Opposition leaders back calls to remove Chinese cameras from Leinster House
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Opposition leaders have backed calls to remove Chinese-made surveillance cameras from Leinster House amid claims they are being used to spy on behalf of China.
Speaking on Sunday, Labour leader Ivana Bacik and Sinn Féin’s Deputy leader Pearse Doherty said that Leinster House should follow the example of the European parliament and remove the Hikvision cameras.
In a letter sent this weekend to government and opposition party leaders, as well as the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) warned that Hikvision, the Chinese-state-backed company which makes the CCTV cameras installed in Leinster House, has been banned from several jurisdictions and institutions because of serious national security concerns.
Ms Bacik said: “The European Parliament have done it. The ICCL wrote to us all this week about it. I think it's a serious concern they've raised and if other Parliaments have moved on, we should.”
Mr Doherty also backed calls for them to be removed saying the reports are “concerning” and called for Oireachtas authorities to get “immediate and swift” security advice on the matter.
Justice Minister Simon Harris said he is reticent to comment on security matters but said he is quite sure the Houses of the Oireachtas authorities take the security of the national parliament very seriously.
In its letter, the ICCL also alleged that “Hikvision is implicated in grave human rights violations against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang” through its contract to operate regional Chinese state surveillance.
Dr Kris Shrishak, a technology fellow at ICCL, pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party is a controlling stakeholder in Hikvision.
“This is significant because Italian investigators have discovered Hikvision devices reporting back to locations in China. This was not an isolated incident: a separate investigation revealed that each Hikvision camera installed in Rome’s Fiumicino airport sent data 11,000 times per hour to China,” Shrishak said in the letter.
In addition to the risk that cameras inside the Oireachtas “may be reporting back to China”, Shrishak said researchers regularly found new security vulnerabilities that allow hackers to seize full control of various types of Hikvision cameras, which allows them to record what the cameras see and, potentially, what they hear.
“ICCL has directly observed Hikvision cameras inside the Oireachtas buildings and about its grounds. The cameras are positioned at locations where they can capture video of TDs, senators and staff, and their private conversations. They may also capture what was said,” the letter said.
Shrishnak said other jurisdictions, including Australia and Scotland, had decided to remove Hikvision cameras from all government buildings, while Denmark, England and the United States had all banned Hikvision. In 2021, the European Parliament also removed Hikvision cameras.
The ICCL asked whether sufficient security assessments had been done before installing the Hikvision cameras. If so, it asked that those assessments be made public, “in view of the acute security and privacy concerns associated with these devices”.
It also called on the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission to “urgently remove all Hikvision cameras and equipment”.