Dahua, Hikvision out of security camera industry group

Both Dahua and Hickvision, two of China's largest security camera makers, are no longer members of the Security Industry Association (SIA), the largest trade organization for surveillance vendors in what appears to be the fallout from the two state-owned companies collaborating with Chinese officials in their oppression of the Uyghur minority.

SIA, which is primarily a US trade organization but has members from all over the world, expelled Dahua last month.

The organization did not give a formal explanation, but IPVM, a news portal dedicated to the security camera and surveillance market, and a member of SIA itself, said it filed a complaint against Dahua in November 2020 after it found that Dahua advertised Uyghur detection capabilities to Chinese police.

Hikvision followed its fellow Chinese vendor last week when it resigned from SIA. In a copy of the vendor's resignation letter, obtained by Security Info Watch, Hikvision officials cited "bullying" from the same IPVM.

IPVM has harassed and maligned fellow members of SIA via a coordinated effort, from unethical hacking of Hikvision cameras, to misleading blog stories about those hacks, to surreptitiously seeding those stories in mainstream media sources, to then using those stories as the basis for lobbying efforts at the FCC and Congress to effectively ban fellow SIA members from US markets.

Hikvision SIA resignation letter

IPVM also appears to be the "blogger" which Hikvision called out on its official website in June 2017.

But in their own follow-up report, IPVM founder John Honovich said that Hikvision went through a "You can't fire me, I quit!" moment as the Chinese company was facing a similar expulsion as Dahua, after IPVM filed a similar ethics violation against it with SIA in March 2021.

In a statement to SIW, included below, Honovich said that just like Dahua, Hikvision collaborated with the Chinese state on the oppression of its Uyghur minority:

Hikvision, like Dahua which SIA recently expelled, has a long track record of unethical behavior and human rights abuses. Rather than risk being expelled, Hikvision has chosen to quit and blame IPVM. That is what Hikvision does. Hikvision alleges that it did not 'knowingly' or 'intentionally' commit human rights abuses despite having direct contracts to build and operate these systems. Hikvision alleges that its joint PLA China Army research to improve the 'lethality' of missiles was done by its workers in their 'personal capacity.' And when Hikvision specifically marketed "Uyghur" detecting cameras on its own website, it alleged its own website was incorrect.

IPVM founder John Honovich

Prior to both Dahua and Hikvision's exit from the SIA trade group, both organizations had mostly been slowly pushed out of the US market anyway.

Congress banned US federal agencies from buying new Hikvision and Dahua technology in 2018, alongside Huawei and ZTE, citing national security risks due to the companies' close association with the Chinese state.

Things got worse in 2019 when the US Department of Commerce sanctioned both companies for their involvement in human rights abuses against the Uyghur minority.

Both Dahua and Hikvision have repeatedly denied developing technology that targets the Uyghur minority in past reporting from IPVM, Reuters, The Guardian, TechCrunch, LA Times, and other outlets.

(h/t this.weekinsecurity.com)