Lenovo Looking to Buy Seagate, May Raise Political Concerns

andy1307 writes "According to an article in the New York Times, Lenovo has expressed an interest in buying Seagate. This has raised concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China. From the article: 'In recent years, modern disk drives, used to store vast quantities of digital information securely, have become complex computing systems, complete with hundreds of thousands of lines of software that are used to ensure the integrity of data and to offer data encryption.'"

Comments

Oh my god, it's the Red Scare!

[r_jensen11]

Quick! Where's McCarthy when we need him?

Honestly, they're raising the same fuss as when IBM sold off their PC and laptop divisions to Lenovo. There's no reason why we should be paranoid about stuff this. It's business.

Re:Oh my god, it's the Red Scare!

[Anonymous Coward]

s/McCarthy/Bush/g
s/communist/terrorist/g

Closer than you think

Re:Oh my god, it's the Red Scare!

[Kjella]

Honestly, they're raising the same fuss as when IBM sold off their PC and laptop divisions to Lenovo. There's no reason why we should be paranoid about stuff this. It's business.

Yes, it is. And when those Chinese-owned leaders get certain hints to store certain things in "bad" sectors who might suddenly resurface in "slack" space seeded with a salt to look like random noise or risk being shut down, that's also business. Or there's a kill code that they can send out to wipe itself and bring down military systems in an emergency situation. No, it's not just a gag China does just to pull off something like that, they're certainly in it for the business. But when business and government go hand in hand like they do in China, you'd also be naive to think they don't further each other's goals. It's not like that the lust for money is mutually exclusive with the lust for power, quite rather the opposite.

Re:Oh my god, it's the Red Scare!

[WindBourne]

wow. You need to study history. The business world is used heavily to spy or screw on each other. For example, Xerox copiers as well as pipe controls come to mind. And yes, this still occurs. I wrote about this earlier, but it bears repeating. In a start-up that I was part of, we had a Taiwanese who wanted to invest in us. Only he wanted access to the machine that we had (it was hard to send it even to Britain or Canada, china was out of the question). Turns out that he wanted to take the device to China. Said that he could get 100's of millions for it (no doubt). And that is just one story. America has been selling off far too much business. For something like this, it needs to stop.

Re:Oh my god, it's the Red Scare!

[kestasjk]

I didn't know the US government trusted Seagate with their military systems and classified data. What "certain things" are you talking about here? What private information gets stored on a hard disk? Like the US government aren't going to bother with encryption.

And since when can hard disk manufacturers send out messages to specific hard disks?

Chief! We're intercepting a message from the Chinese! It's coming through now: "This is Red Dragon to SEAGTE-#1938-391283-2934; the US government's warranty has just run out. Crash Crash Crash! Over."
Dear God! It'll be like Pearl Harbor all over again, except with hard disk drives instead of our navy!

Re:Oh my god, it's the Red Scare!

[couchslug]

McCarthy's excesses didn't make opposing Mao and Stalin wrong.

Who says it's lenovo?

[Tragek]

The article says nobody will say WHICH Chinese tech company wants to buy.

Re:Who says it's lenovo?

[andy1307]

The editors changed my post. I submitted this 2 days ago and no company was named.

So don't buy Seagate

[Marxist Hacker 42]

So a Chinese Company wants to buy a Canadian (?!?!?) company that makes hard drives. Fine. Stop buying Seagate for the NSA, and move on with our lives.

Isn't it a bit late to worry?

[tftp]

This has raised concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China

I think the horse has not only left the barn, it's off the planet by now. What were those "government officials" thinking for last decades? And this process is not [easily] reversible - China has all the factories now, and rephrasing Mao, "Power comes out of the gates of the factory." This much we see already.

Re:Isn't it a bit late to worry?

[Grishnakh]

The problem with your panicking concept is that, at least for now, China's economy is highly dependent on the USA's. After all, we're the ones buying most of the junk their factories make. In exchange, they're getting a bunch of our green paper currency. So I would have to assume that China is not interested in our currency devaluing rapidly any time soon, because then they'll have sold us all that stuff and done all that work for nothing, and they'll have a much smaller market to sell to.

So basically, since Dollar bills are basically IOUs, we're in debt to China. In a normal trade relationship, they would be using those dollars to buy stuff back from us. The problem here is that we don't really make much to sell to them. I know Buicks are really popular there for some strange reason (bad taste? Are the Chinese going to start dying their hair blue and wearing really ugly clothes next?), but that's not enough, plus those Buicks are probably made in Chinese factories anyway.

What's the endpoint of this? Honestly, I don't know. I'm an engineer, dammit, not an economist. But it doesn't look good to me. I guess, if nothing else, China will wind up with lots of great technology, and spiffy new factories to build it with, and while we're sitting around with worthless currency trying to figure out how to survive when we've all forgotten how to do anything practical because we were too busy studying marketing and law, China will be self-sufficient. Does China have expansionist of imperialist aims? Would they be interested in conquering the USA and enslaving us while stealing our resources? The way we've been acting, we probably deserve it.

