UK Bans Chinese Surveillance Gear From Sensitive State Premises (bloomberg.com) 10
The UK government will no longer deploy surveillance equipment made by Chinese companies at sites it considers sensitive, minister Oliver Dowden said in a statement Thursday. From a report: "Since security considerations are always paramount around these sites, we are taking action now to prevent any security risks materialising," Dowden said. The government's decision was based on a review of current and future possible security risks arising from the installation of visual surveillance systems on the government estate.
China's Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. and Zhejiang Dahua Technology are among the world's leading video surveillance providers and have been on a US blacklist since 2019 because of concerns about them being implicated in human rights violations. Discontent about the lack of safeguards preventing the Chinese government from acquiring data and information from its companies has grown in recent years and other governments have taken steps to limit their exposure.
China's Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. and Zhejiang Dahua Technology are among the world's leading video surveillance providers and have been on a US blacklist since 2019 because of concerns about them being implicated in human rights violations. Discontent about the lack of safeguards preventing the Chinese government from acquiring data and information from its companies has grown in recent years and other governments have taken steps to limit their exposure.
OK, but... the fuck? (Score:4, Insightful)
UK Bans Chinese Surveillance Gear From Sensitive State Premises
It's one of those things that in and of itself it's a good idea but implies that someone has been making some colossally stupid decisions up until this point.
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People are still allowed to bring in their phones, right? The ones with 1 or 2 cameras, a microphone, and a gps...
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But you get that the authorities are going for the low-hanging (or in this case "high hanging") fruit, which is the drones, right? Practically everyone has a cell phone and a reason to be carrying it everywhere. Compared to that, practically no one* has a drone or a reason to be carrying it everywhere. Also, like I wrote, the vantage point from an airborne platform is different
Re:OK, but... the fuck? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a case where Technology has improved faster then the laws.
20 Years ago.
A GPS was about 4x3x3 inches. Camera's needed to be about a half an inch deep, Storage via solid state, were in the Megabytes, and more storage needed mechanical mechanisms, that were noisy and used more power. Plus all this was expensive. Plus wireless data transfer, was not widely used, and Cell signals were much spottier than today.
So for a government, back in 2002 to electronically spy on an other country. They needed to bring in and hide larger equipment, then have to go back an retrieve it. If the device was lost or destroyed then it would be a bigger financial risk.
So if someone wanted to spy on an other country, they needed to be precise with the target, and plan an elaborate method to get the spy material there.
Today with off the self tech, someone could just drop a piece of equipment, costing a few bucks, and it will wireless send data, and probably just tossed away by the cleaning staff, figuring someone lost their device. However, they could in theory take it a step forward, by embedding it in consumer devices, such as a smart phone, and a normal Country Loving Citizen could be an unwilling pawn to collect the data.
A lot of the Tech we have today, use to be stuff of science fiction, and trying to make laws regulating a fictional product often will get backlash, for wasting lawmakers time and tax money.
Say parliament or the congress trying to put laws around Matter/Energy Transporters like we see in Star Trek. Debating if said fictional technology, will kill the person or not, (not knowing how the technology will actually or could really work). Making laws if someone would beam into an other home, would that be breaking and entering, or just trespassing, what rights would a transporter duplicate have, and say people decide to make personal transporter duplicates for their own personal porn stars.... In short, at this time it is mostly speculation, and what the real risks and rewards of the hypothetical technology isn't quite known for a real legal stance.
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Not really. The chance that there is actually a backdoor in those products is vanishingly small. You can be sure that GCHQ has examined them in detail. In fact even hobbyists have managed to reverse engineer the Hikvision firmware enough to replace it with their own. Sensitive sites will be running intrusion detection, and have the CCTV system on an isolated network anyway.
This is really about the fact that Hikvision dominates the market. There is a reason their equipment is so often found in those secure l
Re:OK, but... the fuck? (Score:4, Insightful)
The chance that there is actually a backdoor in those products is vanishingly small.
You don't need malicious backdoors or there to be problems...
But you know it is actually owned by the Chinese government.
You can be sure that GCHQ has examined them in detail. In fact even hobbyists have managed to reverse engineer the Hikvision firmware enough to replace it with their own.
That's cool, don't get me wrong, and great or a budget, but you don't want to be blocked on a camera deployment or repair because the manufacturer bumped a minor revision and you need new irmware reverse engineered.
Sensitive sites will be running intrusion detection, and have the CCTV system on an isolated network anyway.
Indeed, but you do security in layers.
This is really about the fact that Hikvision dominates the market. There is a reason their equipment is so often found in those secure locations. It's cheap, it has good optics, and the firmware is good enough. Banning it is just to help British companies get those sales, which are much needed after they lost most of their access to the EU market.
They haven't mandated UK manufactured cameras. People are more likely to buy American or European then British as a result.
Duh. (Score:2)
because nobody is going to spy on their subjects (Score:2)