The chairman of the UK Defence Select Committee has called for an inquiry after an investigation found that surveillance cameras from Chinese technology companies Hikvision and Dahua are still in use at British army bases, months after they should have been replaced over security concerns.
The report said Hikvision cameras were seen at sites including an army training and weapons testing site at Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, and the Westminster Barracks of the 1st Battalion London Guard, while Dahua cameras were found at Hyde Park Barracks, minutes away from Buckingham Palace.
The investigators visited a dozen other sites but couldn’t get close enough to identify the brands of the surveillance cameras.
Surprised that “the British Army is using Chinese camera systems that Beijing deploys to monitor its own population,” Defence Select Committee Chairman Tobias Ellwood said there should be a Cabinet-led inquiry while the defence ministry should act now to “ensure their systems aren’t relying on Chinese surveillance technology.”
Former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith also said the defence ministry has to “accept what has gone wrong and say we are now putting it right and getting rid of all the cameras.”
In December last year, Duncan Smith said he had made a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to every government department, asking about their possession and use of Hikvision cameras.
While the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Health and Social Care, and the Wales Office answered his questions “completely openly, and talked of getting rid of the cameras,” all other departments, including the MoD, the Home Office, and the Foreign Office, refused to answer the questions, citing security reasons.
Duncan Smith told The Mail that he believes these departments still have cameras made by Hikvision and Dahua, the report said.
“We take the security of our sites very seriously and have a range of measures in place to scrutinise the integrity of our arrangements,” an MoD spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. “It is wrong to suggest our sites are compromised.”
Hikvision and Duahua, which have previously denied involvement in human rights abuses, didn’t respond to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.
In a statement to The Mail, a Hikvision spokesperson said: “Technical analysis of our products have never indicated they are a threat to the national security of the UK.
“It is regrettable that some individuals have been willing to politicise a critical element of the country’s security architecture, thus reducing public trust in the vital work our products support.”
Under China’s national intelligence law, all organisations and citizens are required to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.
Hikvision’s controlling shareholder is the China Electronics Technology HIK Group, a subsidiary of state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corp. (CETC), one of China’s “big 10” state-owned military industrial groups.
The company was founded under the auspices of CETC’s 52nd Research Institute to make a profit after “the 9/11 terrorist attack made a splash in the global security and surveillance market,” according to a Sina Finance feature on Hikvision.
Fu Lihua, Dahua’s founder and biggest shareholder, also is the CCP secretary of the company.
According to feature reports on Fu, before founding Dahua, he was assigned after college to work at Tongda electronic equipment—a military-owned factory.
In a speech at a CCP event in 2018, Fu said the company was armed with CCP leader Xi Jinping’s “new socialism with Chinese characteristics” and vowed to “always follow the party” and contribute to the China dream with Dahua.
