The first exercise of a new FCC power.
The first exercise of a new FCC power.
On October 13th, Brendan Carr’s FCC gave itself a new power — it can block gadgets for containing any computer chip made by any company on its list of potential threats to national security . Today, it’s exercising that power for the first time, blocking two gadgets because they contain “foreign surveillance chips,” the FCC claims .
The agency doesn’t say which specific gadgets it blocked, and it didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment, but it does name the “surveillance chip”: it’s a HiVision Hi3516CV610 UHD Smart Vision SoC , a chip that turns a raw camera sensor into a home security camera, a dashcam, or the like. It’s often sold as a package with a Sony camera sensor and sometimes even a lens already on board, according to listings we viewed on AliExpress.
The FCC is calling it a foreign surveillance chip because HiVision advertises it as “designed for the surveillance market” with “[b]uilt in detection algorithms for human faces,” the FCC explains — and because HiVision is a subsidiary of Huawei, one of the first telecom companies the US government decided to call a national security risk .
Huawei is indeed on the FCC’s Covered List, and the FCC’s new power helps it close a loophole where companies could sneak in banned companies’ products inside another company’s gadgets. It did something similar when it gave itself the power to retroactively ban gadgets , and when it gave itself the power to block modular radio transmitters.
As with the router ban and the Roomba ban , he question remains: is the FCC keeping people safer, or just picking winners and losers while making a show of enforcement ? We’ve asked the agency many times to chat about its efforts, but it won’t engage.
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