Advanced sea drones provided by a tech company, also contracted to the United States Military, contained Chinese components sending data from Britain back to Beijing, a whistleblower report claims.
The UK Ministry of Defence was forced to issue denials after claims emerged that the country’s new generation of sea drones (‘uncrewed surface vessels’) contained cameras built with Chinese components which were sending data home without the knowledge of the military or the company that built them.
Conservative-leaning broadsheet The Daily Telegraph cited the remarks of a source within the military who blew the whistle on Chinese components built into scout drones communicating with an Internet Protocol (IP) address inside China, who said: “This is major failure to check origins of components and we have lost confidence in the platform”.
Per the report, the components were installed inside a camera system fitted to K3 Scout drones, which the Navy says can be used for “surveillance, force protection and precision strikes”. Acquired by the Royal Navy as part of a £12 million contract as the British military experiments with emerging drone technologies, the K3 is built by UK-based Kraken Technology, which has also boasted of a $49 million agreement with the United States Special Operations Command.
Respected defence blog Navy Lookout notes that the K3 is fitted with a ‘Night Navigator 3000 series’ Electro-Optical/Infra-Red camera system, which is mounted prominently on the top of the drone boat’s superstructure to give remote operators a clear view around the craft. That gimballed camera assembly is made by Canadian tech company Current Scientific Corporation, but it isn’t clear that this is definitely the system impacted by Chinese components, as the craft may have more than one camera fitted
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