Ausma Bernot, Charles Sturt University
Australian government offices have begun removing more than 900 Chinese-made surveillance cameras, intercoms, electronic entry systems and video recorders. Last week, a government audit found the technology had been installed in more than 250 departments and agencies.
Concerns about the cameras prompted dire warnings from shadow cybersecurity minister James Paterson who has previously called Chinese espionage and foreign interference the greatest threat to Australia’s way of life.
According to Mr Paterson, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess has expressed similar concerns about the cameras, saying, “where data would end up and what else it could be used for would be of great concern to me and my agency”.
China, meanwhile, has reacted to the order to remove the cameras as an “erroneous” action that abuses state power and discriminates against Chinese companies.
So, why are Australian officials so worried about these cameras, and is the level of concern justified?
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The world’s largest video surveillance companies
The two China-based companies that supplied these cameras are Hikvision and Dahua. The MIT Technology Review called Hikvision, which is headquartered in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou, “the world’s biggest surveillance company you’ve never heard of”.
Hikvision is indeed the largest manufacturer of video surveillance equipment in the world, selling to around 200 countries. Dahua is Hikvision’s largest global competitor and the second-largest company in this space.
Both companies have authorised dealers to sell their products in Australia and respond to public tenders. In 2021, independent researchers found there were over 60,000 surveillance camera networks from the two companies in Australia – over 41,000 from Hikvision and 18,000 from Dahua.
That’s a small number compared to the companies’ over 700,000 camera networks in the United States and over 800,000 in Vietnam. Removing just 900 is also just a drop in the ocean when you look at the overall number in Australia.
Links to human rights violations
The Australian government’s audit cited the direct links of Dahua and Hikvision to the mass surveillance system that has been set up in the Xinjiang region of China to monitor and control the Uyghur minority.
In 2019, the US added both companies to its Entity List, which requires foreign companies to file for additional government approvals to continue buying parts or technologies from US companies. (The Biden administration added six more Chinese entities to the blacklist last week, saying they were linked to China’s surveillance balloon program.)
All the Chinese companies on the list have been deemed to be “acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States”. The reasoning was not sugarcoated:
Specifically, these entities have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Last year, the UK also banned Hikvision surveillance systems from being installed in ‘sensitive’ sites.
Links to the Chinese Communist Party
Both Hikvision and Dahua sell to and work with the Chinese Communist Party and government.
Investigations by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) found that in 2019, Dahua received around US$19.9 million (A$28.8 million) in Chinese government subsidies. Dahua also has its own Communist Party committee and supplies technology for numerous projects linked to the Chinese government.
Similarly, Hikvision has a party branch, which was led by its deputy general manager in 2015, and is an important supplier for the People’s Liberation Army. The company has also been visited by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
On its Chinese language website, Hikvision often showcases collaborations with the government’s public security apparatus.
My research shows that through close cooperation with the Chinese Party and government, surveillance companies can access large subsidies to support their domestic and international businesses. Caught between domestic business growth opportunities and international regulations, companies often choose to work in line with party-state policies. The market opportunities are simply larger this way.
Greater scrutiny by countries like the US, UK and Australia may further push Chinese surveillance companies to seek relationships in countries that are perceived as more stable commercial partners. The Chinese government has been calling for a further decoupling of the economy from its rivals and strengthening collaborations with China-friendly nations.
For example, when the US, Australia and other allies banned Huawei’s 5G equipment several years ago, countries in the Persian Gulf happily stepped in to fill their place.
So, would Australian data be safe?
Links to the Communist Party are just part of the concern. So is the potential for data collected by these companies to be transferred to the Chinese government.
Whether these companies do actually transfer data to Chinese intelligence agencies would be hard to either prove or disprove. Paterson acknowledges “we may never know if data is being exfiltrated from these cameras”. In a statement to Time, Hikvision and Dahua representatives rejected claims they store or share user data.
However, Chinese security laws passed in 2017 can compel Chinese organisations to transfer the data they collect to the government. As a senior analyst from ASPI explains, the companies may say the data wouldn’t be accessed, but “if there is a national security or national defence demand for that data, then it would be”.
The recent TikTok example showed that even if a company claims not to send data to the Chinese government, there may be other ways it can be accessed (such as through a company’s cloud storage).
