US Government Entities Hard Spec Hikvision

Hard specifying products can be justified when the buyer needs a very specific feature or function.

Aren't they also justifiable when they are specified because the entity has standardized on a single vendor to ensure homogeneity and increase interoperability and reduce related support issues?

Unless I am missing something, this is not the US Federal Government requesting these but a small municipal government in Pennsylvania.

It feels like these Hikvision articles are more for fear mongering than meaningful conversation at this point.

[I work in an environment that due to security concerns will never install Hik products, but do have them at my personal residence]

I don't know how they got around BAA (Buy America Act). If you use Federal Dollars on any project (including local jobs with Federal Funding), you have to write substantial justifications to move the needle to allowing foreign products. In regard to Chinese Products, that needle is very hard to overcome. I used to write justifications for Mobotix Products. As they were a favored trading partner on an approved list, it wasn't that hard. That said, China is not on a friendly list. This is a shocking turn-of-events. I won't stoop to denigration of the HikVision line of products, its just that the Federal government CANNOT circumvent their own policies (https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2010-title48-vol2/pdf/CFR-2010-title48-vol2-sec52-225-11.pdf)

Furthermore - here is the list of approved countries from the FAR/DFAR:

225.872-1 General.

(a) As a result of memoranda of understanding and other international agreements, DoD has determined it inconsistent with the public interest to apply restrictions of the Buy American statute or the Balance of Payments Program to the acquisition of qualifying country end products from the following qualifying countries:

Do you see CHINA on this list? - Nope.

That said, the FCO (Federal Contracting Officer) can make a decision to go with a less expensive product IF they are part of a trade agreement OR if they believe that the price of domestically available products is excessive.

Here's my take on this - the FCO sought through an RFI pricing for camera products (in a generic sense) and government suppliers (contractors) provided bids that were wholly unacceptable to the FCO with the exception of the HikVision vendor. I would still think that those vendors who sought to bid the work can play the BAA and ask for certifications from the FCO (even to the point of going to the GAO and Federal Ombudsman authority) to seek consideration.

The last thing is that with the price being so low on some of their products (HikVision) in addition to the direct intervention by the Chinese Government (fiscal support), it's unfortunate that our Government (US) hasn't pursued a WTO violation on this product line - it's clearly an effort to prop up an industry to destroy local commerce. The only real people who start one of these initiatives is the state department and they just seem to be "treading water" right now with the entire email scandal. I'd suggest that a US manufacture lodge a direct complaint with the State Department and seek a WTO case for ruling against the Chinese Government.

My two-bits...

Good article, thanks, Brian.

This inspired me to spend a significant amount of time searching Federal Business Opportunities at FBO.gov for any solicitations from any agency, for any location, and any classification, over the past 365 days (the maximum history accessible to search), related to video surveillance and security cameras.

When restricting Google search to site:fbo.gov, Google tells us that "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt"

Since FBO is inaccessible to Google, you're at the mercy of Federal excellence in software, which as multiple recent events have demonstrated, provides a consistently superior user interface for absolutely superb federal transparency.

I searched for a variety of Hikvision models from the IPVM camera finder, across a range of resolutions, prices, and functions, without discovering a single federal solicitation over the past year that specified the Hikvision brand or Hikvision models, even by example.

More broadly, although searching the FBO.gov archive with keywords "security camera" and "video surveillance" turned up only a limited number of solicitations, some of those called out specific models (or equivalent), typically associated with very specific needs or else with compatibility when replacing inoperative cameras or expanding systems. Just by way of example,

M00263-16-T-1014 requested Pelco Spectra IV SE and Pelco FD5-DV10-6 or equivalent.

N6893613F0107 requested FieldPro 5X MWIR cameras

P15PS02002a requested Avigilon 2.0-H3-B1, Avigilon ES-HD-HWS-SM, Avigilon 3.0W-H3-DO2, etc.

From this, I conclude that particular vendors and models (or equivalent) are being specified in federal solicitations. While it's difficult to prove a negative, the fact that a reasonable search fails to turn up federal solicitations for Hikvision brand or models suggests that such federal activity is, at most, uncommon.

The challenges experienced while researching this post may have turned up a whole new topic: searches for video surveillance exposed less than 100 results across the entire federal solicitation base for the past year, yet it seems reasonable that there must have been at least several thousand video surveillance procurements across the federal infrastructure in that timeframe. Perhaps there's an art to pulling relevant information from FBO.gov. In some cases, it seemed as if FBO.gov was pushing information seekers to non-government web sites that appeared to be less accessible and transparent, placing some of the solicitation information behind a registration wall (perhaps this is only the case for solicitations which are no longer open?). Certainly there has been a deliberate choice to prevent the kind of transparency that Google indexing can provide.

From my poor search results, I suspect that businesses which understand how to discover opportunities within FBO have a very significant selective advantage in accessing the federal marketplace. With its video surveillance focus, who knows -- there might be the basis of an IPVM article here...

I would be astonished if there was not a significant financial inducement involved and one hopes that the facts are bought to light soon. I struggle to understand the lack of concern for cyber security. Basically

So John, when will this appear in the local news paper's investigative reporting section... or better yet, tweeted to Trump... could be the Chinese will supply us with ample "Fireworks" for the 4th in the form of headlines if this hits Fox news...