US blacklists Tiandy Technologies as Intel washes its hands

Tiandy Technologies, one of the largest video surveillance suppliers in the world, joins its surveillance compatriots Dahua and Hikvision on the U.S. Commerce Department blacklist, for allowing the selling of U.S.-made technology to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as well as being implicated in human rights violations in China, reports US NBC News.

Both activities are contrary to U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.

The sanctions were announced on 15 December come into effect 16 December. Intel Corp. which previously listed Tiandy Technologies as a partner and supplied it with processors for its video recording systems, removed mention of Tiandy from its site, ahead of the announcement. The chip-maker told NBC that it decided to stop trading with the Tianjin-based firm “following an internal review.”

IPVM, which had questioned Intel about Tiandy’s Iran subsidiary advertising VMS servers powered by Intel and having Intel-enabled equipment to the Iranian military, also notes that Google results indexing suggests a very recent removal of Tiandy from the Intel site.

The discontinuation of Intel parts could prove challenging to the firm, which supplies facial recognition capabilities with its cameras and has operations in more than 60 countries.

Pressure had been mounting against the firm. As well as IPVM highlighting the apparent flouting of U.S. policy, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies was making the case that Tiandy is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

Tiandy was one of 36 companies newly added to the entity list, albeit with its unique combination of circumstances including being “implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR),” according to the Department of Commerce document, hosted by IPVM.

“This entity also has enabled the procurement of U.S.-origin items for use by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

Article Topics

biometrics  |  China  |  facial recognition  |  Intel  |  regulation  |  Tiandy  |  United States  |  video surveillance