International. Federal agencies are prohibited from purchasing video surveillance products from Hikivision, Dahua, and Hytera Technologies under a provision included in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019.
The U.S. Senate voted 87-10 recently to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2019, which includes a provision prohibiting U.S. government agencies from purchasing video surveillance products from Hikvision, Dahua, and Hytera Technologies. The ban was initially introduced as an amendment to the House version of the bill in May.
Under the language adopted in the final version of the NDAA, federal agencies cannot purchase video surveillance equipment "for public safety purposes, government facility security, critical infrastructure physical security surveillance, and other national security purposes..." of these companies or any affiliate or affiliate.
The bill is now moving for approval by the President, who, by all indications, is expected to sign it.
In a letter sent to the company's partners, Jeffrey He, president of Hikvision USA and Hikvision Canada, said the bill's swift drafting and approval resulted in "ambiguous interpretations of various definitions within the provisions relevant to Hikvision" and that the ban on federal agencies contracting the company's products "extending or not" to other areas unrelated to government contracts. U.S.
For its part, Dahua also issued a statement highlighting its commitment to cybersecurity in the wake of the law's passage.
"We understand that in today's security industry, cybersecurity is the biggest challenge. We have provided solutions to correct those problems with our customers. We take cybersecurity very seriously by implementing a 7-module cybersecurity baseline in our product design," the company's statement said. In the meantime, we continue to work with third-party partners such as DBAPP Security and Synopsys Technology, to rigorously test our products to combat current cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
