a covert signalling mechanism in the form of, oh say a power management feature on the motherboards that slightly varies the rate at which ethernet packets are sent based on things the computer is doing. That scheme took me all of five seconds to dream up, I'm sure China could come up with better.

I'm guessing this is just paranoia and xenaphobia on the part of our government, but it's not quite as far-fetched as you make it out to be.