E-commerce giant Amazon reportedly purchased thermal cameras to monitor workers’ temperatures during the Chinese virus pandemic from a Chinese firm blacklisted by the United States over allegations that it helped China detain and monitor Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.
Reuters reports that e-commerce giant Amazon purchased thermal cameras from China’s Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co Ltd, a firm that was blacklisted by the U.S. government for allegedly aiding the Chinese government in detaining and monitoring Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.
Amazon reportedly purchased 1,500 cameras from Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co Ltd. this month in a deal that is valued at close to $10 million. At least 500 systems from the Chinese company are reportedly for use in the United States.
The procurement is reportedly legal as rules restricting U.S. government contract awards and exports to blacklisted firms do not apply to the private sector. However, the United States “considers that transactions of any nature with listed entities carry a ‘red flag’ and recommends that U.S. companies proceed with caution,” according to the Bureau of Industry and Security’s website.
Amazon stated that it was implementing thermal imagers from “multiple” manufacturers which it declined to name. These vendors allegedly include Infrared Cameras Inc. which was previously reported by Reuters, and FLIR, according to employees at the Amazon-owned Whole Foods.
Breitbart News has reported extensively on China’s detention of one-million Muslims, the Associated Press reported in November of 2019 that artificial intelligence and mass surveillance are a key part of China’s efforts to round up ethnic minorities, writing:
The classified documents lay out the Chinese government’s deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities even before they commit a crime, to rewire their thoughts and the language they speak.
The papers also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence. Drawing on data collected by mass surveillance technology, computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week.
Taken as a whole, the documents give the most significant description yet of high-tech mass detention in the 21st century in the words of the Chinese government itself. Experts say they spell out a vast system that targets, surveils and grades entire ethnicities to forcibly assimilate and subdue them — especially Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic minority of more than 10 million people with their own language and culture.
Breitbart News reported on President Donald Trump’s reaction to the treatment of the Uighur Muslims in July of 2019, writing:
Jewher Ilham was one of those who met with Trump and she shared the plight of her father, a Uighur scholar sentenced to life in prison in 2014 for speaking out against the Chinese communist government. She also spoke with the president about the estimated 1 million or more Uighur Muslims that the regime has rounded up and put in “re-education camps” where evidence exists of torture and organ harvesting.
“That’s tough stuff,” Trump said on Wednesday in response to Ilham’s account about the camps and her jailed father, Ilham Tohti.
“Americans will never tire in our efforts to defend and promote religious freedom,” Trump said. “I don’t think any president’s taken it as seriously as me.”
The Trump Administration added Zhejiang Dahua Technology and seven other tech firms to a blacklist last year for acting against U.S. foreign policy interests, accusing them of being “implicated” in “China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.