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US Army Walks Back Decision To Ban DJI Drones Ever So Slightly (suasnews.com)
garymortimer shares a report from sUAS News: News has reached me that another DJI memo was passed around on Friday the 11th of August. An exception to policy with recommendations from the asymmetric warfare group that will permit the use of DJI kit once some conditions have been met. The Android Tactical Assault Kit will become the ground control station (GCS) of choice when a DJI plugin has passed OPSEC (Operational Security) scrutiny. In a separate report from Reuters, DJI said it is "tightening data security in the hopes that the U.S. Army will lift its ban on DJI drones because of 'cyber vulnerabilities.'" The company is "speeding deployment of a system that allows users to disconnect from the internet during flights, making it impossible for flight logs, photos or videos to reach DJI's computer servers," reports Reuters. While the security measure has been in the works for several months, it's being rolled out sooner than planned because of the Army's decision to discontinue the use of DJI drones.
Actually, just because it's not transmitting a log doesn't mean it's not recording a log, or burst reporting a log summary once the drone clears the area. A wise intel officer for a foreign power can easily extrapolate the data based on the "on/off" nature of what it does. This can even allow you to pinpoint things enough for a decent zero survivor air strike.
But, hey, what do I know
DJI is several years ahead of its competitors, including US companies. In tech industry it is forever.
I see on youtube a lot of videos as in the USA people are fined routinely for flying a tiny quad-copter say in a national park (while one can fly a huge and really loud helicopter there all right). There are enforced bans of tens of miles in radius around large cities, etc.
Instead of creating such obstacles in a negative way, a government in fact could do a lot for the development of this industry. For example create spacious RPAS (UAV) parks were people could come with their unmanned aircraft and pilot freely (perhaps with technical guidance?). Or teach students in schools UAV electronics, aerodynamics, piloting, meaningful regulations, safety.
But instead we see only ban this, ban that. So as a result we see as the US and European civil UAV industry is lagging behind. It is not possible to build a hundred of good quad-copters or fixed-wing civil RPAS. A base, a mass market is necessary for this.
The flight logs and video are stored in the app. DJI has a website that, unless you make some effort not to, will download most of that data for the rest of the world to see. For Joe Sixpack, that's great. He can show all of his friends the time he pretended he was a 747 making an instrument landing at the local airport. If you are less publicly inclined it might be an issue but it's very easy to shut down.
And even easier to shut everything down if you don't trust the little green switch on the app - just disconnect the tablet or phone from the network.
But you then have to devote a device to being just for the drone and you have to forego updates. That turns out to be a positive most times since the vast majority of recent DJI updates have been to fool around with it's geofencing system rather than actually improve the drones capabilities. A good firewall on an Android device would also work - you would think the military could at least gin that up.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!