Dell and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Dell to online shop­pers: "Will you be using this PC to design weapons of mass destruc­tion?" (Laud­able strat­egy, laugh­able execution!)

Dell has taken a leaf out of the US government's book of stu­pid ques­tions, ask­ing shop­pers in its online store whether they intend to use their newly acquired PC to cre­ate weapons of mass destruc­tion. The trick here — if that is their inten­tion — is to select 'no'.

If they answer 'yes', then Dell will refuse to ship them the hardware.

Smart move, Dell. That should catch out the ter­ror­ists. You can pic­ture it now:

In the same way that the Visa waiver while enter­ing the US poses tax­ing ques­tions to vis­i­tors about whether they are enter­ing the US to com­mit an act of ter­ror­ism or geno­cide, this line of enquiry is eas­ily cir­cum­vented with a sim­ple lie. And let's face it, if you're bent on com­mit­ting an act of ter­ror­ism, then you're prob­a­bly not going to lose too much sleep about lying to an immi­gra­tion offi­cer… or even to Dell for that matter.

Accord­ing to this ZDNet piece, a Dell spokes­woman said the ques­tions were a rou­tine part of the sale process and were required by any US cor­po­ra­tion to com­ply with export reg­u­la­tions. How­ever, other com­puter mak­ers gen­er­ally make do by refer­ring buy­ers to a "terms of sale" page, with terms such as "you agree to com­ply with all Export Laws".

Dell, how­ever, goes so far as to ask cus­tomers to promise their PC isn't going to be used "in con­nec­tion with weapons of mass destruc­tion" (the periph­er­als mar­ket really has moved on, hasn't it). And, as if that isn't clear, the site goes on to explain that this would include "nuclear appli­ca­tions, mis­sile tech­nol­ogy, or chem­i­cal or bio­log­i­cal weapons purposes".

The Dell UK site is worded slightly dif­fer­ently, accept­ing that there may be excep­tions to this rule. Dell UK won't sell to "a user involved in weapons of mass destruc­tion or genocide…"

Hang on, there's more:

So, assum­ing any­body could find a "com­pe­tent EU gov­ern­ment" (hint, don't start your search in the UK) to grant them per­mis­sion, then Dell will gladly sup­ply com­puter equip­ment for the pro­duc­tion of weapons of mass destruction.

(Pre­sum­ably this is the same kind of per­mis­sion gained by the Tal­iban — remem­ber them? — to buy mil­i­tary hard­ware from West­ern gov­ern­ments, which we men­tion by way of a cau­tion to Dell. You never know when these things will come back to haunt you. Just ask IBM.)

But of course that point lends too much cre­dence to the notion that such processes are observed — that ter­ror­ists really would play by these rules. They have to get their tech­nol­ogy some­where, after all — and such obsta­cles are unlikely to deter them. For exam­ple, it almost goes with­out say­ing that Sony would never will­ingly con­done the use of its equip­ment for nefar­i­ous pur­poses, but that stance didn't stop Sad­dam Hus­sein at the height of his pow­ers allegedly buy­ing 4,000 of the company's PlaySta­tion 2 con­soles to cre­ate a crude super­com­puter capa­ble of ful­fill­ing a num­ber of mil­i­tary uses.

Inter­est­ing inten­tions, ris­i­ble execution.