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Comments: 255 +-   Lenovo Looking to Buy Seagate, May Raise Political Concerns on Monday August 27 2007, @06:22PM

Posted by Zonk on Monday August 27 2007, @06:22PM
from the this-is-what-we're-worried-about dept.
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andy1307 writes "According to an article in the New York Times, Lenovo has expressed an interest in buying Seagate. This has raised concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China. From the article: 'In recent years, modern disk drives, used to store vast quantities of digital information securely, have become complex computing systems, complete with hundreds of thousands of lines of software that are used to ensure the integrity of data and to offer data encryption.'"
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Submission: Chinese company looking to buy Seagate by andy1307 (656570)
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Lenovo Looking to Buy Seagate, May Raise Political Concerns 50 Comments More /

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  • Oh my god, it's the Red Scare! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by r_jensen11 (598210) on Monday August 27 2007, @06:26PM (#20377935)
    Quick! Where's McCarthy when we need him?

    Honestly, they're raising the same fuss as when IBM sold off their PC and laptop divisions to Lenovo. There's no reason why we should be paranoid about stuff this. It's business.
    • I understand being paranoid about it. What I don't understand is why they don't simply write into all those wonderful governmental contracts "Must not be manufactured in China", which would simply cut out a HUGE market for these companies that outsource.
      • You're assuming that the US Government really cares that much about secrecy, national security, or any of that crap.

        By manufacturing stuff in China, corporations are able to save lots of money, and make much bigger profits. Corporate profits are far more important to the elites in Washington than national security.

        Plus, the free-trade crowd would be angered by such a move, as would the anti-government waste crowd, who would whine about the government paying 10 times as much for something that they could ge
        • Heh. I was watching Bill Maher, and he said something to the effect that America's desire to buy stuff as cheap as possible is the reason they're made from poison, mud and shit.

    • Re:Oh my god, it's the Red Scare! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2007, @06:52PM (#20378229)

      s/McCarthy/Bush/g
      s/communist/terrorist/g
      Closer than you think

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kjella (173770)
      Honestly, they're raising the same fuss as when IBM sold off their PC and laptop divisions to Lenovo. There's no reason why we should be paranoid about stuff this. It's business.

      Yes, it is. And when those Chinese-owned leaders get certain hints to store certain things in "bad" sectors who might suddenly resurface in "slack" space seeded with a salt to look like random noise or risk being shut down, that's also business. Or there's a kill code that they can send out to wipe itself and bring down military sys

      • Re:Oh my god, it's the Red Scare! (Score:5, Funny)

        by kestasjk (933987) on Monday August 27 2007, @10:17PM (#20379895) Homepage
        I didn't know the US government trusted Seagate with their military systems and classified data. What "certain things" are you talking about here? What private information gets stored on a hard disk? Like the US government aren't going to bother with encryption.

        And since when can hard disk manufacturers send out messages to specific hard disks?

        Chief! We're intercepting a message from the Chinese! It's coming through now: "This is Red Dragon to SEAGTE-#1938-391283-2934; the US government's warranty has just run out. Crash Crash Crash! Over."
        Dear God! It'll be like Pearl Harbor all over again, except with hard disk drives instead of our navy!

    • Re:Oh my god, it's the Red Scare! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by WindBourne (631190) on Monday August 27 2007, @07:40PM (#20378711) Journal
      wow. You need to study history. The business world is used heavily to spy or screw on each other. For example, Xerox copiers as well as pipe controls come to mind. And yes, this still occurs. I wrote about this earlier, but it bears repeating. In a start-up that I was part of, we had a Taiwanese who wanted to invest in us. Only he wanted access to the machine that we had (it was hard to send it even to Britain or Canada, china was out of the question). Turns out that he wanted to take the device to China. Said that he could get 100's of millions for it (no doubt). And that is just one story. America has been selling off far too much business. For something like this, it needs to stop.

  • Who says it's lenovo? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tragek (772040) on Monday August 27 2007, @06:27PM (#20377941) Journal
    The article says nobody will say WHICH Chinese tech company wants to buy.

