Hikvision
Based on Wikipedia: Hikvision
Somewhere in the world right now, a camera is watching. It might be perched above a convenience store entrance in suburban Ohio, mounted on a lamppost in a British town center, or bolted to the wall of a detention facility in northwestern China. There's a reasonable chance that camera was made by a company most people have never heard of: Hikvision.
And that's exactly how Hikvision would prefer it.
The World's Largest Eyes
Hikvision—short for Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Company Limited—is the world's largest manufacturer of video surveillance equipment. If you've walked through an airport, entered a shopping mall, or visited a government building in the past decade, you've almost certainly been filmed by their cameras. The company produces everything from simple security cameras to sophisticated systems capable of recognizing faces, reading license plates, and tracking individuals across an entire city.
What makes Hikvision unusual isn't its size or its technology. It's the entity that controls it.
Hikvision is majority-owned by China Electronics Technology Group, a state-run enterprise overseen directly by the Chinese government. This isn't some arm's-length investment relationship—the chairman of Hikvision, Chen Zongnian, simultaneously serves as chairman and Communist Party Committee Secretary of the parent company. The lines between corporation and state blur until they nearly disappear.
This arrangement might seem like a minor bureaucratic detail. It is not. It explains nearly everything that has happened to the company since its founding in 2001, and it raises profound questions about what happens when the tools of surveillance are manufactured by an authoritarian government and sold to the rest of the world.
From Hangzhou to Xinjiang
To understand why Hikvision has become one of the most sanctioned companies on Earth, you need to understand what has been happening in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is a vast region in northwestern China, roughly the size of Alaska. It's home to the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group with their own language, culture, and traditions. Beginning around 2017, the Chinese government embarked on what it described as a campaign against extremism. What this meant in practice was the construction of a surveillance state more comprehensive than anything the world had seen before.
Cameras appeared on every street corner. Checkpoints went up at neighborhood entrances. Facial recognition systems tracked residents as they moved through their daily lives. And then came the camps—massive facilities where, according to extensive reporting and leaked documents, more than a million Uyghurs have been detained for "re-education."
Hikvision's cameras were everywhere.
In 2022, a massive leak of internal police files from Xinjiang—known as the Xinjiang Police Files—documented in granular detail how Hikvision technology formed the backbone of the surveillance apparatus. The cameras didn't just record. They recognized faces. They tracked movements. They provided the technical infrastructure that made mass detention possible.
That same year, researchers discovered that Hikvision's software included alarms specifically designed to alert Chinese police about "religion, Falun Gong, and various protest activities." Another contract revealed that the company had developed systems to identify students who were fasting during Ramadan—the Islamic holy month—and report them to university administrators.
In 2023, Hikvision released software that could perform what the company called "ethnic minority detection."
Let that phrase sit for a moment. Ethnic minority detection. A camera that looks at a human face and categorizes it by ethnicity, then flags certain categories for special attention by authorities.
The Global Reckoning
The revelations about Xinjiang triggered something remarkable: a coordinated international response that has reshaped Hikvision's business and forced the company into an increasingly defensive posture.
The United States moved first. In August 2019, the American government banned Hikvision from receiving federal contracts. Two months later, the company was placed on the Entity List—a designation that restricts access to American technology and signals to the world that the United States considers the company a threat. The stated reason was direct: Hikvision was "involved in surveillance of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and of other ethnic and religious minorities in China."
In November 2020, President Donald Trump issued an executive order prohibiting Americans from investing in companies linked to the Chinese military, including Hikvision. The company was swiftly removed from major stock indices.
The Federal Communications Commission, the American agency that regulates communications technology, declared in 2021 that Hikvision equipment posed "an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security." The following year, the agency banned the import and sale of new Hikvision equipment entirely.
But this wasn't just an American concern.
The European Parliament removed Hikvision cameras from its buildings in 2021, citing "an unacceptable risk that Hikvision, through its operations in Xinjiang, is contributing to serious human rights abuses." The United Kingdom banned the equipment from government buildings in 2022. Australia's Department of Defence announced it would remove all Hikvision cameras. New Zealand stopped purchasing them. India's Navy ordered existing cameras destroyed.
Perhaps most striking was Ukraine's designation. In June 2023, the country's National Agency on Corruption Prevention declared Hikvision an "international sponsor of war" for supplying equipment to Russia that could be used for military purposes. The company that had built the surveillance infrastructure for one government's repression was now enabling another's invasion.
The Lobbying Machine
Hikvision did not accept its pariah status quietly.
The company assembled a lobbying operation of unusual scale and sophistication, hiring some of the most prominent names in American politics to plead its case. Barbara Boxer, a former Democratic senator from California who had built her career on human rights causes, registered as a foreign agent for Hikvision. David Vitter, a former Republican senator from Louisiana, joined the effort. Pierre-Richard Prosper, who had served as ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues under President George W. Bush, was brought on to "advise the company regarding human rights compliance."
The irony of hiring a former war crimes prosecutor to advise a company accused of enabling ethnic persecution was apparently lost on no one, but the company pressed forward anyway.
Between 2018 and 2022, Hikvision's law firm—the prestigious Sidley Austin—collected approximately $7.4 million in fees for its work. When the firm initially registered under ordinary lobbying rules, the Department of Justice intervened, requiring them to register instead under the Foreign Agents Registration Act—a more stringent law originally designed to track Nazi propagandists in the 1930s.
