[Infowarrior] - OMG! Intel Celeron chips in terrorists' hands

[Richard Forno]

OMG! Intel Celeron chips in terrorists' hands
by Brooke Crothers

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10305297-64.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
A 24 episode? Probably not.

The June 4, 2009 letter (originally marked "confidential") to Intel  
from the SEC states: "We are aware of a May 2008 news report that PCs  
in Cuba contain your Celeron processors. Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria  
are identified by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism,  
and are subject to U.S. economic sanctions and export controls."

The letter continues. "We note that your Form 10-K does not include  
disclosure regarding contacts with Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria.  
Please describe to us the nature and extent of any past, current, and  
anticipated contacts with the referenced countries, whether through  
distributors, resellers, licensees, or other direct or indirect  
arrangements."

The letter was cited earlier in The Wall Street Journal.

And what kind of computers are we talking about exactly? (It would  
strain credulity, I think, to cue in a Jack Bauer narration--"The  
following takes place between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m"--here.)

"The Cuban PCs have Intel Celeron processors with 80 gigabytes of  
memory (sic) and 512 RAM and are equipped with Microsoft's Windows XP  
operating system. Both could be violations of a U.S. trade embargo,  
but not something Washington can do anything about in the absence of  
diplomatic relations with Havana. Clerks said the PCs were assembled  
by Cuban companies using parts imported from China."

Maybe there's more to this than meets the eye but a lowly Celeron chip  
(one of Intel's bottom-of-the-performance-barrel processors) is hardly  
the chip to designate as a threat to national security. In short, data- 
crunching server farms--assuming they exist--in Cuba are not built  
with Celeron processors.

For the record, an excerpt from the Intel response is as follows:  
"Intel has no business contacts with the Subject Countries, either  
directly or indirectly through tacit agreement with its customers.  
Intel does not provide products or technology to the Subject  
Countries...."

A more productive line of inquiry--by another U.S. government agency-- 
might be: Where on the world market might these countries be buying  
sophisticated multiprocessor computer hardware based on, for instance,  
the newest high-end Intel Nehalem Core i7 processors?

Now, there's an idea for a future '24' episode.

  Brooke Crothers is a former editor at large at CNET News.com, and  
has been an editor for the Asian weekly version of the Wall Street  
Journal. He writes for the CNET Blog Network, and is not a current  
employee of CNET. Contact him at mbcrothers at gmail.com. Disclosure.