Exporting Chinese surveillance: the security risks of ‘smart cities’
Critics say the technology can be a tool for ‘digital authoritarianism’ and leaves countries vulnerable to cyber attack.
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.comT&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
Belgrade’s Republic Square is one of the cultural and social hubs of the Serbian capital, a popular meeting point lined with cafés and the site of the National Museum and the National Theatre. It is also now at the centre of an international debate about the export of Chinese technology, authoritarian surveillance and cyber security. The square is under constant observation by equipment made in China. A surveillance camera system installed by Huawei, the Chinese technology group, has the capacity to monitor the behaviour of people in the square and elsewhere in the city, recognise their faces, identify their vehicle number plates and make judgments on whether suspicious activities are afoot. The cameras in central Belgrade represent the first among some 8,000 that the city plans to install as part of a comprehensive “safe city” partnership with Huawei.
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.comT&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
When the project was unveiled in 2019, Nebojsa Stefanovic, Serbia’s former interior minister, boasted that every street and building in the area of the square would be covered by cameras. “We will know from which street [a perpetrator] came, from which car, who was sitting previously in that car,” he said. But although the Serbian government has a good relationship with Beijing — the pro-China president Aleksandar Vucic last year kissed the Chinese national flag in a video seen over 600m times on Chinese social media — the installation of such surveillance systems is causing controversy.
“Very delicate technology is in question which allows monitoring of the whole society — and enables a dystopian, Orwellian society,”
says Zlatko Petrovic, assistant secretary-general to the Serbian Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection. ‘It can be dangerous in the hands of someone who is not responsible, and it can easily be misused,” adds Petrovic. His independent state agency advocates more debate and transparency about how biometric data should be stored, who can access it, how it will be used and for how long.
The controversy in Serbia is being repeated in different ways across the world as scores of countries — including several western democracies — install surveillance technology as part of “safe city” and “smart city” packages supplied by Chinese companies including Huawei, ZTE Corporation, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, Zhejiang Dahua Technology, Alibaba and others. The growing use of these Chinese technologies around the world is one of the issues that will provide a backdrop to Friday’s G7 summit in Cornwall, where the leading democratic nations will swap notes on how best to respond to China’s growing global reach. “Safe” and “smart” city technologies represent a complex new frontier for China’s projection of power — an indication that Beijing will use its influence not just to defend itself against outside pressure but to actively export its political values to other parts of the world.
Comments