  • So don't buy Seagate (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Marxist Hacker 42 (638312) * <seebert@aracnet.com> on Monday August 27 2007, @06:29PM (#20377957) Homepage Journal
    So a Chinese Company wants to buy a Canadian (?!?!?) company that makes hard drives. Fine. Stop buying Seagate for the NSA, and move on with our lives.
    • Yeah, but think about how many Semi trailers of hard drives a day they must get at the NSA for all their "wiretapping" needs.. That could be a huge chunk of revenue!
      • Yeah, but think about how many Semi trailers of hard drives a day they must get at the NSA for all their "wiretapping" needs.. That could be a huge chunk of revenue!

        And by having their own factory, they can have economy of scale PLUS being able to sell their own proprietary back door drives to the public.
      • Thus raising the question- why the heck is the government buying from them to begin with? Or did they miss the fact that all the drives were "Made in China" with the fine quality control (or lack thereof) that implies?

  • Isn't it a bit late to worry? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tftp (111690) on Monday August 27 2007, @06:29PM (#20377963) Homepage
    This has raised concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China

    I think the horse has not only left the barn, it's off the planet by now. What were those "government officials" thinking for last decades? And this process is not [easily] reversible - China has all the factories now, and rephrasing Mao, "Power comes out of the gates of the factory." This much we see already.

    • Look, you have your economy in hock. China has much more than enough dollars. So the time has come to Pay up in hard goods or your currency suddenly isn't worth the paper its printed on.

      Yup, it's way too late for worrying....

      You yanks should move on a little towards the PANIC NOW stage.

      • Re:Isn't it a bit late to worry? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Grishnakh (216268) on Monday August 27 2007, @07:43PM (#20378737)
        The problem with your panicking concept is that, at least for now, China's economy is highly dependent on the USA's. After all, we're the ones buying most of the junk their factories make. In exchange, they're getting a bunch of our green paper currency. So I would have to assume that China is not interested in our currency devaluing rapidly any time soon, because then they'll have sold us all that stuff and done all that work for nothing, and they'll have a much smaller market to sell to.

        So basically, since Dollar bills are basically IOUs, we're in debt to China. In a normal trade relationship, they would be using those dollars to buy stuff back from us. The problem here is that we don't really make much to sell to them. I know Buicks are really popular there for some strange reason (bad taste? Are the Chinese going to start dying their hair blue and wearing really ugly clothes next?), but that's not enough, plus those Buicks are probably made in Chinese factories anyway.

        What's the endpoint of this? Honestly, I don't know. I'm an engineer, dammit, not an economist. But it doesn't look good to me. I guess, if nothing else, China will wind up with lots of great technology, and spiffy new factories to build it with, and while we're sitting around with worthless currency trying to figure out how to survive when we've all forgotten how to do anything practical because we were too busy studying marketing and law, China will be self-sufficient. Does China have expansionist of imperialist aims? Would they be interested in conquering the USA and enslaving us while stealing our resources? The way we've been acting, we probably deserve it.

        • Is this how they will defeat us? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by AmazingRuss (555076) on Monday August 27 2007, @09:33PM (#20379581)
          Seems like they are trying to create a couple of generations in our country that have no idea how to design or manufacture anything, by undercutting us and removing any incentive to learn.

          If they can keep this going, the US will eventually become a nation of realtors and barristas. Could be they aren't interested in the paper we give them at all.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by refactored (260886)
          I suspect an engineer does better than an economist.

          An economist dreams that fancy accounting can fix things, an engineer tends to think in terms of conservation laws, reservoirs and pressures.

          What's the end game?

          I'm not sure, the things I have been reading about China suggests it may not be what Americans think it is...

          You see China is Old. China is old old old and utterly massive.

          It has basically been way overpopulated and resource depleted since about 1900....

          America is just waking up to thou

    • exactly!!! All the drives are BUILT in China right now. When the Chinese want to, they will do whatever they want to spy on us and we won't be able to stop it!

