View
comments
Surveillance cameras made by firms monitoring the movements of Britons in more than 275,000 separate networks have been identified at five Uighur internment camps in Xinjiang, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The specialist CCTV cameras of Chinese state-owned companies Hikvision and Dahua have been found monitoring detainees at the camps.
The research, carried out by surveillance experts IPVM (PLS KEEP), identified the cameras by studying recently-recorded video footage by a Chinese blogger of the 're-education centres' for minority Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
The cameras are tailored to low-light conditions and come with analytics such as intrusion detection, line crossing detection, and region entrance/exiting detection, which can all be used to detect people entering sensitive areas or inmates trying to escape.
Both firms have been blacklisted in the US over links to human rights abuses but so far the UK Government has not moved to sanction the companies.
It comes as the MoS can also reveal a study has found the UK has the world's fourth largest network outside of China of CCTV cameras made by Communist Party-owned companies.
A report found that Britons are surveilled by 277,986 networks of Hikvision and Dahua cameras, with the number of individual cameras likely to be much higher.
