This is kind of amusing. The Bush administration is getting more goofy by the day. The US State department has moved against Lenovo by not permitting any machines manufactured by the Chinese owned company to attach to secret networks. Now, while I completely understand the goal of protecting classified data, this is nuts. Why? Well, how do we know it’s not Dell or Gateway that we need to be worried about? Do we know for certain that US hardware vendors are not the problem? No. I have worked with military contracts where hardware purchased from US vendors went through no such scrutiny. This is little more than brinksmanship on the part of the Republicans. Rep Frank Wolf (R-Va.) said,
“This decision would have had dire consequences for our national security, potentially jeopardizing our investment in a secure IT infrastructure,†Wolf said today. “It is no secret, and becoming more obvious, hopefully, to the U.S. Congress … that the United States is a principal target of Chinese intelligence services.â€
If they were to apply a standard of care against any vendor hardware in the first place I would be willing to suspect that the Lenovo systems are perfectly safe. But, I’m aware that it’s not politically fashionable to say that.
[tags]SIPRnet, Lenovo, Bush, Republicans, Congress, State Department[/tags]