The Australian focus has so far been on identifying ‘risk’ to national security, but only that coming from China. This is despite other countries, such as the United States, previously being connected to espionage via tech providers.
Instead, Australia should take a more systematic approach that guides the use of all critical data-collecting communications technologies and creates rules that all suppliers must adhere to.
Ausma Bernot, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security, Charles Sturt University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
Do Chinese-made security cameras concern you? What do you think should be done with them? Let us know in the comments section below.
Wow more Chinese hate, so we do what our masters are telling us to do again. There are no human rights violations and abuses in Xinjiang. This has already been debunked!
Have a look at why the UK banned Huawei’s, they could find no security risk at all but were told by the USA to ban Huawei anyway this was reported in the Sunday Times over there.
Have a look at who funds the Australian Strategic Policy Institute then tell me they are telling the truth! Maybe we should ask the USA why they monitor all mobile phones of all their supposed friendly countries? Check out Prism and most likely newer versions of it now, Angela Merkel’s phone was tapped by the USA so a very nice friend.
Perhaps also ask Germany what they think of the USA blowing up the Nordstream pipelines! who need enemy’s when you have the USA as a friend.
Perhaps the people that write articles like this should tell us if they are funded by any government or weapon manufacturers ?
You must remember the USA has a budget for people to write negative articles about China I believe its 300 Million per year.
Don’t forget the USA lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq if they can do that and kill millions of people what else will they do??
Of course we should be worried by Chinese surveillance in OUR country! They have openly stated that they want to be the world’s superpower and given the tyrannical nature of its dictatorship, the human rights abuses, the “investing” in other countries that as we now realise is a subterfuge for getting a foot in the door of foreign governments, anyone who is not alarmed is living under a rock.
We have made a grave error in allowing China to manufacture almost everything we need and it’s time to stop it. China is not a country to trust with anything.
Give some facts for your statements, as far as I can see they have never said they want to be the worlds only superpower. There has been no proof of human rights abuses unlike proof that we have! have a look at our government and see how many Americans are in control of our military or have a huge influence. We need to become a sovereign country and control our own destiny and not do as we are told by others
Well said!
Firstly, where else could we competitively source comparable cameras with the same capabilities? The West is at last falling on its own sword of lazily relying on China for cheap, cheap goods. We used to have the capability of making photographic equipment but while the Chinese make everything we need, our most rewarding activity is chasing a ball around a paddock. Wake up Australia!
Secondly, if the cameras are connected to the internet there is clearly a problem but surely, if the cameras are on a closed loop system (e.g. wired to a base) there should be minimal danger of infiltration.
Why does anyone outside of Canberra need to connect by internet to surveillance cameras in a Canberra government office?
It’s a similar issue to our data protection on computer systems. We have far too much unnecessary data on internet based systems when it can be stored off-line or on a closed loop intranet system.
very true, we also gave away just about all our manufacturing due high labour cost here,. I do believe that’s fine with most things but not essential items, medical/defence/ power system and banks they should be own by Australia.
All that mentioned are already owned by Australia. But medical ingredients feeding into Western drug maunfacturers are from China and India due to economies of scale.
As the population of India is fast exceeding that of China, the two countries will be dominant. India is a democracy albeit with Modi things may change. Modi banned BBC broadcasts regarded as unfriendly about him. We have much more Indian immigrants nowadays. Hopefully they should lower the costs.
Frankly I’d have far more concerns over the broad growth of CCTV surveillance in our own cities and suburbs, motorways and everywhere else associated with transit, by not just our own government but also by private companies. If anything data with government is at least often regulated (and government IT systems are so inept that the data is unlikely to be misused because systems won’t operate together), but private companies face no such scrutiny.
China is a non-event in all this. You seriously think the Chinese government cares that you went to McDonalds for a sly Sundae and they might blackmail secrets from you under threat of telling your wife you broke your diet? Give me a break.
“blackmail secrets from you under threat of telling your wife you broke your diet?”
I am not afraid of China nor US but my wife is another matter!!
We are tracked in our shopping centres, jailed for telling the truth, information & privacy is not secured by those we deal with. We turn off tracking, yet we are still tracked.
We are being watched, tracked, targeted wherever we go & hacked via our dealings.