For example, research found 55,455 Hikvision networks in London. “From my experience of walking around London, I would probably go through it several times. They are found in almost every supermarket,” says Samuel Woodhams, a Top10VPN researcher who conducted the study.
The prevalence of Hikvision cameras abroad has raised concerns about national security, although the company has not been shown to transfer its data overseas to China. In 2019, the U.S. passed a bill banning Hikvision from holding any contracts with the federal government.
What really made Hikvision infamous on the world stage was his involvement in China’s oppressive policies in Xinjiang against Muslim minorities, mostly Uighurs. Numerous surveillance cameras have been installed, many equipped with advanced facial recognition, both inside and outside Xinjiang detention camps to help control the government over the region. And Hikvision has been a big part of that activity. The company was found to have received at least $ 275 million in government contracts to build surveillance in the region and has developed AI cameras that can detect physical characteristics of the Uyghur ethnic group.
Asked about Xinjiang by the MIT Technology Review, Hikvision responded with a statement that did not address them directly, but said the company “must and will continue to strictly abide by the laws and regulations applicable to the countries in which we operate, following business ethics.” internationally accepted business standards and business standards “.
“The ways [companies like Hikvision] they are able to keep people in place through checkpoints, and facial recognition systems have turned the entire region, at least from an Uyghur perspective, into a flexible system. [but] closed system. They often talk about it as an open-air prison, “said Darren Byler, a Simon Fraser University anthropologist and author of In the camps: China’s high-tech penal colony. “And that really wouldn’t be possible without these tech companies.”
Unexplored waters
Adding Hikvision to the SDN would do more than increase tensions between the US and China: it would open a new front in international sanctions, in which technology companies are increasingly involved in geopolitical power struggles.
Healy says people could be prosecuted for working or doing business with the company once the sanction is announced: “[Hikvision] it can no longer interact with the US dollar or the US financial system. And other banks and other financial institutions around the world, in general, will not do business with you either, because they want to keep their access to the US dollar and the US financial markets. ”
At the very least, this would mean that Hikvision could not sell its cameras outside of China and its international revenue would fall to zero. But it is unclear whether governments and companies that already use Hikvision cameras will be asked to replace them immediately. Then things get even more complicated when it comes to Hikvision services beyond hardware. Can current Hikvision users accept company software updates? Do you use enterprise cloud storage? “This is exactly the kind of thing [the US government] could make an exception out there, ”says Healy, because the traditional application of the SDN list may be impractical in the digital age.
