A series of internal PowerPoint presentations indicate that Chinese tech giant Huawei is more involved in state surveillance than it has publicly acknowledged, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
Over 100 marketing presentations posted on a publicly accessible Huawei website until last year describe applications for Huawei products in various fields of surveillance. Among five of those presentations highlighted by the Post, two appeared to show that Huawei designed certain features of detention camps in Xinjiang province and surveillance tools used in the province.
The Trump administration implemented various sanctions against Huawei, including visa restrictions against some company personnel. The U.S. has alleged that the company can use its ties with the Chinese Communist Party to conduct espionage operations, which Huawei has denied.
Huawei denied any knowledge of the products in PowerPoint presentations reported by the Post.
“Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report,” the company told the Post. “Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards.”
One presentation appeared to tout facial recognition technology used to apprehend criminals. A slide said the the technology was employed in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, beginning in 2017 and helped capture criminal suspects.
Another presentation, “Huawei and Hewei Smart Prison Unified Platform,” appeared to show that Huawei developed some technology used in Xinjiang detention camps. The presentation said the technology, apparently developed with another company called Shanghai Hewei Technology, could be used for “Law enforcement management functions” including “Reeducation” and “Manufacturing Labor,” according to the Post‘s translations.
Hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Xinjiang, many of them Uyghur, are thought to have been detained and held in camps in the region. China has also forcibly sterilized Uyghur women in an attempt to lower birth rates, according to the Associated Press and a study by Adrian Zenz, senior China studies fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.