According to the Australian government, in order to make sure that its structures are "fully secure," the Department of Defense will remove any security cameras built in China.
Out of concern that Chinese businesses would be compelled to disclose information with Beijing's security services, the United States and the United Kingdom have also taken action to prohibit Chinese-made cameras at critical sites. The decision to take the camera equipment out resulted from this.
The decision has been brought to our attention, and we're going to remedy it, Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said on Thursday.
"It's crucial that we go through this exercise and make sure that our facilities are totally protected," Marles told the national television channel ABC.
According to official statistics, more than 250 Australian government facilities, including the defense, foreign affairs, finance, and attorney general ministries, have at least 913 cameras built in China.
With the exception of the departments for the Prime Minister and Cabinet and Agriculture, cameras and other security equipment were produced in Hangzhou by Hikvision Digital Technology and Dahua Technology Co.
Due to allegations that they assisted the Chinese government in using "high-tech monitoring" to "repress" the Uighur minority in the Xinjiang area, the US has placed the Chinese companies Hikvision and Dahua, which the Chinese government controls in part, on a blacklist.
After learning that Hikvision and Dahua's equipment had been used to track Uighurs, 67 members of the UK parliament and the House of Lords petitioned the government to impose a ban on the companies in July of last year.
Hikvision argued that it was "categorically untrue" to refer to the corporation as "a threat to national security."
“No respected technical institution or assessment has come to this conclusion,” the company told AFP news agency. “Our products are compliant with all applicable Australian laws and regulations and are subject to strict security requirements.”
When asked for a comment, the Chinese embassy in Australia didn’t answer right away.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he wasn’t worried about how China would react if the cameras were taken down.
“We act in accordance with Australia’s national interest. We do so transparently and that’s what we will continue to do,” Albanese told the press.
In 2018, Australia was one of the first places in the world to stop the Chinese company Huawei from using its 5G mobile network. Similar bans on Huawei are now in place in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. These three countries, along with New Zealand and Australia, make up the secretive Five Eyes spying alliance.
James Paterson, the cybersecurity spokesman for the opposition Liberal Party, said that he had asked questions for six months that led to the audit because the Department of Home Affairs couldn’t say how many cameras, access control systems, and intercoms made in China were installed in Australian government buildings.
Paterson said, “We urgently need a plan from the … government to rip every one of these devices out of Australian government departments and agencies.”
He said that China’s National Intelligence Law, which both companies had to follow, required them to work with Chinese intelligence agencies.
Paterson said, “We would have no way of knowing if the sensitive information, images and audio collected by these devices are secretly being sent back to China against the interests of Australian citizens.”