At Least 11 UK Police Forces Use Chinese Hikvision Cameras for Public Surveillance: Survey

Hikvision cameras in an electronic mall in Beijing on May 24, 2019. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images

At least 11 British police forces are using surveillance cameras made by Chinese state-controlled company Hikvision, a survey has found.

Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner Fraser Sampson on Monday published the initial analysis of a police survey, saying that almost a third of respondents confirmed they were using Hikvision cameras.

Conor Healy, director of government research at security and surveillance industry research group IPVM, told The Epoch Times that he believes Hikvision and Dahua, another Chinese surveillance camera company, are “directly responsible” for the scale of human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

He also said there are “quite significant” security risks in using equipment from the two companies, which “consistently” had vulnerabilities in their software that open doors for hackers to access information.

Police Survey

Sampson said he wrote to chief officers of all 43 police forces in England and Wales, the Ministry of Defence, British Transport Police, and the Civil Nuclear Constabulary in June, asking about their use and governance of all overt surveillance camera systems deployed in public places.

Of those who responded, a third, or 12, confirmed they were using surveillance cameras manufactured outside the UK. Eleven of them were using Hikvision cameras, including police forces in Bedfordshire, Cleveland, Hampshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Northumbria, North Wales, Nottinghamshire, Suffolk, and the Metropolitan Police and British Transport Police.

Two of the 11 said they were aware of ethical concerns regarding Hikvision cameras. One of them claimed “the Home Office had investigated those concerns and were satisfied that there was no evidence of human rights violations,” the analysis said.

Others didn’t mention ethical concerns, saying they had not breached any procurement policies or government guidelines.

Some forces using Hikvision cameras said the cameras were stand-alone and were not part of the network.

Undated photo showing the New Scotland Yard sign outside the Metropolitan Police headquarters in London. Kirsty O’Connor/PA Media

The Met was the only force that said it was using live facial recognition (LFR). More than a third (13) said they would use LFR in the future. Six forces said they had access to either the Police National Database or the Child Abuse Images Database.

No forces said they were using Hikvision body-worn cameras, while 26 of the 28 forces using drones are using equipment from DJI, a privately-owned company in China, according to its website.

Sampson is expecting more responses from police forces and will publish a full analysis in early 2023.

Hikvision ‘Directly Responsible’ for Human Rights Atrocities: Healy

Hikvision and Dahua, the world’s top manufacturers of surveillance cameras, have been blacklisted by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for posing a threat to American national security.

Both firms, which are ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are known to supply surveillance equipment that has been used to target Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region.

A Dahua thermal camera takes a man's temperature during a demonstration of the technology in San Francisco, Calif., on April 24, 2020. Lewis Surveillance/Handout via Reuters

The companies previously denied being complicit in the human rights abuses in Xinjiang that a number of legislatures have called “genocide,” but Healy argued that while other suppliers may be able to argue they don’t know how their products are being used, it’s “not at all an exaggeration to say that Hikvision and Dahua are themselves directly responsible for the extraordinary scale of what has happened in Xinjiang.”

Citing the testimony of a former internment camp detainee, Healy painted a picture of a “panopticon.”

Ovalbek Turdakun, a Chinese Kyrgyz Christian who spent 10 months in a camp in 2018, immediately recognised Hikvision’s logo when Healy showed it to him, saying: “Video cameras. They are everywhere.”

Turdakun told Healy that he shared a cell with 22 people, who were not allowed to speak to each other, go to the toilet in the room, or stand up without permission.

Yet “the guards almost never entered,” Healy said, because they could monitor “an entire floor in these concentration camps using custom built sophisticated Hikvision technology.”

“These are not off the shelf systems. You can’t go online and buy camera systems to run your concentration camp,” he said. “The idea that Hikvision has no idea how these products are being used [is] utterly absurd. They know exactly how they’re being used because they are participants in all this.”

Security Risks ‘Quite Significant’

Hikvision’s controlling shareholder is the China Electronics Technology HIK Group, a subsidiary of state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), one of China’s “big 10” state-owned military industrial groups.

According to a Sina Finance report on Hikvision, the company was born while CETC’s 52nd Research Institute was exploring ways to make profit.

“That was when the 911 terrorist attack made a splash in the global security and surveillance market. Chen [Zongnian] and Hu [Yangzhong] ... decided to found Hikvision under the auspices of the 52nd Research Institute,” the report said.

Healy said the products Hikvision and Dahua offer to Western clients are “nothing special” compared to other options but they often out-bid their competitors because the West has “a broken procurement system that fails to consider factors beyond the lowest bidder.”

The security risks of using these cameras are also “quite significant,” Healy said, citing previously exposed backdoors and vulnerabilities, some of which appeared to be deliberately included in the software.

Asked how these vulnerabilities can be exploited, Healy said bad actors can access recordings, archives, and settings, meaning they can “see what it sees and hear what it hears ... or turn it on or off and reposition it.”

When a camera is connected to a secure network, “depending on the setup of [the] network, it’s possible that you could use that device to then hack their information and steal their data off of their computers,” he added.

Then-health secretary Sajid Javid on March 15, 2022. James Manning/PA Media

In April this year, then-health secretary Sajid Javid banned his department from buying security cameras from Hikvision after a procurement review revealed ethical concerns.

Sampson subsequently wrote to then-Cabinet Office minister Michael Ellis, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, and Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities Michael Gove, who was responsible for local government, saying the rationale behind Javid’s decision “must apply equally across all government departments, devolved administrations, and local authorities.”

Hikvision, Dahua, and the Home Office didn’t respond to requests for comment.