
China to have 626M surveillance cameras within 3 years - knowsnothing
http://technode.com/2017/11/22/china-to-have-626-million-surveillance-cameras-within-3-years/
======
post_break
Somewhat related, be very careful buying IP cameras. A lot have been shown to
have backdoors to different countries. Trying to find a good PTZ outdoor IP
camera has been a mine field since I'll find one and then a reviewer will look
at the traffic it's sending and see very very sketchy stuff. My friend bought
a hidden camera for his house only to see it was sending video traffic to
china.

~~~
jhulla
This is why I keep a bunch of equipment by default on an isolated subnet where
the router drops all packets to the outside world. Doesn't matter what the
device is trying to do.

Connecting to these devices requires one level of indirect - where I connect
first to an internal machine that can send packets to/from the hidden subnet.

~~~
post_break
Yeah that's a good plan. I've read reviews where some cameras just stop
working after a while when this is done too. It's a shit show.

------
thisisit
The interesting thing part is this:

"Hikvision has been expanding in the Americas where it now has 8.5% of the
market, putting it in the No.2 position. The Chinese government owns a 42%
stake of Hikvision, according to a piece by the Wall Street Journal earlier
this month on the security concerns of Chinese-made cameras being used in the
US."

Article here: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/surveillance-cameras-made-by-
ch...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/surveillance-cameras-made-by-china-are-
hanging-all-over-the-u-s-1510513949)

~~~
rtx
They might get Huaweied. War through the internet is so fascinating and
complex.

~~~
sebleon
What does Huaweied mean?

~~~
ghostcluster
Chinese firm learns how the foreign firm operates it and clones its technology
and practices, including any patented tech. Then the Chinese government
changes its laws/policy to restrict foreign companies' access to the country's
market to privilege the Chinese firm.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Early_years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Early_years)

~~~
asclepi
I believe OP coined the term "Huaweied" to refer to a phenomenon described in
another section of the same Wikipedia entry...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Espionage_and_security_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Espionage_and_security_concerns_in_the_West)

There are abundant parallels between the Huawei situation a few years ago and
the Hikvision situation now.

------
azurezyq
Well, you may call it surveillance cams but it may not be a bad thing. But as
a Chinese, I never feel stressful under these cams in China, but feel unsafe
all the time walking down the street in SF in the night after moving to US.

Purpose matters.

~~~
tbronchain
Is it really camera that made the difference? I had a motorbike stolen in
Beijing. Police's answer? "Sorry, the camera didn't work". A friend forget his
phone in a taxi (who run away, then turned it off when he tried to call it).
He left the taxi at a precise crossing with cameras. He went to the police
station a very soon after. Police answer? "We couldn't identify the taxi". I
have a few more stories like this (like wallet and phones stolen at the ATM).
Yes all in China. And I'm not talking about the multiple scams that are very
specific to china.

Maybe public surveillance camera help preventing armed attacks (but it's never
really been a thing in China anyway, and in serious decline in the world in
general) and I doubt they can do much more. As you say, purpose matters.

I don't believe crime stops with surveillance, it changes.

Edit: one thing I forgot to mention, I feel the Chinese state media are doing
a very good job at not talking too much about the different crime/problems
happening. Western media are doing pretty much the opposite. I think on that
precise point, if other method than censorship were used, it's actually a
pretty good thing and do make people feel safer.

~~~
rahimnathwani
In the UK, a shop that I ran was robbed. The police said the camera outside
the ship was mobile, and happened to be pointing the other way at the time.

In China, I had a traffic altercation (between me, a pedestrian, and some
people who were in a car at the time the altercation started). The police
found the video footage and watched it within an hour after I reported it.

My point: the plural of anecdote is not data.

~~~
ttflee
Are you non-east-Asian? Chinese police answers to foreigners so quickly that
jokes about foreigner-aided-reporting-to-police-as-a-service are circulated.

~~~
rahimnathwani
Yes, I'm non-east-Asian. And I reported the incident at a police station in an
area where many foreigners live and work.

------
kosma
Corrected title: "China to have 626M surveillance camera botnet within 3
years".

------
breitling
I'm interested in how they plan to monitor all these cameras. Obviously, it
can't be any number of people looking at all 625M cameras.

Will some AI monitor all the feeds and flag suspicious activities to the local
authorities?

~~~
wqnt
Chinese government utilize some pretty good machine learning to analyze and
monitor those cameras. Techniques include: \- Vehicle plates recognition. They
are automatically captured and mapped. Chinese police can get the complete
historical routes of any car around major cities in real time just buy
entering the number.

\- Activity detection. If something interesting is happening in front of a
camera (e.g. two people running in front of a camera middle of the night), AI
detects that and pops the view up in front of humans for further action.
Because less than 1% of cameras contain any useful info at any moment, they
don't need that many humans to watch those cameras live.

\- Face recognition. For many cameras, Face capture and recognition is running
live and report any criminals or targeted personnel to police.

\- Footage markup. If police need to go through the camera footage manually,
the recording playback can skip the uninteresting parts to save time.

Combining these with unrestricted real-time integration of other data sources,
such as real time GPS from mobile apps, cell tower call history from telecoms,
network traffic inspection and remote spying capabilities, Chinese police
forces can pretty much find anybody very quickly. They are also known to have
state of the art big data platforms developed in house.

One anecdote I read: Somebody killed a person in a small city middle of the
night, removed battery of his phone, ran to his car parked on street, drove a
couple of hundred miles to another middle sized city, only to be caught in a
motel next morning. How? Complete camera footage covering his walking path,
vehicle plate tracking all the way to his destination, and motel check-in
system that is also integrated with police.

------
infinity0
Following suit, UK unveiled plans to have 625M surveillance cameras.

~~~
kalleboo
I just tried to search for how many surveillance cameras there already are in
the UK, and by the time I got to "number of surveillance cameras", Safari
popped up a Siri suggestion for the London Wikipedia article...
[http://mayoyo.tokyo/jK7.jpg](http://mayoyo.tokyo/jK7.jpg)

If anyone is curious "The British Security Industry Association (BSIA)
estimates there are between 4-5.9 million cameras"

~~~
infinity0
A quick google search suggests that China currently has about 20 million
cameras, so the UK is actually not far behind.

Given the population, there are actually more cameras per UK citizen than
there are per Chinese citizen.

~~~
buro9
And yet, when I was the victim of a hit and run incident in central London we
were unable to locate a single working camera that could provide any usable
evidence.

The vast majority either do not work, or are privately owned and when enquired
about (difficult in itself as there are so many parties to contact once the
owner is identified, and they likely do not have direct access and need to
speak to someone else) have extremely useless retention periods that meant no
footage survived enough time to request it.

------
taksintikk
Cell phones are surveillance cameras so that number is extremely understated.

