“Surveillance Cameras Made in China are Hanging All Over the US”

The Memphis police use the surveillance cameras to scan the streets for crime. The U.S. Army uses them to monitor a base in Missouri. Consumer models hang in homes and businesses across the country. At one point, the cameras kept watch on the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

All the devices were manufactured by a single company, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology . It is 42%-owned by the Chinese government.
Hikvision (pronounced “hike-vision”) was nurtured by Beijing to help keep watch on its 1.4 billion citizens, part of a vast expansion of its domestic-surveillance apparatus. In the process, the little-known company has become the world’s largest maker of surveillance cameras. It has sold equipment used to track French airports, an Irish port and sites in Brazil and Iran.

Hikvision’s rapid rise, its ties to the Chinese government and a cybersecurity lapse flagged by the Department of Homeland Security have fanned concerns among officials in the U.S. and Italy about the security of Hikvision’s devices.

The above was the lead of an article in WSJ. My response is below.

The Wall Street Journal article has just made the grains of sand practice of espionage obsolete!!! In case you've forgotten, during the height of Wen Ho Lee hysteria, there was a FBI expert (Paul Moore was his name) on China that proclaimed that all Chinese Americans in the US were potential spies for China. He claimed that China conducted their spying differently, relying of grains of sand to collect any tidbits of inconsequential information and send them to Beijing. By grains of sand, he was referring to the Chinese American living in America, each representing a grain of sand and each seeing something of potential value would send the intelligence to Beijing. There was this alleged supercomputer in bowls of Beijing Zhongnanhai (don't forget China was on the way of developing the world's fastest supercomputer) that processes these bits of intelligence sent from the grains of sand, voila out comes the design of the multi-head missile, just like the one in your old backyard. Now with surveillance camera made in China, Beijing sure won't need no grains of sand anymore.