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A Chinese language firm is promoting its surveillance know-how to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, police, and navy, in accordance with a brand new report by IPVM, a surveillance analysis group. The agency, known as Tiandy, is likely one of the world’s largest video surveillance firms, reporting virtually $700 million in gross sales in 2020. The corporate sells cameras and accompanying AI-enabled software program, together with facial recognition know-how, software program that it claims can detect somebody’s race, and “good” interrogation tables to be used alongside “tiger chairs,” which have been extensively documented as a software for torture.
The report is a uncommon look into some specifics of China’s strategic relationship with Iran and the methods during which the nation disperses surveillance know-how to different autocracies overseas.
Tiandy’s “ethnicity monitoring” software, which has been extensively challenged by specialists as each inaccurate and unethical, is believed to be one among a number of AI-based programs the Chinese language authorities makes use of to repress the Uyghur minority group within the nation’s Xinjiang province, together with Huawei’s face recognition software program, emotion-detection AI applied sciences, and a number of others. (Huawei has denied involvement within the area.)
The report, primarily based on evaluation of Tiandy’s publicly accessible social media posts and internet advertising and marketing supplies, reveals that the corporate has signed a five-year contract in Iran, the place it plans to have eight native employees members. The report additionally particulars that whereas Tiandy is privately owned, its CEO, Dai Lin, is a public supporter of the Communist Occasion, the ruling social gathering in China, and the corporate is a significant provider to the Chinese language authorities. Whereas the precise bundle of surveillance capabilities Tiandy will promote to Iran is unclear, IPVM discovered Tiandy cameras in use by the Iranian agency Sairan—a “state-owned navy electronics supplier”—and at an undisclosed navy base. Tiandy additionally touts a number of initiatives in Iran on its public web site, together with work with an arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and with police within the northern metropolis of Khomam.
Importantly, the report revealed that Tiandy’s networked video recorders (NVRs) are in use by the Iranian navy and powered by chips produced by US producer Intel, elevating questions of whether or not the corporate has violated US sanctions on Iran. Penny Bruce, an Intel spokesperson, instructed MIT Expertise Evaluation, “Now we have no data of the allegations raised, and we’re investigating the state of affairs.”
A budding partnership
The brand new report is among the many few items of onerous proof for one thing specialists have lengthy suspected: that Iran is making an attempt to construct a system of digital management over its residents, following China’s mannequin and utilizing Chinese language instruments. Censorship and surveillance are core tenets of that mannequin, says Saeid Golkar, an knowledgeable in Iranian safety and a professor on the College of Tennessee, Chattanooga. “The Islamic Republic is making an attempt to create an web like China, creating large connectivity after which controlling it,” he says.
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