Government Suspicious of Lenovo
Posted by Jeff Chenkus on May 19, 2006
Filed Under Misc. Gadgets | Stumble This
And the winner for the biggest over-reaction of the week goes to the US State Department for refusing to use Lenovo made PC’s on classified work. The claim is that the software on them could be used for spying, because the Chinese have obvously gone through all the trouble of building a PC business just to get their hardware into the US government’s classified areas. Being that they bought IBM’s personal computer division, are they implying that IBM is complicit? The whole thing is fairly ridiculous.
Look, Lenovo manufactures PC’s in China, India, Mexico, the US and Europe and a few other countries. They are using the same manufacturing sites and processes as IBM did. They are also still using all of the same employees to create the hardware and software, so I am not quite sure why this is suddenly an issue. If they don’t think buying from a Chinese company is good because they want to support US business, then they should just say that. It seems obvious that they are not working on anything as nefarious as what they are being accused of. I almost feel bad for Lenovo, no matter what they do they are going to be under a cloud just because they are a Chinese company.
With an order as large as the government made, they have complete control over what gets loaded on their computers. They can hand Lenovo the software set up as they want, and be able to verify that what they receive back is the exact same OS image. It seems that some in the government have decided to use scare tactics and misinformation to push whatever agenda it is they are pursuing. For all their talk of a global economy, to then turn around and claim that goods bought from China could be spying possibilities is wrong. Base your decision on facts, not hyperbole and scare tactics.
Posted by Jeff
| Trackback |Comments
2 Responses to “Government Suspicious of Lenovo”
Leave a Reply
It is not invalid to assume that Chinese companies (even those out of HK like Lenovo) will do Beijing’s bidding. However, wouldn’t it be really easy to discovery anything in the computers that allows tracking back? Or is the fear not so much that there’s a software bug, but rather that there is a listening bug? If I knew more about the technical side I would be much better positioned to determine whether this is political or not.
The idea that Lenovo has been coerced into developing “spy software” is not impossible - just highly improbable given the risk factor.
If the U.S. government wanted to verify that Lenovo’s software was bug-free, they could. If something were found, you can bet that any company using Chinese computer equiptment would cease doing so. I would imagine that this would be a tremendous economic / PR blow to China - and therefore too big a risk to undertake.
However, one has to wonder whether software bugs and viruses have been specifically developed with the purpose of spying on governments.