After Lithuania banned the use of Chinese technology in public infrastructure, the country’s second city Kaunas is asking for an exemption. The municipality has just installed CCTV cameras worth nearly a million euros and assures they are completely safe.
For a year now, 234 cameras manufactured by the Chinese company Hikvision have been monitoring 30 locations in Kaunas. They have helped law enforcement record evidence of more than 120,000 offences.
“Most of them are road traffic violations, vehicles without compulsory insurance, and cars that have not passed the compulsory roadworthiness test. Interestingly, we found about 7,000 cases of vehicles without both insurance and technical inspection,” says Virginija Bagdzevičienė, head of Kaunas Police Department.
CCTV cameras are installed at major intersections, bridges, parks, and underpasses. Officials say that they have proved their usefulness, helping to detect crimes and search for missing people.
“These cameras can also record sounds – these can be loud screams, explosions, gunshots, sounds like that,” says Bagdzevičienė.
The cameras were bought by the municipality at the request of the police, at the cost of around 850,000 euros. It took two years to install them and switch them on, while the city was ironing out data protection details.
However, the National Cyber Security Centre, under the Ministry of Defence, has called into question data security, claiming that the Chinese government may have access to data collected by Chinese equipment.
“It is about threats to get into the systems, especially critical infrastructure systems, it is about being able to take over the systems through updates, to see all the data that get transmitted,” says Antanas Aleknavičius, head of the Ministry of Defence’s cyber security team.
Therefore, the Lithuanian government passed a law last year, outlawing the use of equipment made in “unfriendly countries” – mainly China, Russia, and Belarus – in critical public infrastructure. Lithuania’s institutions have been given until 2025 to phase out Chinese equipment already in use.
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Kaunas municipality intends to negotiate exceptions, however. The cameras that monitor the city are secure and connected to a closed network, claim the city’s authorities, only the police have access to it.
“We will try to talk, this was a big purchase and in our opinion – and in the opinion of experts – the system is completely safe, it is a closed network, there is no danger,” says Gedeminas Barčauskas, deputy director of the Kaunas Municipality Administration.
The Ministry of Defence says there will be no exceptions in the law, while the transitional period is long enough to buy new equipment.
“The law does not provide for individual exceptions, technological solutions for connecting the cameras, or for solving the problem in one way or another. There is a general decision to phase out equipment from unreliable manufacturers,” insists Aleknavičius.
Under the law, purchasing software, technology or services from “unreliable manufacturers” has not been possible since last July when organising new public procurements.
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