Documents link Huawei to China’s surveillance programs
Eva Dou 12-14-21 WASHINGTON POST
The Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has long brushed off questions about its role in China’s state surveillance, saying it just sells general-purpose networking gear.
A review by The Washington Post of more than 100 Huawei PowerPoint presentations, many marked “confidential,” suggests that the company has had a broader role in tracking China’s populace than it has acknowledged.
These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.
“Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report,” the company said in a statement, after The Post shared some of the slides with Huawei representatives to seek comment. “Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards.”
The divergence between Huawei’s public disavowals that it doesn’t know how its technology is used by customers, and the detailed accounts of surveillance operations on slides carrying the company’s watermark, taps into long-standing concerns about lack of transparency at the world’s largest vendor of telecommunications gear.
Huawei has long been dogged by criticism that it is opaque and closer to the Chinese government than it claims. A number of Western governments have blocked Huawei gear from their new 5G telecom networks out of concern that the company may assist Beijing with intelligence-gathering, which Huawei denies.
The new details on Huawei’s surveillance products come amid growing concerns in China, and around the world, about the consequences of pervasive facial recognition and other biometric tracking.
The Post article goes on to analyse voice recoding analysis; Prison and detention monitoring; Location Tracking; Cororate Monitoring; and Xinjiang Surveillance of the Uyghur people:
Xinjiang surveillance
The slides also detail how Huawei equipment was used in China’s far west Xinjiang region.
The Xinjiang government’s sweeping campaign against Uyghurs has drawn international denunciation, and Huawei has faced questions for years about whether its equipment was used in the crackdown. A Huawei executive resigned in response to a Washington Post report in 2020 about a “Uyghur alarm” the company tested that could send an alert to police when it identified a member of the ethnic minority native to the region.
Huawei executives have mostly deflected questions about how its products are used in Xinjiang, saying it did not supply the region directly. “That is not actually one of our projects,” Huawei’s global cybersecurity chief, John Suffolk, said, when asked by a British parliamentary committee in 2019 about Xinjiang surveillance systems using Huawei equipment. “It is done via a third party.” “We sell technology all around the world, but we don’t operate it. We don’t know how our customers choose to operate it,” Alykhan Velshi, Huawei Canada’s vice president of corporate affairs, said last year, when asked by Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Radio about its surveillance technology sales in Xinjiang.
He added: “Certainly what’s happening in Xinjiang causes me a great deal of concern, as it should cause everyone who is concerned about human rights abroad, but Huawei selling to customers who may sell to customers who may do something? That, to me, is a different issue entirely.”
But Xinjiang surveillance projects are highlighted in several of the presentations, with the Huawei logo on each slide, though the slides do not mention the Uyghur ethnic minority. In one titled “One Person One File Solution High-Level Report,” the company’s technology is touted as having helped public security in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang region, capture a number of criminal suspects.
The presentation said the system had been in use in Urumqi since 2017, a time frame coinciding with the mass detentions of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
This “One Person One File” facial recognition solution was co-developed by Huawei and DeepGlint, or Beijing Geling Shentong Information Technology, a start-up sanctioned by the Commerce Department in July for alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang. DeepGlint declined to comment. Other presentations said Huawei equipment was in use in surveillance camera systems in other Xinjiang cities, highways and detention centers.
