The Federal Rules: FCC Covered List and NDAA Section 889
Is it still legal in New York to buy a brand-new Dahua camera system in 2026?
Yes, for a private home or a private business, with one real caveat about stock. On November 25, 2022 the FCC adopted rules that stopped new equipment authorizations for products from companies on its Covered List, Dahua and its subsidiaries among them. The FCC's own news release said the rules applied "to future authorizations" and only sought comment on what to do about existing ones. For Dahua the order was use-based: its cameras count as covered equipment when they are used for public safety, government facility security or surveillance of critical infrastructure, and the company could only win a conditional authorization by showing it was not marketing that equipment for those uses — for example, by directing it to consumers. Equipment that had already been authorized could keep being sold. Nothing in the 2022 order, the federal procurement law, or any New York State statute we could find makes it illegal for a homeowner in Merrick or a deli owner in Bay Shore to buy or install a Dahua camera.
The caveat is newer. In rules released October 29, 2025, which took effect December 26, 2025, the FCC gave two of its bureaus a procedure to limit the marketing and importing of previously authorized covered equipment without revoking the authorization. The FCC's January 2026 compliance guide describes that as a way to "prohibit future importation and marketing" of such equipment. If the FCC uses that power on particular Dahua models, distributors will stop selling them even though cameras already installed are untouched. That is why we confirm which models we can actually supply before we write a quote, and why we do not promise that the exact camera on your neighbour's garage will still be available next year.
If the FCC restricts more Dahua models, do the cameras already on my Long Island house have to come down?
No. Every FCC action so far has been aimed at authorizing, importing and marketing equipment, not at people who already own it. The 2022 order expressly left existing authorizations in place, the Congressional Research Service noted in January 2023 that the FCC "did not, however, revoke any of its prior authorizations," and the FCC's 2026 compliance guide states that a limit on previously authorized equipment would not prohibit "continued use." There is no federal or New York requirement for a homeowner or private business to remove Dahua cameras, register them, or report them.
What does change for an existing owner is the long-term supply picture. The 2025 rules also prohibit modifications, including the "permissive changes" manufacturers use to update an approved product's radio design, and they extend the ban to covered modular transmitters inside other devices. Wired PoE cameras and recorders are not radio products in the way a Wi-Fi camera is, but if you are adding to an existing system over the next few years, it is sensible to buy any spares you want while they are easy to get and to keep the cabling plan brand-neutral so a later camera from another maker can drop onto the same cable and the same recorder through ONVIF.
Which Long Island properties should not get Dahua at all because of NDAA Section 889?
Section 889 of the 2019 defense authorization act has two parts. Part A, effective August 13, 2019, stops federal agencies buying Dahua, Hikvision, Huawei, ZTE and Hytera video surveillance and telecom equipment, including white-label versions. Part B, effective August 13, 2020, goes further: federal agencies may not contract with any entity that uses that equipment as a substantial or essential component of any system. University compliance offices, such as UC Santa Barbara's, read that as covering the whole organization "regardless of its funding source" and warn that "many consumer video surveillance systems are rebranded products from one of the prohibited companies."
On Long Island that puts a firm line around federal contractors in the Route 110 and Hauppauge business parks, laboratories and research partners, hospitals and clinics with federal contracts, colleges, and nonprofits that receive federal awards. It also covers properties used for public safety or critical infrastructure under the FCC's 2022 order. For those owners we do not install Dahua, and if they already have it we can plan a replacement that reuses the cable. A family home, a private retail store or a restaurant with no federal contracts is outside both rules.
Will Dahua keep publishing firmware fixes for cameras already sold in the United States?
So far it has. Dahua's product security team published advisory DHCC-SA-202507-001 on July 23, 2025 and revised it on August 15, 2025, with fixed firmware for camera series sold here, including the IPC-1XXX, IPC-2XXX, IPC-WX and several SD pan-tilt families. The advisory says devices with cloud-upgrade capability would receive the fix automatically within 30 working days and gives a contact address for its response team. We cannot promise what a manufacturer will do in future, so our setups assume the opposite: cameras are kept off the open internet, the recorder sits behind your router with port forwarding closed, and remote viewing goes through a channel we can lock down. If updates ever stop, a system built that way is still far safer than one with a camera forwarded straight to the street.
Two Counties, Two Houses, Several Stores
Can one DMSS login show both our Nassau house and our summer place on the North Fork?
