China's Spying PCs

In a move almost to silly to ridicule, the US State Department has decided to make sure that none of the 16.000 PCs they purchased from Lenovo last year will be hooked up to their secure network. This comes as a result of the initiative of congress representative Frank R. Wolf, a Republican, who fears that China may have fitted the computers with spying software or hardware.

Mr Wolf apparently knows about as much about computers as we do about fungus. No, that's an exaggeration. Make that half as much.

Quite apart from 1) the PCs being routinely tested both by the State Department and outside specialists, and 2) doing such a thing would be like signing a death warrant for Lenovo, consider this: The Lenovo PCs are made by American and Mexican workers at plants in Mexico and North Carolina, in exactly the same fashion that they were produced before the Chinese bought a 27% share of the stocks in this subsidiary of a company you may have heard of before. It's called IBM.