Liberal Talk Radio

The U.S. Government loves cheap Chinese imports, don’t they? After all, isn’t that why we normalized trade relations with China and opened up our markets to their wonderful goods?

Well, looks like this free market global paradise isn’t quite all it’s cracked up to be. The State Department went and bought some 16,000 Chinese Lenovo PCs, and now it’s afraid that the Chinese government might have bugged the machines. Lenovo bought IBM’s ThinkPad division a year or so ago, and started churning out PCs under the Lenovo brand.

Now, let’s keep in mind that the ThinkPads were probably being made in China already, so all that happened when IBM sold to Lenovo is that some stock changed hands and some vice presidents had to get new business cards. Nevertheless, these ThinkPads (err… Lenovos) are now potentially enemies of the state! But go ahead, American Consumer, and keep buying that Chinese gear. Just know that your government won’t touch the stuff.

On balance, of course, this cloak-and-dagger stuff is a refreshing throwback to the Cold War, back when it was our technology vs. their technology, as opposed to our technology vs. their suicide bombers.

There’s a funny anecdote in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack where the CIA, in 2002 or so, cripples a batch of computers that were (they thought) being sold to Saddam for use in WMD facilities. Of course, Saddam had no WMD facilities, so the machines ended up in Iraqi TV stations. Then, after the U.S. invasion, when we tried to get our message out to the Iraqi people, the TV stations kept going down because of all the buggy computers! You can’t make this stuff up.