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Homeland Security Claims DJI Drones Are Spying For China (engadget.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the fraternizing-with-the-enemy dept.

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."

10 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Huh, I've always wondered... by Nabeel_co · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Huh, I've always wondered... by Freischutz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Huh, I've always wondered... by BlueStrat · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      This accusation is pure hogwash.

      This is simply a propaganda push to move the Overton Window closer towards eventually disallowing the civilian purchase of non-US-approved drones without the (soon) US-required remote kill switches and similar spying ability to benefit US TLAs/LEAs. Can't have civilians with drones exposing corruption, incompetence, and things the government and those within it are not supposed to do.

      The US intelligence services dislike foreign states spying on US citizens and manipulating US citizens with propaganda, as they resent the competition.

      Strat

      --
      Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
    3. Re:Huh, I've always wondered... by AHuxley · · Score: 2, Informative

      re "Can't have civilians with drones exposing corruption, incompetence, and things the government and those within it are not supposed to do."
      That will be great news for the states with ag gag laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      Civilians will have to pay for helicopters and light aircraft to once again get video of topics of interest to the public.
      No more low cost drone that can get viral video everyday.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    4. Re:Huh, I've always wondered... by rahvin112 · · Score: 2

      Food security isn't about flag waiving and patriotic music, it's about basic defense. Maybe it's not needed anymore but the reality is that a disruption in food supply can be awful and maintaining not just production but local know-how is key to basic survival.

      Look no further than Venezuela right now for what can happen when international food supplies are interrupted and local production is insignificant. Venezuela imported everything for so many years that they don't even know how to produce food on mass scale anymore. That know how is critical and the result is a population that's on the verge of starvation and the average person has lost almost 20 lbs trying to survive. In the ends all the kids growing up during this will be stunted because of insufficient calories.

      Food security is not a minor issue.

  2. Because China xan't ... by CaptainDork · · Score: 2

    ... get to Google Maps?

    --
    It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
  3. If I were the China spy agency, I'd do it by raymorris · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:If I were the China spy agency, I'd do it by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But - how do you do it and why would you bother?

      This whole thing smells pretty skanky. Yes, the DJI quadcopters can produce fairly high quality GPS tagged video. No questions there. And, should you be of a particular persuasion, you can upload that data to SkyPixel (owned by DJI) or YouTube or FaceBook or whatever. But you have to work a bit to do it. It's not automatic and there is absolutely no data to suggest that the drones and controllers are sending back unsolicited video. Further, if you don't take the images off the SD card, all you get is 720P - at best (from the downlink). Woot.

      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? Sucks to be him (or her). It would be a whole lot easier to just pick off areas of interest on Google Earth. Or even buy some satellite time. Or launch your own.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  4. Moderate confidence by manu0601 · · Score: 2

    Is "Moderate confidence" the synonym for "Someone told us it would be possible, but we have no evidence"?

  5. You said GPS, then forgot? by raymorris · · Score: 2

    > 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.