A Tiny Blog Took on Big Surveillance in China – and Won. When John Honovich, a founder of a small survey publication that covers video surveillance technology, was compiling his research on the world’s largest security camera manufacturer, Hikvision, he stumbled upon something rather shocking. While researching the 2018 AI Cloud World Summit taking place in Hangzhou, Honovich found a feature on the summit agenda that detailed an AI-powered system installed around the sacred Mount Tai in Shandong.
When Honovich watched the accompanying video, he was surprised to see the Hikvision cameras pointing at tourists, then cutting to a computer view which showed a zoomed-in view of one visitor’s face, as well as data which the camera’s AI had inferred about the visitor – including their minority status. This feature seemed completely unethical to Honovich, and made him curious about how China might use it against the Uyghur people, a mostly-Muslim minority group located in Xinjiang province.
Honovich quickly wrote up an article about Hikvision’s ethnicity-detection technology, and posted it on the website of his trade publication – IPVM. There, Honovich and his colleague Charles Rollet, a Frenchman and reporter for IPVM, found further evidence of Hikvision and Dahua – the second biggest video survelinence manufacturer in China – profiting from government work in Xinjiang.
Hikvision and Dahua cameras were found be hung on houses, businesses and public buildings in the US and much of the world, and Intel and NVIDIA were selling them silicon to power their face recognition – but the revelations uncovered by IPVM would soon begin to change the two companies’ fortunes.
John Honovich is a founder and the CEO of IPVM, a small trade publication which specialises in video surveillance technology. His research on the 2018 AI Cloud World Summit and the shocking discovery that some of Hikvision’s cameras could automatically detect racial minorities, pushed him to the forefront of the controversy surrounding Chinese state surveillance. His well-researched articles, written in collaboration with Charles Rollet, also called out the abuses which allowed Hikvision and Dahua to reap huge profits from government work in Xinjiang.
Hikvision is the world’s biggest security camera manufacturer, and Dahua is the second largest. The two companies have reaped huge profits from government work in Xinjiang, having received contracts to build a mass face-recognition system, install videoconferencing systems in mosques, as well as setting up camera-equipped police stations in various areas of the province. Intel and NVIDIA also provided their chips and silicon to power Hikvision and Dahua’s face recognition technology.
However, with the revelations which Honovich and Rollet uncovered, both global financial institutions – such as Fidelity International and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund – have since distanced themselves from the companies, and there is now pressure for these security cameras to be removed from public and private entities. Thanks to Honovich and Rollet’s hard-hitting news, Hikvision and Dahua’s actions have been called out and the two companies’ fortunes have changed significantly.
