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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."
It has been argued that part of the reason to supplement farmers income is to make sure our food supply is secure. Ultimately we probably need to bring back more tech production so we can have semi secure sources to build common items.
Oh gawd I hope not the farm subsidy model is more rotten that road kill in July. Every year the subsidies for the farmers get bigger in the name of food supply security (cue flag waving and patriotic music) and more of the demands on these people to actually try to minimise the level of subsides and work for a living evaporates. I can't comment on the situation in the US but with 40-60% of farmer's direct incomes are being paid by the taxpayer and/or the EU depending on where you live in Europe. Every time somebody tries to reform the money eating black hole that is the farm subsidy system the farmers and their lobbyists go ape shit throwing crazy and choke any reform effort at birth. The last thing we need is a tech sector that works like that, where all drive for excellence and innovation has been ritually murdered by special interests cliques, lobbyists and pork barrel politics.
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.