The FCC has been on a ban spree lately, shutting out new Chinese-made robot vacuums, humanoid robots, and Wi-Fi routers from sale on U.S. soil. Now two new devices are on the list — dashboard cameras and wireless video transmitters — both with ties to a previously banned brand.
To be clear, the ban doesn’t cover all dashboard cameras and wireless video transmitters. Most of these products available on store shelves are safe, by federal standards. Instead, the ban goes after two specific devices that contain technology from a Chinese company that has allegedly tried to steal U.S. tech secrets in the past.
HiSilicon uses some concerning language in its marketing materials.
The devices feature chips made by HiSilicon, a subsidiary of the Chinese tech juggernaut Huawei. Going back to 2012, a committee led by Mike Rogers deemed Huawei and fellow Chinese tech giant ZTE national security threats after neither could convince the group that they wouldn’t spy on Americans on behalf of the Chinese government.
What started as a warning for U.S. enterprises not to buy telecommunications products from the two companies ultimately led to President Trump issuing a national ban during his first term in 2019. The ban blocked Huawei from selling its smartphones in the U.S., blocked Huawei’s technology from being installed in the U.S. 5G network, and even prevented Huawei from using Google’s Android platform and apps on its devices.
Still, Huawei continues to be a leading tech giant with huge foreign influence. By pivoting away from Android to its own operating system, HarmonyOS, Huawei overtook both Apple and Samsung as the number-one smartphone manufacturer in China.
Even as the resilient tech giant focused on its domestic market, it still found a way into American products, thanks to a subsidiary called HiSilicon. Founded back in 1991, HiSilicon is a fabless semiconductor creator that designs the Kirin mobile processor for Huawei’s smartphones. It also designs chips for AI servers, smart home appliances, and other devices.
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Among those devices are dashboard cameras and wireless video transmitters. According to the FCC, the agency blocked two devices in these categories that contained HiSilicon chips, barring them from being sold or marketed to American customers in the United States.
The FCC also noted that HiSilicon uses some concerning language in its marketing materials, claiming that its chips contained in products are “designed for the surveillance market” with “[b]uilt in detection algorithms for human faces.”
The official announcement doesn’t name the brands or device models that contained Huawei’s chips. However, given the ongoing ban in the United States, one can only hope that the inclusion of these chips for American-bound products was an oversight by the device manufacturer. Either way, the FCC caught the discrepancy and dealt with it swiftly.
Given the increasingly precarious nature of online cybersecurity these days, we as a nation can’t be too careful about the products we allow into the country. Just last week, the world suffered from the largest cybersecurity event in human history. Before that, Chinese hackers broke into an enterprise cloud backup system that contained data for thousands of companies. Then there’s also the mass surveillance campaign currently under way through Flock’s ALPR camera network, though the company may be falling apart.
Still, we have enough problems to deal with here on American soil without giving China even more access to the American people through suspicious tech.
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Fcc, Ban, Dash cam, Huawei, Tech
