US government restricts China PCs
The US State Department says the 16,000 computers it bought from a Chinese firm with links to the Beijing government will not be used for classified work.
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.
I wouldn’t trust any device not specially prepared and TEMPEST rated in a secure facility to begin with.
What do you think? Should we be wary of Lenovo gear? Is Lenovo a security risk? Is Rep Wolf a political opportunist China-bashing, or he expressing genuine concern?
I would be wary of running any equipment like this in a government department.
I think the bigger issue than this, however, is the Huawei routers being implemented in the larger carriers around the world (not to mention the enterprise routers possibly going into defence and govt). I know it sounds a bit conspiracy theory-like, but there is a bucketload of confidential data flowing over closed box chinese developed huawei network equipment as we speak.
Thanks.
Everybody KNOWS that all laptops have keystroke capturing devices in them attached to the network cards. But where are you going to buy computers which were NOT built in China or some other third world country? I guess the US government will have to start building their own. Back to the UNIVAC!
I’m cynical enough to distrust just about any government. Saying that, though, the Chinese are ascendant as it is. I tend to worry less about a nation in that context — than someone doing their level best to imitate the Fall of the Roman Empire.
Whoever that might be.
I wouldn’t trust any computer to be completely secure if it was running Windows.
Nice to see the shoe on the other foot.
How long have other countries had to worry that technology provided by American companies might have CIA/NSA “back-doors”…
Cisco switches & routers, RSA encryption, etc.
Their “paranoid” fears that any American working at an embassy was a CIA operative. That any US-supported aid workers or UN “inspectors” were also spying for Uncle Sam…
I wouldn’t trust any device not specially prepared and TEMPEST rated in a secure facility to begin with.
Well, D’uh! Those standards are required for work in secure Government areas. Hell, when I was having some of my equipment field-certified [when I was still in the Navy] we weren’t even supposed to talk about TEMPEST – since people not directly invlolved didn’t have a “need to know”.
Details of what the certification-testing entailed were themselves classified… to keep people from learning what their limits are. I had a high enough clearance to be in the room while some of the testing was going on, but not high enough to have the details of what they were doing explained to me. [and I was curious, as an Electronics Technician…]
The problem has always been that you can secure the equipment, but not the people. Machines won’t [yet] betray your trust for money, or political ideology – but people will…
I wonder how many grumpy government people who don’t get to buy ThinkPad’s anymore it takes to change the government’s mind?
“… a Chinese firm with links to the Beijing government …”
Are there any large [insert country name here] firms without links to the [insert country name here] Government?
Are Lenovo’s Chinese-manufactured components any more likely to be “tainted” than Apple’s, or Dell’s, or HP’s??
My conspiracy theory of the day [since David hasn’t posted his, yet]
1. China & Russia are blocking US attempts to get UN sanctions against Iran.
2. Cheney tweaks Russia for using energy supplies to extort nearby countries.
3. US State Department declares Chinese-manufactured laptops a security threat.
Co-inky-dink? Of course! How could any of those things be related in our modern, enlightened world.
Anything running anything important will either not be conected to the WWW or will be behind a secure classified network. So this threat is baseless, either that or the panasonic toughbooks all throughout the military are really spies!
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.
AT LAST! Someone woke up and understood that this is a wrong move to have ANYTHING from that government in China in any dept sensetive enought to sell milk, let alone NSA! LOL!
But when Chinese are warry of using Windows because it may have backdoors used by the CIA, they are just being paranoid, right?
Or when Brazilians, Germans, French, etc, decide to use Linux instead of Windows (which is created by a company with close ties to the US government) they are just being paranoid, right?
I just fear this will be seen as a “because that’s what we would do in their place” admission.
I think the political nature of this whole retro-Cold War piece of intrique is best illustrated by the fact that — guess what, folks — the computers in question were all built in the US or Mexico.
Lenovo, now, will do what any sensible company would do. Focus their government sales [via CDW in this case] on countries whose purchasing decisions are not grounded in electoral hype.