The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has urged the U.S. Navy Exchange to remove Lenovo computers from its stores over concerns about the company’s ties with the CCP regime.
“The Navy Exchange is a valuable asset for U.S. servicemembers as its marketplace offers competitive prices with no sales taxes,” Mr. Gallagher stated in the letter.
“That being said, the Exchange should not be selling Lenovo products to U.S. servicemembers, let alone incentivizing such purchases with tax-free, discounted prices. Doing so creates a major cybersecurity threat and undermines the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2023 Cyber Strategy, which commits to ‘fostering a culture of cybersecurity and cyber awareness,’” he added.
The House Select Committee asked Mr. Bianchi to schedule a briefing no later than Oct. 20 to explain why the Navy Exchange decided to sell Lenovo products to active-duty U.S. servicemembers.
Lenovo’s largest shareholder is the CCP, and it has affiliations with the Chinese military and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The company has also been linked to the CCP’s espionage campaigns, Mr. Gallagher said.
Mr. Gallagher said he was concerned that selling Chinese-linked tech products could allow the CCP access to servicemembers’ sensitive personal information, posing a risk to U.S. national security.
“According to the 2023 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, China ‘probably represents the broadest, most active, and persistent cyber espionage threat to U.S. Government and private-sector networks,’” he said.
Concerns Over Lenovo’s Relations With CCP
In a report prepared for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, technology experts said that Lenovo is believed to have been complicit in installing Superfish spyware and backdoor access on a number of its computer products.“Superfish is a preloaded software shipped with Lenovo computers that ostensibly monitored internet browser traffic to improve advertisements but also allowed hackers to read all encrypted browser traffic, including banking transactions, passwords, emails, and instant messages,” the report reads.
It said that Lenovo products had been banned by intelligence agencies in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand since the mid-2000s, when reports of “backdoor” access and vulnerable firmware found in Lenovo products emerged.
In 2006, the State Department banned the use of Lenovo computers on classified systems to avoid any compromise of its information and communication channels.
The report states that the U.S. Navy announced in 2015 its decision to replace servers for its guided missile cruisers and destroyers after Lenovo acquired certain IBM server and software product lines.
“In 2016, several incidents suggested the [Department of Defense] may have banned Lenovo products owing to concerns about cyber spying against Pentagon networks and concerns that the company is installing backdoors in its products for the purposes of espionage,” it added.
It warned that Chinese-linked products could potentially “access sensitive personal and financial information held by courts, police departments, elections departments, education departments, children and family services, and other social service providers and agencies.”
