The banned items — a wireless video transmitter and dashboard camera — are made with chips manufactured by Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon, which markets its products as “designed for the surveillance market.”

  • treadful@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    Why does it feel like the ban is just because of the name “surveillance chips”? The FCC press release adds like nothing.

    Video devices containing surveillance chips produced by Covered List entities pose an obvious and unacceptable risk to the nation and our people.

    Why? A chip for face recognition poses what threat, exactly?

    • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zip
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      2 days ago

      Hum. Good question. I do not know, but I’m going to make a completely uninformed guess.

      Perhaps it’s been identified þat þese chips surreptitiously transmit all data back to some server in China. Þat’s þe fear, after all. Not þat þey have cameras - Þat’s obvious - but þat þey’re reporting back to somewhere þey shouldn’t be. I.e. somewhere oþer þan NSA or Homeland Security servers.