  • I'm no expert, but (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bombula (670389) on Monday August 27 2007, @06:29PM (#20377967)
    the statement that, "the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China" referring to hard drive technology just sounds a bit silly. I'd bet dollars to donuts that any technology latent in a commercial hard drive that the Chinese might be after can be reverse engineered right off the shelf. The only exception might be the encryption component, but - someone correct me here if I'm completely wrong - as I understand it 128-bit encryption is no longer restricted by the US government, presumably because they can break it, and that is why 128-bit is also the current 'limit' or whatever on commercial encryption products.
    • It wouldn't surprise me if the hard drives, or at least some of the components are constructed or assembled in China anyway.
    • > the statement that, "the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China" referring to hard drive technology just sounds a bit silly. I'd bet dollars to donuts that any technology latent in a commercial hard drive that the Chinese might be after can be reverse engineered right off the shelf. The only exception might be the encryption component, but - someone correct me here if I'm completely wrong - as I understand it 128-bit encryption is no longer restricted by the US government
      • The US government is wise not trust a Chinese implementation of those standards for its data, because the US government can't guarentee the absence of Chinese-added backdoors.

        So stop buying from Seagate and put a few tax dollars back into manufacturing hard drives here. You provide jobs for Americans *and* data security for the federal government. Win-win to me.

        • Re:I'm no expert, but (Score:5, Funny)

          by Tackhead (54550) on Monday August 27 2007, @07:13PM (#20378455)
          > > The US government is wise not trust a Chinese implementation of those standards for its data, because the US government can't guarentee the absence of Chinese-added backdoors.
          >
          >So stop buying from Seagate and put a few tax dollars back into manufacturing hard drives here. You provide jobs for Americans *and* data security for the federal government. Win-win to me.

          Sure, that's better than selling our secrets to the Chinese, but where's the win to the American hard drive user?

          Geek: Have you got anything without added backdoors?
          NSA: Try that Hitachi Deathstar, it doesn't have that many backdoors in it since the Japanese bought IBM's hard drive division.
          Geek: I don't want any government's backdoors!
          CIA: Can't hd have the Western Digital? Hasn't got as many backdoors in it as the Hitachi Deathstar!
          Yankees (Singing): Back-door-back-door! Back-DOOOR! For Homeland and more!
          Geek: How about this old IDE drive and this 8-bit ISA-bus IDE controller?
          Everyone: Eeeew!
          Geek: What do you mean 'Eeeww'? I don't like backdoors!
          Yankees: Lovely backdoors! Wonderful backdoors!
          DHS: Shut up! Bloody Yankees! You can't have an IDE without the controller card, and you can't have the controller card without the backdoor! Unless he wants to go back to MFM/RLL, and then we can recover everything even after a low-level format! The very first backdoor!
          Geek: I don't like backdoors!
          DHS: Sshh, citizen, don't cause a fuss, or we'll have your backdoor! We love it. Mmm, backdoors, CALEA for the telephone switches, backdoors, the Clipper Chip for the phones, backdoors in newfangled BIOSes, TPMs, DRMs, backdoors into the backdoors, it's backdoors into everything!
          Yankees (singing): Back-door-back-door! Back-DOOOR! Lovely backdoor! Backity door! Safety galore! For homeland and more! Backdoor! Lovely backdoor! Backity door! For the children and more...

