Mick Hartley

No surprise here, but it's interesting to see it confirmed. 

Huawei was involved in creating mass surveillance programmes for Beijing and offered to produce technology that would enable the authorities to monitor the forced “re-education” of Uighurs in detention camps, an investigation has alleged.

A review of the telecommunications company’s confidential marketing materials by The Washington Post uncovered evidence that appears to contradict Huawei’s denials of a role in China’s state surveillance.

Huawei, which has faced allegations that it is a de-facto organ of the Chinese state, has long insisted that it has no knowledge of or control over how its equipment and technologies are used once sold. Western governments, including Britain, have blocked Huawei from their new 5G telecom networks over national security fears.

The newspaper claimed that Huawei co-developed surveillance systems and pitched them with marketing materials bearing the company logo. It claimed that slides in the material show surveillance functions specific to police or government agencies, suggesting that Chinese government authorities may have been the “intended audience”.

The newspaper reviewed more than 3,000 PowerPoint slides from the presentations outlining what it said were surveillance projects co-developed by Huawei with other companies. They highlighted Huawei’s alleged role in five surveillance activities in China: “Voice recording analysis, detention centre monitoring, location tracking of political individuals of interest, police surveillance in the Xinjiang region and corporate tracking of employees and customers…”

The review found what purport to be marketing presentations showing that Huawei helped to design some technical underpinnings for the country’s re-education programmes for detainees in the far-west region of Xinjiang.

As many as a million members of Muslim minorities, especially the Uighurs, were sent, without due process, to re-education and vocational training centres, where they were forced to undergo indoctrination sessions and, in many cases, were abused.

The marketing materials purport to show that Huawei, along with a business partner, developed the prison management system, including software to manage the attendance of ideological re-education classes and prison labour shifts by the detainees….

Another marketing presentation pitches a solution to track “political persons of interest” through measures such as pinpointing the location of their electronic devices and tracking them with surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition.

In particular, Huawei’s technology has reportedly been used to help public security in Xinjiang to capture criminal suspects. One facial recognition solution, called “One Person One File”, was allegedly co-developed by Huawei and DeepGlint, a Beijing-based tech company sanctioned by the US government for alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

In other words, Huawei is up to its neck in Beijing's totalitarian schemes. In China's technology development, there are no innocents.