The lobbying campaign had some success in slowing the regulatory response, but it could not reverse the fundamental trajectory. When the Biden inaugural committee discovered that Barbara Boxer had donated $500 after registering as a Hikvision foreign agent, they returned the money.
The Cybersecurity Problem
Set aside, for a moment, the ethical questions about Xinjiang. Hikvision cameras present a more immediate problem: they may not be secure.
In 2017, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an alert about an authentication vulnerability affecting multiple Hikvision camera models. The flaw could allow malicious attackers to assume the identity of legitimate users and access sensitive data.
In 2021, Italian state broadcaster RAI reported that Hikvision cameras were automatically opening communication channels with servers in China the moment they connected to the internet. The company declined to comment on what data was being transmitted or why.
That same year, Hikvision disclosed a far more serious vulnerability. The flaw, which received a severity score of 9.8 out of 10, allowed attackers to remotely hijack cameras without needing any username or password. The cameras could simply be taken over by anyone who knew how to exploit the bug.
For organizations using these cameras to protect sensitive facilities, this created an uncomfortable reality: the security equipment itself was a security risk. The cameras watching the doors might also be providing a window.
In response to these concerns, Hikvision hired FTI Consulting to conduct cybersecurity audits. Whether those audits resolved the underlying issues—or whether they could, given the company's relationship with the Chinese government—remains an open question.
The Consumer Deception
If you've never heard of Hikvision, you might still own one of their cameras. The company sells consumer products through subsidiaries with different names, obscuring the connection to the controversial parent company.
Ezviz, for example, is a Hikvision brand that until recently was sold at major American retailers like Best Buy, Home Depot, and Lowe's. The cameras looked like any other consumer security product—small, sleek devices promising to help you monitor your front porch or check on your pets.
In 2021, all three retailers quietly stopped selling Ezviz products. The reason, they acknowledged, was concern about Hikvision's "complicity in surveillance and human rights violations in Xinjiang."
But the problem goes deeper than retail shelves. In 2023, the United States Department of Defense warned that Hikvision products were being "white labeled"—sold under different brand names—and resold to the American government. The very agencies that had banned Hikvision equipment might be unknowingly purchasing it anyway, just with different logos on the box.
The Chinese Government Contract
In 2022, Hikvision won a contract that captured the company's true function more clearly than any sales brochure could.
The Chinese government hired Hikvision to develop software capable of tracking "key people" in order to prevent them from entering Beijing. The technology would identify individuals—presumably dissidents, activists, and others deemed problematic by authorities—and flag their presence as they approached the capital city.
This is not a commercial security product. This is a political tool. It is surveillance designed to suppress dissent, to limit freedom of movement, to ensure that certain people cannot exercise the right to petition their government or participate in public life.
And the company building it is the same one selling cameras to police departments and schools and apartment buildings around the world.
The Uncomfortable Questions
Hikvision's story forces a series of uncomfortable questions that most consumers and policymakers would prefer not to confront.
The first is about supply chains. In an interconnected global economy, where components and manufacturing expertise cross borders constantly, how much should the origin of technology matter? If a camera works reliably and costs less than alternatives, does it matter who made it or what else they might be making?
For a long time, the answer for most buyers was no. Hikvision captured enormous market share precisely because its products were effective and affordable. Security professionals recommended them. Governments purchased them. The company's relationship with the Chinese state was known, but largely ignored.
The revelations about Xinjiang changed the calculus. Suddenly the question wasn't abstract—it was specific. These cameras, this technology, this company had been used to build the infrastructure of mass detention. Could buyers separate the commercial product from its other applications?
The second question is about our own surveillance infrastructure. The technology Hikvision sells to the Chinese government is substantially similar to what it sells everywhere else. Facial recognition, license plate reading, tracking across camera networks—these capabilities exist in systems installed in Western democracies. The uses are different. The potential is the same.
When critics warn about surveillance states, they're often dismissed as paranoid. But Xinjiang shows what happens when these technologies are deployed without restraint, when there are no legal limits on how cameras can be used, when the goal is explicitly to monitor and control a population.
Hikvision didn't invent surveillance. But it industrialized it. It made the tools of comprehensive population monitoring cheap enough and capable enough that any government can afford them. The question for the rest of the world is what prevents those tools from being used the same way everywhere.
The Future of Watching
In January 2024, Hikvision joined the United Nations Global Compact—a voluntary initiative in which companies commit to uphold principles of human rights, labor standards, environmental protection, and anti-corruption.
The same month, Taiwanese authorities indicted a Hikvision employee for illegally establishing operations in Taiwan through a shell corporation.
The juxtaposition captures the company's current position perfectly. Hikvision is simultaneously reaching for international legitimacy and continuing to operate in ways that undermine it. The company insists it respects human rights while its technology enables their violation. It claims to be a normal commercial enterprise while functioning as an extension of state power.
In 2025, the Canadian government ordered Hikvision to close its operations entirely, citing national security concerns. A federal court dismissed the company's request to have the ruling thrown out.
In March 2025, the FCC opened an investigation into whether Hikvision and other Chinese companies were operating in the United States in violation of restrictions.
The walls continue to close in. But Hikvision remains the largest surveillance equipment manufacturer in the world. Its cameras are still watching in countless locations, and new ones are being installed every day. The company has been sanctioned, investigated, denounced, and banned from sensitive sites across multiple continents.
And yet somewhere, right now, a camera is watching.
The question is who's watching through it.