Tech Shout!

The US State Department has backed down on a controversial decision to install computers made by Chinese company Lenovo on its classified networks, officials said Thursday. But the department’s purchase of about 16,000 personal computers (PCs) from Lenovo has raised serious questions accusing China of aggressively spying on the United States, Republican lawmaker Frank Wolf said.

Word of the State Department order for the desktop PCs was made public in March, 10 months after Lenovo completed its 1.75-billion-dollar acquisition of IBM’s PC division. The department chose to install about 900 of the PCs on its secure network at home and at embassies around the world, according to documents released by Wolf. But after a flurry of objections from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a bipartisan panel appointed by Congress, the department opted this week to pull the computers from the network.

“This decision would have had dire consequences for our national security, potentially jeopardizing our investment in a secure IT infrastructure,” said Wolf, whose House appropriations subcommittee funds the State Department. “It is no secret that the United States is a principal target of Chinese intelligence services,” he said.

While welcoming the department’s reversal, Wolf said the purchase of the 16,000 computers from the Chinese state-backed company was still troubling. Launching an impassioned attack on China’s foreign policies and human-rights record, he said that “of course you would take them (Lenovo) off the list” of companies approved to provide technology to the US government. “No American government agency should want to purchase from them,” he said.

Last year’s acquisition vaulted Lenovo to third place among global PC makers, behind only Dell and Hewlett-Packard. The Chinese firm kept the right to use the IBM name on its PCs and the “ThinkPad” brand on laptop computers.