The owner of a New Jersey technology company is under fire for allegedly duping public safety and law enforcement agencies across the state into spending at least $35 million, including 15 million in federal COVID 19 relief money on banned Chinese surveillance equipment, according to a complaint unveiled last week, first reported by the independent tech website 404 Media.

The company's owner repeatedly lied to the state agencies in order to get their money.

Journalist Jason Koebler dug into the case for 404 Media and he joins me with the latest.

Jason, welcome to the show and great reporting here.

I guess my first question is, how was it that these towns were duped, so to speak, into purchasing this blacklisted equipment?

Yeah.

So there is a company that's based in New Jersey called Packetalk, which has had previous contracts with East Orange, West Orange, Passaic and a few other towns in New Jersey.

And it had these existing relationships with these New Jersey towns.

And during the pandemic, there was all this new funding for what's known as ALPRs which are automated license plate reader cameras, as well as infrared cameras to supposedly detect COVID cases.

And so basically, the CEO of this company, Packetalk, went to their existing relationships and said, hey, you can use this COVID funding to buy new technology.

And essentially, you know, there wasn't enough research being done to to prove that this was actually banned Chinese technology that was being sold to them.

Yeah.

And in fact, this company, Packetalk, had been listed as an official vendor with the state of New Jersey.

So how far was this able to get before complaints were filed and people started noticing that this was equipment that a shouldn't be purchased with federal dollars but is also banned from the U.S. and of course, New Jersey.

Yeah, well, something really interesting is that the cameras are actually rebranded.

So instead of saying Dahua, which is the banned Chinese company, you know, the CEO of this company knew that they were banned.

And so he had the company remove their logos and change the color of the cameras.

And so it wasn't for a few months that, you know, eventually there was an FBI investigation into Packetalk.

And the FBI investigation had been going on for over a year.

And during that time, New Jersey put Packetalk on its official approved vendors list.

So seemingly not great communication between the FBI and the state of New Jersey.

But essentially, the FBI uncovered this after about a year of investigation.

What did officials, Jason, from the state, from these localities say to you about their justification for using COVID relief money to buy this equipment in the first place?

Yeah.

So I basically found these documents, these charging documents in the on Pacer, which is the federal court records system.

And I went to, you know, every city that I could find that had done a deal with packet talk.

And I said, you know, did you know this was happening?

How many Packetalk cameras do you have?

Are any of the cameras, you know, Chinese cameras that are banned?

And none of the towns were ready to provide comment.

It seemed like they were learning about it in real time.

So they were initially banned because Dahua was found to be using their surveillance cameras in Xinjiang, in China, in in weaker prison camps, essentially.

And so they were banned for human rights reasons.

But then later, about a year later, in 2021, the FCC banned these cameras for import into the U.S. in general because they may be phoning back to China.

And there's been a lot of Chinese surveillance tech companies that have been banned by the federal government.

We don't know specifically how and why and where and which ones are sending information back to China.

But that is sort of the reason why they were banned.

Jason Koebler is a journalist with the independent tech website 404 Media.

Jason, thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for having me.