Beijing-made CCTV cameras can recognise faces, eavesdrop on conversation and judge a person's mood.
26/05/2022
What if UK streets were plastered with Russian-made CCTV cameras, many employing sophisticated technology such as facial-recognition software — and virtually all hooked up to the internet.
Imagine their manufacturers — able to access them remotely — had been ordered by the Kremlin to make all the data recorded available to it, with the result that the FSB (the Russian secret police), as well as the military, had the opportunity to spy on our streets, citizens, police stations, universities and hospitals.
Perhaps the cameras were being used to monitor the comings and goings at government departments, too, where ministers make vital decisions about, say, supplying weaponry to Ukraine. The Russian state could also be tracking dissidents and other opponents of the Ukraine war around our streets. Fortunately, Russia doesn’t have much of an electronics industry.
But China does. And while we are not engaged in armed conflict with China, it is deeply worrying how surveillance equipment designed and made in a country run by a dictatorship with an appalling human rights record has been allowed to embed itself in our security networks.
For anyone who sighed with relief in 2020 when Boris Johnson made his welcome but belated decision to ban China’s telecoms giant Huawei from further participation in constructing the UK’s 5G network, I’m afraid to say the threat has not gone away.
Last month, Fraser Sampson, the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner, wrote to Cabinet Minister Michael Gove to warn him about the dominance of Chinese CCTV equipment in Britain.
He said he had ‘become increasingly concerned at the security risks presented by some state-controlled surveillance systems covering our public spaces’. Two Chinese firms have become huge players in our CCTV market: Hikvision, which has revenues of £7.5 billion and Dahua, whose revenues are £3 billion. While both are private companies, both have major shareholders with connections to the Chinese Communist Party.
Yet security concerns don’t seem to have been in the minds of the Government departments, police forces and councils who have ordered Hikvision and Dahua cameras by the hundreds.
Many have advanced features, even if they are not always used: microphones, the capacity for facial and gender recognition and distinguishing between people of different racial groups.
Some cameras can analyse behaviour — detecting, for example, if a fight might be breaking out. Others can even judge moods, track via heat-sensing and learn patterns of behaviour, so as to highlight any unusual activity.
The campaign group Big Brother Watch sent 4,500 freedom of information (FoI) requests to public bodies asking whether they had Hikvision or Dahua cameras employed on their premises.
Of the 1,300 which responded, 800 confirmed that they did, including nearly three-quarters of councils, 60 per cent of schools, half of NHS trusts and universities and nearly a third of police forces.