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Considering The Impact

How does this impact us in the UK? The combined impact of the above legislative decisions and the wider human rights issues has led the UK to issue our own bans against Chinese-made security products. The Ministry of Defence issued guidance in 2021 ‘not to use/install Hikvision equipment’, followed by the Department of Health and Social Care banning new Hikvision camera purchases in 2022. MP Oliver Dowden made a broader statement in November 2022, announcing that the government would ‘Cease deployment of such equipment onto sensitive sites where it is produced by companies subject to the National Intelligence Law of the People’s Republic of China’ before continuing that departments ‘Should consider whether they should remove and replace such equipment’. As a personal anecdote, we at LILIN have been inundated with tender requests from local councils looking for non-Chinese surveillance, particularly in the past six months. It seems to us that the NDAA has finally made the leap from the USA, to Europe, and now is being accepted in the UK.

So far, 2023 has been awash with headlines weighing in on the potential risks associated with using Chinese-made security technologybrought to the general public’s attention with the repeated sightings of Chinese spy balloons. Their size- and their novelty- has led to discussions over the danger of Chinese spyware, but as Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner Fraser Sampson comments, “There has been a lot in the news in recent days about how concerned we should be about Chinese spy balloons 60,000ft up in the sky. I do not understand why we are not at least as concerned about the Chinese cameras six feet above our heads in the street and elsewhere.”

Is it a lack of knowledge of these events, or perhaps the prevalence of OEM products in the custom installation market, that has limited interest and discussion on this topic? It could be that installers do not realise the sheer number of brands that OEM their products from Chinese manufacturers, with independent camera authority IPVM verifying 140+ OEMs from the two leading manufacturers alone in the US in 2020.

As an industry, we need to be more aware of where our products are coming from and the implications this could have on our installations, to best serve our customers’ needs.