Arunachal Pradesh lawmaker urges PM Narendra Modi to ban Chinese CCTV in India

 OUR CORRESPONDENT

ITANAGAR: Congress MLA from Arunachal Pradesh Ninong Ering has requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ban Chinese CCTV, used in the country, keeping in view the threat perception.

The MLA from Pasighat West assembly constituency, in a letter to Modi on Sunday also suggested launching a public awareness campaign educating people against using Chinese CCTVs in their homes.

“The government can also consider the launch of a Swadeshi cloud-based server solution to safe keep the CCTV data wherever it is required. Given India’s prowess in the IT sector, we are well capable of dealing with this danger to our national security,” the lawmaker said in his letter.

Quoting a media article titled “The China Snooping Menace”, he said that the article revealed that Chinese made CCTVs currently in use across India can be used as eyes and ears for Beijing.

Also, the threat to India’s national security becomes graver since the existing laws and awareness are inadequate to deal with this threat, he pointed out quoting the article.

He added that Chinese hackers have regularly attacked Indian institutions, including a thwarted attempt to jeopardize the seven major electricity load dispatch centres (ELDCs) near the LAC to Ladakh.

“In connection with this, a US-based cyber security firm has revealed that Internet Protocol (IP) cameras, often used in CCTV networks and internet-operated Digital Video Recording (DVR) devices were compromised in the operation by the Chinese hackers,” he added.

An estimate by the centre showed that there were over 2 million CCTVs installed across India, with over 90 per cent of them made by companies that are partially owned by the Chinese government, he said adding, even more worrisome is the fact that more than half of these are installed in India’s government departments.

“The former minister of state for communications and IT, Sanjay Dhotre, in Lok Sabha has even called the problem of such CCTVs as vulnerabilities; that can transfer sensitive data to servers located abroad,” Ering, who was also a former union minister said in his letter.

He added that experts have also repeatedly pointed out that these CCTVs have weak technical architecture that can easily be compromised and used for offensive purposes. These CCTVs can effectively become eyes and ears for anti-India forces. Chinese CCTV systems made by Hikvision and Prama Hikvision have even found their way to India’s Southern Naval Command, located in Kochi.

It is noteworthy that many countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, have identified the dangers associated with using Chinese infrastructure in CCTV systems and have explicitly put public statements and banned their use in areas sensitive to their national security, he said and requested the Prime Minister to ban Chinese CCTV in the country.

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