No evidence Chinese spies saw anything: Norway’s rental car scare started when soldiers forgot to turn off dashboard cameras
- Dashboard cameras captured soldiers entering vehicles, moving around and typing security codes.
- Military personnel deleted recordings after discovering them inside rented cars
- The shortage of alternative vehicles kept cars in military use.
Rental cars used by the Norwegian military during an exercise in Oslo reportedly filmed soldiers and stored the recordings inside the vehicles without anyone noticing.
The clips showed troops getting in and out of cars, their movements and locations, and the entry codes they typed in on camera.
Despite finding the footage, the military continued to use the vehicles for the rest of the exercise because they had very few alternative cars available.
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Why recordings alarm people
Public sensitivity about personal data is already high, so any device that silently stores images of people attracts immediate scrutiny.
For soldiers to write access codes in full view of a recording lens is a serious violation of routine security, regardless of the nationality of the car owner.
Entry codes protect restricted areas, so anyone who accessed the clips could have learned how to enter without authorization.
The cameras were standard dash cameras that the soldiers had left on by mistake, so the recordings were piling up in the cars without anyone checking them.
The soldiers found the clips by chance while browsing the vehicle’s menus because they were bored, and then deleted the recordings.
What the evidence shows about China’s role
The whole situation became a more sensitive issue after it became known that the rental operator is part of a corporate chain that ends with a company based in China.
The military rents vehicles from First Rent A Car Norway AS, a Hertz-branded operator that supplies vehicles for daily errands, exercises and operational missions.
Volvo Cars gained full control of First Rent A Car Norway AS, but around 79% of Volvo Cars is controlled by Geely’s Swedish holding company.
Interestingly, that arm of Geely is fully controlled by China-based Zhejiang Geely Holding Group.
Although the rental company belongs to Volvo, only two vehicles are confirmed as Chinese-made Deepals and the brands of the rest are unnamed.
Ownership alone proves nothing about intent, so the question is whether Chinese services have the capacity and track record to exploit that access in Norway.
Norway’s Police Security Service, the counterintelligence body, says Chinese intelligence and security agencies now possess greater capacity to execute operations inside the country.
That concern is based on a recent case, when police detained a Chinese citizen suspected of assisting in espionage, possibly targeting the Andøya spaceport.
Other governments have acted on similar risks, with Israel’s military banning Chinese-made vehicles from its bases and then withdrawing officers from them.
Germany’s military took a similar step, restricting phones, tablets and smart watches for personnel handling classified material due to espionage threats from Russia and China.
However, all of these cases involve other incidents and policies, and none connect Geely or the rental company to the dash cameras that recorded the soldiers.
No evidence has emerged that any recordings came out of the cars, making a misconfiguration on the soldiers’ part a more defensible explanation than deliberate spying.
Via Militaryni
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