Chinese EV footage captured Norwegian soldiers’ access codes

A Chinese electric car used in a Norwegian military exercise recorded footage showing soldiers entering access codes to reach a restricted area, mbl.is reported.

The soldiers had rented the car for a security exercise at Oslo Airport earlier this month. While examining its equipment, they found camera recordings showing who got in and out of the vehicle and which numbers soldiers entered to unlock doors leading to a secure area. They could not confirm whether the data had been sent to a third party. The soldiers continued using the car and deleted the recordings after the exercise.

The incident has prompted debate about whether sensors, microphones and cameras in modern cars could be used for spying, as well as concerns about the privacy of drivers, passengers and people captured by the cameras.

Daði Áslaugason, chairman of ITS Iceland, a group of transport and technology professionals, said the possibility of using cars as surveillance devices could not be ignored. He said the cameras in modern vehicles can be sufficiently high-resolution to identify faces from dozens of metres away with suitable software, while microphones may pick up conversations outside the car.

At an ITS Iceland conference in September, a Norwegian speaker described an experiment that measured the data sent by two Chinese vehicles and examined how easily hackers might gain access to their systems. The vehicles, a bus and a passenger car, were driven deep into an abandoned mine in Norway to cut off contact with the outside world before researchers measured the signals they emitted.

Both vehicles collected large amounts of data. The bus collected less than the passenger car, likely because it was older and less technologically equipped.

The British military has also introduced rules limiting Chinese vehicles’ access to military bases over concerns about espionage. A British Ministry of Defence tender this summer excluded Chinese vehicles entirely.