Yes. The DMSS phone app lets one account hold several recorders, each listed as its own device, so a family can open the app and switch between the house in Garden City and the cottage in Southold. Each property still needs its own recorder and drives, because recording has to continue at each house even when the internet at the other is down. We name each device clearly, give each family member their own user on each recorder rather than sharing one password, and set alerts differently: at the house you live in, alerts for people at the back door at night; at the summer house in winter, alerts for any person or car on the property at any hour.
Two practical points. The second house needs an internet connection that stays on all year — many seasonal owners cancel service in the off-season and then wonder why the app shows the cottage offline. And the recorder at the empty house should be on a battery backup sized to ride through short outages, with the recorder set to restart and resume recording by itself when power returns.
How is a Dahua system planned for a business with locations in both Nassau and Suffolk?
Each location gets its own recorder sized for its cameras and retention, so a network fault at one store never stops recording at another. On top of that, the owner gets one view of every site, either through DMSS on a phone or Dahua's desktop software on an office PC. Store managers get a user limited to their own location, usually live view and playback but not export or delete; the owner or an outside IT person holds the administrator account. We keep the camera naming the same at every site — "Register 1", "Rear door", "Parking east" — so a manager who moves from Levittown to Smithtown knows the screen immediately.
Retention is a policy decision, not a technical one. We size drives so every store keeps the same number of days, write that number into the handover sheet, and show each manager how to export a clip before it is overwritten. For chains that already have an IT provider, we document the network settings each recorder needs so their firewall rules can be written once and applied everywhere.
Why does a 1950s Nassau ranch need a different Dahua layout from a 1970s Suffolk colonial?
Because the houses send cable, and the threats, in different directions. A slab ranch in Levittown, Wantagh or Bethpage has no basement and a low roof, so cameras mount at the eaves and cable runs across the attic. Neighbours are close, which means side-yard cameras need privacy masks to avoid looking into the next kitchen, and wide-angle fixed cameras on the front corners often cover the whole frontage. In a 1950s house we also check the electrical panel and outlet near the recorder location, because older circuits are more likely to be shared with appliances that trip them.
A 1970s colonial or high-ranch in Commack, Dix Hills or Holbrook sits further back from the road on a wider lot. The driveway is longer, so a single camera cannot catch both a face at the car and a plate at the curb; that job usually takes a pair, or a varifocal bullet zoomed toward the street. Basements make cable routing easier, but the second-floor eaves are high, and the detached shed or pool house is often far enough away to need a separate cable route or a wireless bridge. The camera count rises, but so does the coverage you get from each one.
Picking the Right Dahua Line
When is WizSense enough, and when does WizMind earn its higher price?
Dahua describes WizSense as a series of AI products built around people and vehicles: smart motion detection that ignores animals, leaves and changing light, plus tripwire and intrusion rules that send a push alert when someone crosses a line you draw. For a Long Island house that is almost always enough. The alert that matters is "a person is in the driveway at 2 a.m.", not a count of how many people walked past, and WizSense cameras do that at the price that lets you cover every side of the house.
WizMind is the higher tier, which resellers summarize as advanced analytics such as face detection, people counting and heat maps. It earns its cost where those numbers mean something: a store that wants to know how many customers came in each hour, a business that wants face detection at its entrance, or a property manager that needs to find one person in many hours of video from several entrances. We often mix the two — WizMind at the main entrance where the analytics pay off, WizSense everywhere else.
Is a TiOC camera worth paying extra for over a standard WizSense turret at a Long Island house?
At one or two positions, often yes; across the whole house, usually no. Dahua's TiOC ("three-in-one") cameras add three things to a standard smart turret: warm white lights that switch on when a person enters a zone, so night video is in color; a siren and red-and-blue strobe that fire when the person reaches a narrower zone; and two-way talk from the phone. Dahua's launch material notes that switching the lights on only when a target appears "reduces light pollution." You are paying for the ability to interrupt someone, not just record them.
That is worth the money where an intruder is the only plausible visitor at night — the back of the house facing a wooded strip, a detached garage or shed, the pool gate, or any part of a seasonal house in the months it stands empty. It is poor value at the front door and the street side, where deliveries, neighbours and dog-walkers would set it off constantly and the feature ends up disabled. A typical Long Island layout uses one or two TiOC cameras at the back and the driveway, often with the siren scheduled only for overnight hours or vacant months, and standard WizSense or full-color turrets everywhere else.
Do Dahua's smart alerts need a cloud subscription, or do they run on the camera?
