A Chinese Company was Selling Spyware to the U.S. Military
Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) husband Richard Blum was a part owner of a Chinese corporation that allegedly provided computers with spyware chips to the US military.
This is according to Peter Schweizer’s new book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win.
The military has never been able to assess how much vital information China was able to steal thanks to these machines.
Feinstein’s long and costly association with Communist China is the subject of a chapter in Red-Handed. The senator has shown to be extremely valuable to Beijing, to the point where she attempted to justify the Tiananmen Square massacre by claiming that China only sent combat forces to murder thousands of protesters when it ran out of cops.
The book says the husband of the senator did a great deal of lucrative business with Chinese companies, including entities run by the Communist government and linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Not that anyone bothers nowadays whether American companies are dealing with Chinese companies, but this is part of the American anti-communist history.
How was it possible for an American whose wife is a Senator to do business with Communist China?
Blum became a major investor in a computer company that was founded by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), an institution tied to both the Chinese government and the PLA. The company was originally called Legend but is better known by its second name, Lenovo.
Lenovo bought IBM’s line of personal computer products in 2005. This made it a major player in the computer business.
One of the companies that helped Lenovo in the IBM deal was Richard Blum’s Newbridge Capital, says the book.
Banning Lenovo
Barely a year after Lenovo’s acquisition of the IBM’s range of PCs, the U.S. State Department did not allow these computers to connect to the classified networks in 2006. That was a year after the acquisition and after the authorities ‘discovered’ security vulnerabilities in Lenovo’s products.
The book says, somehow, the company managed to sell a large number of laptop computers to the U.S. military.
The army then discovered that many of those machines included motherboard chips that “would record all the data that was being inputted into that laptop and send it back to China”.
Despite the fact that the Department of Homeland Security and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence Directorate have both identified the machines as cyberespionage risks, the Pentagon released an audit in 2019 that found the Department of Defense (DoD) has not formally banned computers from Lenovo, China’s now-largest personal computer company. In 2018, the United States Air Force spent $1.9 million on 1,378 Lenovo items.
Harper-Collins released the novel Red-Handed. Schweizer is a senior contributor to Breitbart News and the president of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute (GAI).
Richard Charles Blum is an American investor and chairman and president of Blum Capital, an equity investment management firm.
Read the full story here: Breitbart