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According to reports, a Chinese company is selling its surveillance technology to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, police and military. New report from IPVM, A surveillance research team. The company called Tiandy is one of the largest video surveillance companies in the world, with sales in 2020 of nearly 700 million U.S. dollars. The company sells cameras and supporting artificial intelligence software, including facial recognition technology, which claims to detect a person’s race, and a “smart” interrogation table used with the “tiger chair,” which is widely documented as a torture tool .
The report rarely examined some details of China’s strategic relationship with Iran, and the country’s way of spreading surveillance technology to other authoritarian countries abroad.
Tiandi’s “race tracking” tool has been widely questioned by experts because of its inaccuracy and immorality. Considered to be one of several artificial intelligence-based systems of the Chinese government Used to suppress the Uyghur minority in China’s Xinjiang Province, and Huawei face recognition software, Emotion detection artificial intelligence Technology, and many other technologies. (Huawei denies involvement in the area.)
The report is based on an analysis of Tiandi’s public social media posts and online marketing materials, showing that the company has signed a five-year contract in Iran and plans to have eight local employees there.The report also details that although Tiandi is a private company, its CEO Dai Lin is an open supporter of the ruling Communist Party of China, and the company is Main supplier of the Chinese governmentAlthough it is not yet clear the exact surveillance package that Tiandy will sell to Iran, IPVM found that the Iranian company Sairan (a “state-owned military electronics supplier”) and an undisclosed military base are using Tiandy cameras. Tiandy also touted several projects in Iran Public website, Including cooperation with a department of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the police in the northern city of Khomam.
Importantly, the report shows that the Iranian military is using Tiandi’s Network Video Recorder (NVR) Supported by chips produced by American manufacturer Intel, Which raised the question of whether the company violated US sanctions on Iran. Intel spokesperson Penny Bruce told MIT Technology Review, “We are not aware of the allegations made and we are investigating the situation.”
Budding partnership
This new report is one of the few conclusive evidence that experts have long suspected: Iran is trying to establish a digital control system for its citizens, following Chinese models and using Chinese tools. Saeid Golkar, an Iranian security expert and a professor at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, said that censorship and surveillance are the core principles of this model. “The Islamic Republic is trying to create an Internet like China, create large-scale connections, and then control it,” he said.
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