The detection itself runs on the hardware. Dahua describes WizSense smart motion detection and its tripwire and intrusion rules as features of the cameras and recorders, which is why a Dahua system keeps classifying people and vehicles even when the internet is down; the events are written to the recorder alongside the video. What needs the internet is the delivery of the alert to your phone, which goes through the DMSS app's push service, and remote viewing.
There is no monthly fee for any of that. Cloud recording, where a copy of video is stored off-site, is a separate and optional service; most Long Island owners we work with keep footage on the recorder and rely on export when they need a clip. If you want an off-site copy because the recorder itself could be stolen or flooded, we discuss options and costs separately, and we place the recorder where a burglar is least likely to find it.
What should a Long Island business ask its IT provider before a Dahua recorder goes on the network?
Five things. Whether the cameras and recorder can sit on their own VLAN or a physically separate switch, so they cannot talk to the point-of-sale terminals or the office PCs. Whether the firewall can block the cameras from reaching the internet at all, leaving only the recorder able to make the outbound connections it needs. Which addresses the recorder and cameras should hold, so a router replacement does not scatter them. Which time server the recorder should use, so timestamps stay right. And whether remote access will be through Dahua's P2P service or the company VPN.
We send the IT provider those answers as a short document before the install, rather than turning up with a recorder and asking for a port forward. For Long Island businesses with a store in each county, the same settings are applied at every site, which makes later troubleshooting much faster. If there is no IT provider, we set it up ourselves and leave the document with the owner.
Keeping the System Itself Secure
What did Dahua's 2025 buffer-overflow advisory mean for cameras already installed on Long Island?
In July 2025 Dahua disclosed two flaws, CVE-2025-31700 and CVE-2025-31701, in which specially crafted network packets could cause a buffer overflow, leading to a crash or remote code execution; Dahua rated them 8.1 on the CVSS scale. TechRadar reported that Bitdefender found them and reported them privately in March 2025. Affected series included several common IP camera and pan-tilt families, and Dahua said that builds dated after April 16, 2025 are not affected.
For an owner the practical steps are simple. Open the camera or recorder's web page, look at System Information, and check the build date; if it is older than April 16, 2025, it needs the update. If you cannot update immediately, Dahua and the researchers advised the same thing we do on every install: no camera directly reachable from the internet, UPnP turned off on the router and the recorder, and cameras on their own network segment. Our takeover visits include this check on every camera, and the written report lists each one's build date before and after.
Is Dahua's P2P remote viewing safe enough, or should our Long Island office use a VPN?
P2P is the convenience feature that lets the DMSS app reach a recorder by scanning a serial-number QR code, with no port forwarding. It is much safer than the old practice of forwarding camera ports to the internet, because nothing on your network is left listening for strangers. It still depends on a cloud relay operated by the manufacturer — the DMSS listing on Apple's App Store names its seller as Hangzhou Dong Bin Information Technology Co., Ltd. — so some business owners, and almost every corporate IT department, prefer a VPN instead.
For a home, P2P with strong unique passwords and current firmware is a reasonable choice and the one most owners use. For an office or a business with an IT policy, we disable P2P and set up access through a VPN on the router or firewall, so the phone joins the office network first and then sees the recorder as if it were on site. Either way, every user gets their own login, and the administrator account is never the one saved on a phone.
Power, Storms and the Police
Which parts of a Dahua system belong on a battery or a standby generator circuit?
Four parts, and owners usually remember only the first. The recorder obviously needs power to write video. The PoE switch, or the PoE ports built into the recorder, must stay powered too, because every camera gets its electricity through that switch — a recorder on a battery with a switch on a dead outlet records nothing. The modem and router decide whether the DMSS app can reach the house during the outage. And any camera or radio link fed by its own local power supply at a detached garage or pool house needs its own protection, or that corner of the property goes dark first.
Long Island outages are common enough to plan for: ABC7 reported that during Isaias in August 2020 almost half of PSEG Long Island's 1.1 million customers lost power at the peak. Where a house has a standby generator, we ask the electrician to put the recorder, switch and router on a generator-backed circuit, and we still add a small battery backup in front of them, because generators take time to start and that gap is enough to corrupt a recorder that loses power mid-write. We then set the recorder to restart on its own and send a push notification when it does.
Should we register our Dahua cameras with the Suffolk police Camera Registry or a village program?