    • Who cares if the NSA has found a way to solve AES128 in a timely fashion? Many of the AES candidate algorithms can be extended to arbitrary key lengths and some 4096bits variants are currently out in the wild. Rijindael (today's AES) itself supports 128, 192 and 256bits as standard (required by NSA) and 160/224 as common extras. With more rounds and larger S-tables, larger keys could be supported. The main parameters that really limit key lengths of most AES candidates is throughput and implementation compl
  • The US Government will gladly take/steal technology however they can, but they always have this hissy fit when when another country is trying to advance their own technology, directly, or indirectly.
    • Yeah, and did you know the US Government spends all this money on roads and military and social programs for itself, but the highway from Tongjian to Beijing needs a couple potholes fixed or the Chinese army needs a couple new QSZ-92s and suddenly they get all stingy! Like pursuing their own interests is so important, as if!
    • Aaaaannnd? Really how is that any different than any other country. Let me break it down Technology=Power Governments like power so naturally governments want to keep power and get more power. So advancing technology is in the best interest of the country and giving it away is not. Of course there's going to be a double standard, as long as there's war (SPOILER ALERT: with humans there always will be until we destroy ourselves) it's in every country's best interest to hoard technology/power and keep it
    • In both cases, the US Government is looking out for the interests of the US - as it should. It's good for the US if it can steal others' technology; it's bad for the US if others steal its technology. Any successful country will do the same; unsuccessful ones will end up like Russia in the 90s - making others richer while it gets poorer.

  • The irony of it all (Score:3, Insightful)

    by v3xt0r (799856) on Monday August 27 2007, @06:32PM (#20378011)
    This government, the same one who has no problem allowing China to take hundreds of thousands of jobs away from Americans simply by our failed international trade policies, wants us to worry about national security issues related to 1 corporation. What about all the other national security issues that are caused by trade w. China, or any other socialist/communist country for that matter? What about all the (60%+) staff @ Los Alamos?? Lenovo is the least of my concerns, at this point.

  • hehe National what??? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xednieht (1117791) on Monday August 27 2007, @06:36PM (#20378053) Homepage
    China buys blocks and blocks of our national debt, and they're concerned about the Seagate purchase? pfft

    With their ownership of US debt, China is probably as concerned about our national security as we are.
    • I love the sweet irony you raise.... Bitter and SWEET. China IS as worried about US security as the US supposedly is...

      Captcha: Crystal, hehehe (crystal clear?)

  • Extent of the legit concerns? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by neapolitan (1100101) on Monday August 27 2007, @06:39PM (#20378067)
    We (the US) have long had a ban on the export of 'strong' (>40 bit, now >64 bit key) technology to foreign governments / citizens. I've long wondered about this.

    It seems to me that:

    - All concerns regarding exporting of technology that is not guarded as a trade secret is ineffective. If China wants a technology that is freely available over here (USA), just have one of their numerous graduate students download the technology and send it over there. AFAIK, no American internet provider actively prohibits strong encryption connections to Chinese IPs (their "great firewall" may be different).

    However, my second immediate thought is:

    - Seagate likely has numerous trade secrets that are *not* public domain, and thus can now be exclusively owned and operated by the Chinese. Imagine if DES had a backdoor (or Seagate's equivalent), and my organization uses Seagate's out of box encryption (not likely ;) -- now a foreign government controls this. Legitimately scary.

    As for the 'manufacturing techniques' -- as long as there is an oligopoly of storage makers, I'm not concerned. We have bright minds here coming out of graduate school and going to work at Seagate as well as Western Digital, IBM, Intel, etc.

    All the more reason to use published cryptographic standards, and not rely on any proprietary solutions -- they can never fall exclusively into the "wrong hands."
    • > Imagine if DES had a backdoor (or Seagate's equivalent), and my organization uses Seagate's
      > out of box encryption (not likely ;) -- now a foreign government controls this. Legitimately scary.

      So you are saying that currently every state besides the U.S. should be scared?
  • Seagate have given me years of rock-solid hard drivers. Own many, but never lost one due to failure.

    Now Lenovo wants to buy them out? For all that is holy, stop them. China just doesn't get quality, and the hard drive is one place more than anything else in a PC where quality counts.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Alex Zepeda (10955)
      You're kidding, right? My last Seagate ('Cuda.10 - 320GB) was made in China.
      • > But would we really care if they put lead in the hard drives??

        Memo to self: When my new Lenovo hard drives fails outside of its 7-day warranty period, do not give to kids as 'toy'.

