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| Huawei linked to Chinese spying in Xinjiang |
China's Huawei has long been silent about its role in China's national surveillance, saying it sells general-purpose networking equipment. The company has long been criticized for being opaque and closer to the Chinese government than it claims.
Fearing that the company would help Beijing gather information, some Western governments have blocked the company's devices from accessing its new 5G communications network.
A Washington Post review of more than 100 presentations by Huawei revealed that the company played a greater role in the persecution of the Chinese people than it realizes.
The company helped build technology and monitoring systems for labor camps in Xinjiang, China. The report shows how the company's work relates to the persecution of ethnic minorities in the region.
The newspaper said it obtained introductions from the company's public website before deleting it. According to the report, the chipset provides detailed information about Huawei and other companies involved in building multiple platforms.
Its metadata is from 2014 to 2020 (including copyright data from 2016 to 2018).
On a slide, the company's products were treated as the basis for a unified platform for smart prisons with reference to production workers and analysis of rehabilitation efficacy.
The company said some of the prisons using the technology are located in Xinjiang, which is mainly made up of Uighur Muslims.
The Chinese government is accused of repeatedly violating the human rights of Uyghurs, transporting them to concentration and rehabilitation camps and forcing them to work. (There are many tech companies that use this workforce.)
Another slide describes the surveillance system in Xinjiang. She described how public security forces in Urumqi, the regional capital, used facial recognition systems to arrest refugees.
Document linking Huawei to China's surveillance program
A report from CCTV researchers in 2020 details Huawei's work on a facial recognition system that can trigger an alert if it recognizes someone as Uyghur.
According to the Washington Post report, Huawei did not mention the Uyghurs in its work on the monitoring system. The company also denied that it delivered the technology directly to Xinjiang.
The slide highlights the company's role in five monitoring activities in China:
- Registry analysis.
- Monitoring the detention center.
- Track the location of interested politicians.
- The police are monitoring the residents of Xinjiang.
- Companies keep track of employees and customers.
Other slides describe technology for identifying people using voice fingerprints, a system for tracking people's location using surveillance video, and technology for monitoring employee work.
Several companies have been added to the list of US government agencies allegedly helping the Chinese government monitor ethnic minorities in Xinjiang (the list limits how US companies manage them).
An example is DJI. But few people have received the attention of the US government as Huawei. Although most of the attention came from the trade war between former President Trump and China.
In addition, in February 2020, the US government recommended that telecom companies spend money on Huawei's competitors. The company has also been accused of building a backdoor into its devices.
"Huawei is not aware of any of the elements mentioned in the Washington Post report," the company said in a statement. Like all other major service providers, Huawei offers cloud platform services that comply with current industry standards.