The FCC is beginning to block gadgets with ‘foreign surveillance chips’
Sean Hollister is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
On October 13th, Brendan Carr’s FCC gave itself a new power — it can block gadgets for containing any computer chip made by any company on its list of potential threats to national security. Today, it’s exercising that power for the first time, blocking two gadgets because they contain “foreign surveillance chips,” the FCC claims.
The agency doesn’t say which specific gadgets it blocked, and it didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment, but it does name the “surveillance chip”: it’s a HiVision Hi3516CV610 UHD Smart Vision SoC, a chip that turns a raw camera sensor into a home security camera, a dashcam, or the like. It’s often sold as a package with a Sony camera...
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