Burnaby-based Extreme CCTV’s night-vision cameras already keep watch at the pyramids of Egypt.

And the state-of-the-art EX82DXLs are on order for use at Abu Ghraib, the infamous U.S. military prison in Iraq.

But now they have been selected to guard a giant oil refinery in Indonesia and the Presidential Palace in Singapore, wedging open a new market for the company in Southeast Asia.

As well, Extreme is chipping at China and supplies Hong Kong/China border authorities with its REG Licence Plate Readers.

Over 90 per cent of the company’s $25 million plus in sales is split between the U.K, Europe and North America, but, in the last year, it has been planting seeds in Asia.

Extreme designs and builds equipment that uses near-infrared light to illuminate dark and low-light conditions. This kind of light is just beyond the range of the human eye.

“We can see things other people can’t,” Jack Gin, president and CEO of Extreme CCTV, said in an interview. “We can capture [movement] and licence plates in the dark at high speeds.”

It sells its night vision cameras and licence plate readers to international companies like Johnson Controls and SAIC, which include them in full-package security projects around the world. “Security is a complex solution and involves layers of things that have to be integrated,” Gin said.

In Southeast Asia, Extreme sells via O’Connors Singapore Pte Ltd. Its strategy in Asia is to pitch the “highest-tech products to high-end projects where it would be tough for competitors to show up and copy or emulate.”

Instead of, say, shopping malls, Extreme targets governments and Fortune 500 companies that want surveillance for their palaces, border crossings, oil tanks and prominent landmarks. To reach this clientele, Gin will attend an upcoming security conference and trade expo in Singapore where security companies from around the world will be showcasing their goods.

While Extreme has broken into Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China [and has actually stationed an executive responsible for Asia in Zhuhai, southern China], sales are currently showing particular traction in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. “There is money for security there. There is concern and fear of terrorism. And there have been events. Let’s not forget that there have been horrible acts of terrorism in Indonesia more recently than Sept. 11,” Gin said. “The J.W. Marriott hotel in Jakarta was bombed [in 2003. Since then,] we have licence-plate reading cameras going into international hotels with an American name.”

Gin also hopes to expand elsewhere in Asia — the main target being China. Like the U.S., Beijing has earmarked official funds to stock up on the latest in tech equipment for every aspect

of state security, from sophisticated nationwide databases linked to smart cards that can be scanned by remote sensors to CCTV for monitoring public spaces, to web cameras and Internet firewalls. The massive multi-year program is known as the “Golden Shield.”

But while Asian governments are keen to spend on security, they sometimes have fewer of the checks and balances taken for granted in most Western, democratic states, human rights groups warn.

Those groups argue that while people in China are communicating more freely and have better access to information than ever before, thanks to technology, it’s wishful to think that the same technology works only to protect public safety and erode authoritarian rule. In fact, it is also helping to strengthen Beijing‘s ability to monitor and suppress groups it doesn’t like.

Greg Walton, a freelance researcher who wrote on behalf of Montreal-based Rights & Democracy, particularly targeted Nortel Networks for its sale of research and equipment that automates the surveillance of telephone conversations and the channelling of video surveillance data to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security.

More prominent international NGOs such as Amnesty International have also pointed fingers at Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Websense, Sun Microsystems and other major software companies for selling Beijing technology it uses to monitor and censor Chinese citizens.

Indeed, the struggle to balance civil liberties with security is an issue that the most disparate regimes have in common.

Gin says that he isn’t “into politics,” but emphasizes that “the greater population wants safety first. We live in a society here where thankfully we can trust our police force to do the right thing. If you can’t trust your police, you are living in the wrong part of the world.”

To that end, while Extreme sells its cameras to many prisons across North America, Gin says that “our strategy in Asia is to sell certain products. And the prison market in China is not something we are chasing. I might have a problem with the moral ethics of that.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005