It is worth doing, and it does not give anyone access to your system. The Suffolk County Police Department's Camera Registry Program stores the location of private cameras so detectives can ask owners near a crime to check a specific date and time; if you find something, retrieval is arranged "at the convenience of the camera owner." In Nassau, some village police departments run their own versions — Garden City's Private Camera Registration Program states plainly that it "does NOT provide us access to security camera systems that are privately owned."
What makes a registered camera useful is the clock and the export. We sync the recorder's time to an internet time source, name cameras after real places ("Driveway - toward street"), and show you how to export a clip to a USB stick, so that when an officer calls you can hand over the right minutes in a format they can play.
Boards, Plates and Recording Time
Should a Long Island HOA or condo board choose Dahua for its common areas?
It can, but the board should ask two questions first. The first is money: if the association, or any building it manages, receives federal grants, federally backed financing tied to security equipment, or works under a government contract, the Section 889 and FCC limits described above are a reason to choose another brand. Most private associations have none of those ties, and for them Dahua is a legitimate, budget-friendly choice for pool gates, mail kiosks, clubhouse doors and shared parking.
The second is governance. A board-owned system should have one administrator account held by the managing agent or a named officer, separate logins for anyone else who views footage, and a written policy on who may export video and for how long it is kept. Residents' own doorbells and driveway cameras are their business, but cameras on common property should look only at common areas, never into a unit's windows. We put all of that in the handover document so the next board inherits a system it understands.
Can Dahua cameras record to a non-Dahua recorder or software if we change brands later?
Usually yes, through ONVIF, the industry standard that lets cameras and recorders from different makers talk to each other. Most current Dahua IP cameras support ONVIF profiles that let a third-party recorder or video software pull their video stream, so a business that later moves to another brand of recorder, or an owner who prefers desktop software, does not have to throw the cameras away at the same time. Smart features are the catch: Dahua's people-and-vehicle detection and TiOC deterrence controls generally work best, and sometimes only, with a Dahua recorder or app, so on another system you may get video but lose some alert types.
This works the other way too. A Long Island owner who already has a recorder from another maker can often add Dahua cameras to it. We test the exact camera and recorder combination before quoting it, because ONVIF support varies by model and firmware, and we write down which features will and will not carry over.
When does a Long Island owner pick Dahua over Hikvision or a brand not made in China?
Hikvision sits under the same FCC Covered List and NDAA Section 889 restrictions as Dahua, so switching between those two does not change the federal picture; the choice between them comes down to models, the app and what the installer supports. The real decision is between those two and the brands outside the restrictions. Dahua makes sense when the property is private, the budget has to stretch across many cameras, and the owner is comfortable with the brand once it is secured properly. A non-Chinese or NDAA-compliant brand makes sense when the site has any federal contract or funding tie, when a corporate IT or insurance policy forbids covered equipment, or when the owner simply does not want the brand after reading the news.
For many Long Island homes the answer is mixed: Dahua cameras on the house, because they cover the most ground for the money, and a different brand at a home office used for a federal contractor's work. We price both ways on request, and the cabling we install is the same either way, so the decision can be revisited later without opening walls.
Inherited and Older Systems
We bought a Long Island house that came with a Dahua system. What should we do before connecting it to our internet?
Do not leave it plugged into your new internet connection as it is. A recorder that has not been updated in years may carry the login-bypass flaw CVE-2021-33044, which CISA added to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list on August 21, 2024 with the instruction to apply the vendor's mitigations or stop using the product. Unplug the recorder's network cable until it has been reset and updated.
Resetting depends on the model and its firmware, and Dahua's process differs between recorder generations, so we identify the exact model before touching it. Once in, we update the firmware, delete the previous owner's users and phone devices, create new ones for you, and then check every camera. Often the cameras themselves are fine and only the recorder needs attention; sometimes one or two have failed after years on a sunny wall and are worth replacing while we are there.
Is an aging Lorex system worth replacing with Dahua, given the two brands' history?
Lorex was owned by Dahua until December 2022, when Dahua agreed to sell it to Skywatch, a Taipei-based company, for about US$72 million. Because Lorex was a Dahua subsidiary for years, owners often ask whether the two can be mixed. Sometimes newer Dahua cameras will work on an older Lorex recorder over ONVIF, and sometimes they will not, depending on model and firmware.
Whether to replace depends on what is failing. If the Lorex cameras are analog and the picture is soft, the upgrade is worth it, and the existing coax can sometimes stay for HD-over-coax cameras. If the Lorex system is recent and working, adding a few Dahua cameras may not be worth the compatibility gamble. We test before we sell, and our Lorex camera installation page for Long Island covers staying with that brand.
