India and the Manchurian Camera

India has a pro tip for would-be users of surveillance cameras, especially ones installed in your own government’s buildings: Don’t buy from China. Recognizing since at least 2021 that they might have a teensy-weensy security problem with the one million Chinese-made cameras installed in government institutions, India has finally decided that maybe they should, well, do something.

In April, according to Reuters, Indian officials met with 17 surveillance gear makers and asked them if they were ready to play by the country’s new rules, which require closed-circuit television (CCTV) vendors to “submit hardware, software and source code for assessment in government labs.” And to absolutely no one’s surprise, they answered (more or less), “Um, no. We don’t like your rules, so, we’re not ready.”

All of which is to say, the surveillance gear makers pitched a wall-eyed fit, predictably portending industry losses, marketplace tremors, timeline impacts, and disruption of various unspecified projects. Of all the CCTV players, China has the most to lose, given their million installed cameras and that 80 percent of all camera components in India are Chinese-made.

For its part, China sees India’s new rules as a smear campaign. But it’s hard to be sympathetic when U.S. officials discovered:

• Among other things, communication equipment that couldn’t be readily explained inside Chinese-made solar power inverters.
• The potential for Chinese equipment in U.S. cell towers to spy on our missile silos.
• What Sen. Mark Warner called “the worst telecom hack in United States history” last December. The Chinese were conducting a “major intelligence gathering operation” using hundreds of thousands of smartphones, many of them in the Washington, DC, area.

The U.S. government has wisely banned certain brands of Chinese telecom equipment because they posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security.

But India reminds us that we need to do more. We don’t think India’s stance is old-fashioned protectionism, as some of the new policy’s detractors would like to suggest. Given China’s track record, we consider it a prudent form of self-preservation and risk mitigation.

In February, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bulletin connected the dots in no uncertain terms: Chinese cameras double as spy tools for the Chinese Communist Party and could even be used to disrupt critical U.S. infrastructure. The DHS bulletin’s advice is as clear as its warning:

“Broader dissemination of tools designed to help recognize PRC cameras, particularly white-labeled cameras, could tighten enforcement of the 2022 Federal Communication Commission (FCC) ban on the import of these cameras and help mitigate the threat of PRC cyber actors exploiting them for malicious purposes.”

Tens of thousands of such cameras are currently used across U.S. sectors that include critical ones like the energy and chemical industries. Yet the DHS bulletin notes that because of loopholes like the aforementioned “white-labeling” (where imported cameras ship under other companies’ brands), the ongoing proliferation of this Chinese spy tech continues.

It’s time to end practices like white-labeling banned Chinese cameras. And while we’re at it, let’s open up the cases on samples of CCTV cameras sold here and have a look inside.
And if doing so “voids the warranty,” we should just take our chances.

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