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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! --
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"
... 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.
"Wasn't this reported here yesterday?"
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Refer to IME NSA "bug" released with Shadow Brokers leak to understand why any state that has any competition with any party headquartered in US should be looking to do just that.
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.