The FCC is beginning to block gadgets with ‘foreign surveillance chips’

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.