The irony of it all

[v3xt0r]

This government, the same one who has no problem allowing China to take hundreds of thousands of jobs away from Americans simply by our failed international trade policies, wants us to worry about national security issues related to 1 corporation. What about all the other national security issues that are caused by trade w. China, or any other socialist/communist country for that matter? What about all the (60%+) staff @ Los Alamos?? Lenovo is the least of my concerns, at this point.

hehe National what???

[xednieht]

China buys blocks and blocks of our national debt, and they're concerned about the Seagate purchase? pfft

With their ownership of US debt, China is probably as concerned about our national security as we are.

Extent of the legit concerns?

[neapolitan]

We (the US) have long had a ban on the export of 'strong' (>40 bit, now >64 bit key) technology to foreign governments / citizens. I've long wondered about this.

It seems to me that:

- All concerns regarding exporting of technology that is not guarded as a trade secret is ineffective. If China wants a technology that is freely available over here (USA), just have one of their numerous graduate students download the technology and send it over there. AFAIK, no American internet provider actively prohibits strong encryption connections to Chinese IPs (their "great firewall" may be different).

However, my second immediate thought is:

- Seagate likely has numerous trade secrets that are *not* public domain, and thus can now be exclusively owned and operated by the Chinese. Imagine if DES had a backdoor (or Seagate's equivalent), and my organization uses Seagate's out of box encryption (not likely ;) -- now a foreign government controls this. Legitimately scary.

As for the 'manufacturing techniques' -- as long as there is an oligopoly of storage makers, I'm not concerned. We have bright minds here coming out of graduate school and going to work at Seagate as well as Western Digital, IBM, Intel, etc.

All the more reason to use published cryptographic standards, and not rely on any proprietary solutions -- they can never fall exclusively into the "wrong hands."

Fuck nationalism, what about quality?

[pavon]

Seagate is pretty much the only computer componets company that hasn't wavered much in quality over the years. IBM, Western Digital, and Maxtor have all gone through phases ranging from good quality to absolute crap, while Seagate has continued to put out consistently good products.

I understand that theory that larger companies can decrease overhead and thus be more efficient, but that never seems to happen. The success rate on mergers looks almost as bad as on startups. But this stupid economic model that is the stockmarket rewards growth (even artificial growth) over all else - quality, efficiency you name it. We created this system, and the laws that govern it, and then we act shocked, just shocked, when the market consolidates to the point of a monopoly. What is the point of even having anti-trust laws when we not only allow but encourage consolidation at every turn.

Sorry, I'm just so tired of seeing all these mergers that decrease the amount of competition in the field and end up destroying everything that was good about the company to begin with.

Re:I'm no expert, but

[Tackhead]

> > The US government is wise not trust a Chinese implementation of those standards for its data, because the US government can't guarentee the absence of Chinese-added backdoors.
>
>So stop buying from Seagate and put a few tax dollars back into manufacturing hard drives here. You provide jobs for Americans *and* data security for the federal government. Win-win to me.

Sure, that's better than selling our secrets to the Chinese, but where's the win to the American hard drive user?

Geek: Have you got anything without added backdoors?
NSA: Try that Hitachi Deathstar, it doesn't have that many backdoors in it since the Japanese bought IBM's hard drive division.
Geek: I don't want any government's backdoors!
CIA: Can't hd have the Western Digital? Hasn't got as many backdoors in it as the Hitachi Deathstar!
Yankees (Singing): Back-door-back-door! Back-DOOOR! For Homeland and more!
Geek: How about this old IDE drive and this 8-bit ISA-bus IDE controller?
Everyone: Eeeew!
Geek: What do you mean 'Eeeww'? I don't like backdoors!
Yankees: Lovely backdoors! Wonderful backdoors!
DHS: Shut up! Bloody Yankees! You can't have an IDE without the controller card, and you can't have the controller card without the backdoor! Unless he wants to go back to MFM/RLL, and then we can recover everything even after a low-level format! The very first backdoor!
Geek: I don't like backdoors!
DHS: Sshh, citizen, don't cause a fuss, or we'll have your backdoor! We love it. Mmm, backdoors, CALEA for the telephone switches, backdoors, the Clipper Chip for the phones, backdoors in newfangled BIOSes, TPMs, DRMs, backdoors into the backdoors, it's backdoors into everything!
Yankees (singing): Back-door-back-door! Back-DOOOR! Lovely backdoor! Backity door! Safety galore! For homeland and more! Backdoor! Lovely backdoor! Backity door! For the children and more...

Is this how they will defeat us?

[AmazingRuss]

Seems like they are trying to create a couple of generations in our country that have no idea how to design or manufacture anything, by undercutting us and removing any incentive to learn.

If they can keep this going, the US will eventually become a nation of realtors and barristas. Could be they aren't interested in the paper we give them at all.