  • Consolidation in hard drive market? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bomanbot (980297) on Monday August 27 2007, @06:47PM (#20378171)
    Wasnt Seagate the company that bought Maxtor not too long ago? And will the buyout end there or will we see the great consolidation in the hard drive business as well, so that in the end it may look like the CPU market, especially for x86 processors?

    I mean, there are not that many hard drive companies left anyway, the big players are Seagate/Maxtor, Hitachi, Western Digital and Samsung and thats about it. Let Seagate be bought and maybe merge another company or two and the hard dirve market looks an awfully lot like AMD/Intel or ATI(AMD)/NVIDIA, which may not be as beneficial as we think....
    • Ages ago, Seagate bought Conner, who made good drives. Later, Maxtor bought Quantum, who made good drives. Recently, Seagate bought Maxtor. These days the real players are Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Fujitsu (SCSI only I believe) and Hitachi.

  • Fuck nationalism, what about quality? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pavon (30274) on Monday August 27 2007, @06:55PM (#20378263)
    Seagate is pretty much the only computer componets company that hasn't wavered much in quality over the years. IBM, Western Digital, and Maxtor have all gone through phases ranging from good quality to absolute crap, while Seagate has continued to put out consistently good products.

    I understand that theory that larger companies can decrease overhead and thus be more efficient, but that never seems to happen. The success rate on mergers looks almost as bad as on startups. But this stupid economic model that is the stockmarket rewards growth (even artificial growth) over all else - quality, efficiency you name it. We created this system, and the laws that govern it, and then we act shocked, just shocked, when the market consolidates to the point of a monopoly. What is the point of even having anti-trust laws when we not only allow but encourage consolidation at every turn.

    Sorry, I'm just so tired of seeing all these mergers that decrease the amount of competition in the field and end up destroying everything that was good about the company to begin with.

  • China Seagate (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hackus (159037) on Monday August 27 2007, @06:59PM (#20378297) Homepage
    Question: These people allowed all of our technology such as computers...etc....out of the country and NOW they have a problem with simple storage devices?

    Whats wrong with this picture?

    China already owns Taiwan all nice and legal like.

    The Chinese already HAVE everything they need to build anything they want.

    The Chinese OWN the United States. China has been buying our treasury bills to float the home mortgages everyone has for christ sake, along with those credit cards everyone on average owes like $5K on!

    NOW they have a problem with moving a relatively simple technology like drive storage out of the country?

    Gimme a beak!

    -Hack
  • On-disk encryption [seagate.com] is why the U.S. government would be nervous about Chinese ownership of Seagate. They'd be afraid of a back door in their "secure" hard drives.

  • It was already produced in China (Score:3, Insightful)

    by WoLpH (699064) <Rick.van.HattemNO@SPAMFawo.nl> on Tuesday August 28 2007, @04:49AM (#20381769)
    So what will change? Perhaps some manager will move but for the rest it's exactly the same as before.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ivan256 (17499)
      [Insert country name here]'s products are hit or miss to. That's why most people judge product quality on reviews and the reputation of the individual maker rather than the region in which they are manufactured.

      Now if you have political reasons for not giving business to a particular country or government, that's another story, and is perfectly respectable.
      • Interesting. Sounds like their testing phase of manufacturing could use some improvement.

        Although that is annoying, I've yet to have a WD or Seagate go bad on me and cause me to loose data. In fact, the only ones to go bad were Maxtor (got it running again later, but something happened that killed large sections of sectors so I never really trusted it again) and a Fujitsu (dead as a door-nail).

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by red_gnom (545555)
        "The US economy in free fall grows at a rate of 4%/yr. China will have to grow at 10% for the next 100 years to equal it in size."
        Your calculation is incorrect.
        US GDP in 2006 was 5 times of China.
        With your assumption that US economy grows 4%/yr, and Chinese 10%/yr.

        5 * (1.04)^n = (1.1)^n
        n = number of years = 29

        Therefore with those grow rates it would take China 29 years to overtake US economy.
        In reality the difference in their GDP grow rates is greater, so it should happen much sooner.
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