Comment by bicx
2 days ago
Why can’t they just require government agencies to purchase US-made drones? Why is this a bigger threat than any of the millions of foreign electronics used to communicate in the U.S.?
2 days ago
Why can’t they just require government agencies to purchase US-made drones? Why is this a bigger threat than any of the millions of foreign electronics used to communicate in the U.S.?
Because there's a non-trivial element of the current USG (and probably a decent sized portion of American voters) who think we'll be at war with PRC within the next couple years, at some point when the next Taiwan invasion windows open (April and October each year). From that perspective, this is prudent policy. If you don't think this is likely, or don't care about broader historical or geopolitical trends, then yes it's very annoying.
That doesn't explain it, though. In this case and the TikTok case, nobody has been able to cite exactly what all these "personal data" are. Not once have I seen a citation of what TikTok has "stolen" from users, somehow defying data sandboxing implemented on mobile devices.
This fake hysteria over drones is even worse, considering that the drones don't have the means of sending arbitrary data to remote servers.
If you think that is likely there won't be a USA or much of the rest of the world anyway.
So this whole thing is utterly stupid
> If you think that is likely there won't be a USA or much of the rest of the world anyway
America and China will probably find themselves in a proxy and/or hybrid war before 2035 (unless China stops trying to invade Taiwan).
None of that requries a nuclear exchange, nor even conventional strikes by China on the American homeland or vice versa.
[flagged]
2 replies →
Department of Interior tried that, but "Interior faces challenges with maintaining a sufficient drone fleet because drones compliant with its policies are more expensive and do not always have sufficient capabilities, among other issues, according to officials."
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106924
At least theoretically, there could be code in the China-made drones that allows them to be taken over in the event of a war between China and the US. In practice, this is probably just protectionist.
Taken over how, though? They are controlled by short-range radio, and have no cellular transceivers.
A lot of them are controllable from mobile devices through apps that could have new code remotely deployed to them - for example https://www.dji.com/downloads/djiapp/dji-go-4. The apps are mostly for controlling the camera, but presumably they're not airgapped from the flight controls.
1 reply →
Its probably protectionism to protect/boost the domestic drone industry
What domestic drone industry?
It's right down the street from US domestic coffee, semiconductor, game console, laptop, rare earth mineral, graphite, and banana industries. All these US industries are protected by baseline and reciprocal tariffs.
1 reply →
Skydio and Freefly and a bunch of defense contractors. Skydio is pretty big, IIRC
The entire point is to force the creation of one
1 reply →
Perhaps Trump Jr's Unusual Machines.