This week several reports were published featuring leaked documents linking Chinese technology firms to the unlawful surveillance of Uyghur Muslims (also Uighur) in the Xinjiang region.

Now the United States is preparing to blacklist as many as eight Chinese companies over the findings, including some notable technology providers like DJI.

Huawei was also implicated in the leaked documents, strengthening claims that the company has been involved in some sort of surveillance activity linked to the Chinese government.

As such, any prospect of it being removed from the entity list then, have suffered a significant blow following this week’s revelations.

“The US Treasury will put DJI and the other firms on its ‘Chinese military-industrial complex companies’ blacklist on Thursday, according to two people briefed on the move. US investors are barred from taking financial stakes in the 60 Chinese groups already on the blacklist,” the Financial Times reported this week.

Some of the other firms highlighted for potential blacklisting over their alleged involvement in Uyghur surveillance include SenseTime and CloudWalk Technology, which both specialise in facial recognition software, as well as cyber security group Xiamen Meiya Pico and cloud computing outfit NetPosa Technologies, along with a handful more.

As the Financial Times notes, with some of the companies publicly listed, or in the process of going public, this latest development throws a signifcant spanner in the works.

It also highlights the ugly side of technology and how it can be subverted to unlawfully persecute an entire group of people.

The United States is expected to issue its sanctions tomorrow, and for companies like DJI, it could result in it suffering a similar fate to Huawei, which has faltered since being placed on the entity list.

[Image – Photo by Siarhei Horbach on Unsplash]