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Homeland Security Claims DJI Drones Are Spying For China (engadget.com)
A memo from the Los Angeles office of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau (ICE) says that the officials assess "with moderate confidence that Chinese-based company DJI Science and Technology is providing U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government." It also says that the information is based on "open source reporting and a reliable source within the unmanned aerial systems industry with first and secondhand access." Engadget reports: Part of the memo focuses on targets that the LA ICE office believes to be of interest to DJI. "DJI's criteria for selecting accounts to target appears to focus on the account holder's ability to disrupt critical infrastructure," it said. The memo goes on to say that DJI is particularly interested in infrastructure like railroads and utilities, companies that provide drinking water as well as weapon storage facilities. The LA ICE office concludes that it, "assesses with high confidence the critical infrastructure and law enforcement entities using DJI systems are collecting sensitive intelligence that the Chinese government could use to conduct physical or cyber attacks against the United States and its population." The accusation that DJI is using its drones to spy on the US and scope out particular facilities for the Chinese government seems pretty wacky and the company itself told the New York Times that the memo was "based on clearly false and misleading claims."
Huh, I've always wondered about this.
Everything has powerful CPUs in them now and megabytes of firmware. It wouldn't be hard to do for almost anything.
Add to the fact that most of everything comes from china, manufactured by the lowest bider, it wouldn't be hard.
Maybe they might notice the secure web is:
a. not secure
b. leaks like a sieve
c. feeds Russian intel
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Damn if Slashdot hasn't fucked up the fearmongering, too.
If huge amounts of new raw cyber data was flowing back to other nations from imported consumer devices all over the USA what are the Western cyber intelligence services doing?
Buy US law enforcement drones that Western intelligence services have faith in?
A short list of drones approved by the USA for use in the USA and NATO?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Unless DJI drones have a sim card in them, how the hell do they expect the drone to magically send the signal back to China? Typically drones are used in rural areas, since they are banned in most urban places, which means no WIFI either.
If you hook up the drone to a computer to download the footage from the SD Card, it should be quite easy to determine if the drone is sending the footage home through your computer - just run netstat and look for weird connections, or a lot of data transfers through your router.
This seems just as likely as Kaperskey spying for the Russians.
Spy-guy behavior from a whopter-copter ! And you expect what else from a patriotic slant ? Chi.com central ... 'Course American business-traitor$$$ make their chi.com loot and run to New Zealand ... where they believe a righteously angry American yeomanry would not follow and butcher them out.
Wasn't this reported here yesterday?
>The accusation that DJI is using its drones to spy on the US and scope out particular facilities for the Chinese government seems pretty wacky
What the fuck kind of retard is writing this shit? Someone working for Ch News agency????
... get to Google Maps?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The Chinese don't need to attack stuff, they just buy it.
The Chinese are building their own CPUs and own OS because they believe we do the same thing.
but nobody seems to listen.
China is DEFINITELY a threat to us all. They make up a majority of all known hacking attacks. Election influence? Google Chinagate where it was proven beyond a doubt they were trying to influence our elections in the 90's. They have recently stolen BILLIONS of dollars in weapons research, nuclear sub technology, and nuke information. And they have the largest standing army in the world.
They are gearing up, and they are ABSOLUTELY enjoying the "OMG Russia!" distraction.
If I ran the Chinese spy agency and I knew that my country was sending hundreds of thousands of drones to fly high resolution cameras over the US, I darn sure would look at tapping into that. I don't know if they *have*, but they are incompetent if they haven't considered it.
These are the same clowns who're claiming that a guy who fell into a culvert and hit his head and died was "attacked", despite there being absolutely ZERO evidence of any attack, attackers or anything out of the ordinary at all.
Is "Moderate confidence" the synonym for "Someone told us it would be possible, but we have no evidence"?
> Yes, the DJI quadcopters can produce fairly high quality GPS tagged video. ...
> So, some poor Chinese intelligence intern is pouring through gigabytes of pictures of Americans' back yards, local parks and smoggy sunsets in order to glean some tiny bits of information?
If I'm running Chinese intelligence, no I'm not looking at video of some backyard in Wisconsin. Except maybe one particular house in downtown Janesville, Wisconsin - where Speaker of the House Paul Ryan lives. I might be curious who is visiting him and generally what he's up to when he goes home every weekend.
The LA ICE office concludes that it, "assesses with high confidence the critical infrastructure and law enforcement entities using DJI systems are collecting sensitive intelligence that the Chinese government could use to conduct physical or cyber attacks against the United States and its population."
Why are law enforcement entities using drones?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
No this is the start of the Red Dawn! Better prepare those sporty kids to face the enemy before it's all too late!! The unrestricted gun access will save us all!!!
Wait till you have Chinese or Russian-made connected cars.
With telemetry and update channels ending up at their respective makers.
Those are effectively civilian surveillance bots.
With remote software update (giving potential full remote control), they also can "break away" from their drivers's control and do whatever the central hub tells them to do.
Then think of the reverse.
US-made smart cars in Russia or China.
Will Russia allow US-built, US-connected Teslas on their roads?
Can you have an Israel-made car driving in Egypt? Lebanese or Iranian car in Israel?
With everyhing having a telemetry uplink up to their maker, the countries caring for they national safety have two options:
- ban everything "smart",
- terminate and proxy all connections.
It is a fight waiting to happen.
Perhaps, the DJI pilots in the USA should register themselves as Foreign Agents? And this is it. The problem solved.
Is not more easy to use google street view ot google earth to do that?
And next you will hear that German cars are spying for Angela Merkel and the EU, and that Swedish communication equipment from Ericsson is spying for the Swedish government.
Every product that is either part of a huge market or has to do with security and communication, will eventually be attacked with propaganda and lies from U.S. government agencies, to trick consumers into avoiding them. This is how far people are willing to blindly trust America's word.
They can now literally just lie and people will believe it. This is how America will conduct its war on markets and countries in this century, by lying and scaring dumb people all over the world to stop buying products that aren't American.
But noooOOOOOoooooooo. You HAD to buy into a Chinese company with a closed-source system that HAS to phone home every time you launch the app.
All major nations are spying on each other. Two big differences is that Russia and China are in a cold war with the west, and are EXTREMELY active in what they are doing. The other is that American leaders, Trump, O, and W, but esp Trump, have been STUPID WRT these nations and what they are doing to the west.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The government has created a list of sensitive locations where the drone isn't supposed to fly. If I were a chinese spy company I would have some strange gps errors that occasionally would fly over gps sensitive areas while reporting the gps as a nearby area safe to fly.
And is this not expected?
American made drones spy on behalf of the American government.
I do not see any point in this article.
Y'all just figured this shit out eh?
Drones? Facebook is just China's remote profile backup storage.
Thats just idiotic, in what way is China in a Cold War with the West?
Hyperbolie at it finest.
more like leaking info everywhere. This is the same DJI where a security researcher (who didn't accept DJI terrible condition for the $30,000 award) found their server with user ID and passport info. I'll say it's worst than spying.