US Government Fears China Bugs Lenovo PCs

An anonymous reader writes "After approving the sale of IBM's PC Division to the Chinese Corporation Lenovo, the US Government has realized China could bug Lenovo PCs destined for US Government customers. Would the US have done the same to China? With American businesses so eager for business in China no matter what, where are we headed?"

Comments

Security or economics?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

While I have no doubt that the US & China spy on each other constantly:

But after angry objections from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a bipartisan panel of experts appointed by Congress, the department opted this week to pull the computers from the network. [emph mine]

I really do have to ask. Is the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission really unaware that the vast majority of PCs (including Apple, dell, hp, gateway, etc) are manufactured (or at least part manufactured) in China?

I find it hard to believe that they don't, so this punishment is not for the computers being manufactured in China, rather for the company not being US owned anymore. In other words, it's fine for the Chinese to do the manufacturing, but it has to be Americans making the real money (and again, this sort of chauvinism is pretty common & not unexpected, but it would be nice for the US to be a little more honest about its motivations).

Tin foil time!

[madnuke]

Wrap your laptop in foil, it will protect it from Chinese bugs and boost your wifi signal by 40%!

Yes

[Samir Gupta]

The USA did it to China indeed.

and now that I think about it...

[macadamia_harold]

what's with all the speculation? With their domestic spying program, wouldn't the NSA know whether the PCs were "phoning home"?

Aw, these Americans...

[liangzai]

They say they want free trade, but they won't buy IBM PCs after China bought the brand (no other difference).

They say they want democracy in the Middle East, but when there is democracy in the Middle East, they don't respect the outcome (Hamas).

They say other nations should respect human rights, but they themselves don't (Gitmo, torture flights, numerous examples).

Anyone still wonder why the rest of the world spits on America?

So how does this supposed bugging scam work?

[Savage-Rabbit]

...the vast majority of PCs (including Apple, dell, hp, gateway, etc) are manufactured (or at least part manufactured) in China?

True enough, the whole suggestion of PC bugging is almost funny. If the Chinese were to bug every single computer that gets assembled in China just on the off chance that it happens to end up in a secret US.Govt facitlity they would leave a footprint so large that the operation would be blown wide open pretty quickly. How many amateurs and computer engineers are there around the world picking their computers apart? One would expect such a scam to be discovered pretty quickly. Besides that how are the Chinese going tell which of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of computers the US.Govt buys end up in secret facilities. Do the computes phone home? Do they have self activating bugging devices that phone home (through how many layers of firewalling and network security?) when they some how automatically detect that they are in a US Govt facility? The whole suggestion of the Chinese bugging computers wholesale is ridiculous. That leaves us with the possibility of a sophisticated Chinese sting operation that uses the Lenovo distribution network to spike only those computers Lenovo and its distributors (distributors which would have to be staffed by the Chinese intelligence) know are likely to be destined for sensetive facilites. That would minimize the likelyhood of the scam being discovered unless US intel started randomly sampling computers and checking them for bugs but it still seems collossally impractical. If I were Chinese intelligence I would stick to working the most vulnerable part of any US.Govt operation. I would, for example, look for that inevitable disappointed, bored out of his skull, stuck in a dead end career pencil pusher and bribe him/her. It has worked in the past and it will work today. There have to be a thousand more practical ways of spying on the US than bugging computers.