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U.S. Warns Of Spy Dangers Of Chinese-Made Drones

npr.org

41–50 of 165 posts

Re: U.S. Warns Of Spy Dangers Of Chinese-Made Drones

#41

Why not publish a specific threat? These vague "The Chinese are up to something but we cannot reveal what" isn't really helpful, particularly given the current trade tensions (and political motivations e.g. "bring jobs home"). I'm not really "siding" with the Chinese, they may be up to something, but the US has really done themselves a great deal of damage when their own allies don't really believe them. Just publish…

> Just publish technical information. It isn't hard. It would do huge damage to the Chinese and reinforce the US's whole argument. I doubt that it would damage China. The existence of the threat is already well publicized. I think that U.S. intelligence does not talk about specific threats because the attack vectors would probably misunderstood and underestimated by the general public. There would inevitably be pushb…

> I doubt that it would damage China. The existence of the threat is already well publicized.

It'd certainly damage Chinese companies and curtail those companies' utility as sources of intelligence. How many drones do you think DJI would sell if it became known that flight logs and aerial photos were being uploaded to the Chinese government? (This is all purely hypothetical but the DJI app is very aggressive about permissions and updates, so they absolutely could if they wanted to. I have a dedicated phone for mine which never gets to connect to the internet, for this very reason.)

Re: U.S. Warns Of Spy Dangers Of Chinese-Made Drones

#42
post #9

Security researchers in the field have been talking about this for several years. DJI absolutely dominates the consumer/pro UAV market so this is a real issue. Source: I had a UAV related startup several years ago and got to know some of the security folks.

The real issue is security or the real issue is a non-US company dominating in a tech field?

Re: U.S. Warns Of Spy Dangers Of Chinese-Made Drones

#43
post #37
post #12

It seems like they're just saying: - China makes most of the drones - A lot of them aren't very secure Which isn't surprising to me considering the state of things like DVR cameras (also mostly made by China, also plagued with security issues) and similar tech. The real problem is that consumers want cheap but quality and security aren't cheap. The cost of security isn't obvious and consumers don't really know how to…

> start communicating over the 5G backbone 5G operates at OSI layer 1 (and maybe has some impact on layer 2). I've never heard of any aspect of it changing higher layers, which is where the concerns about control come in. Is there something I'm missing? If not, 5G has nothing to do with application-level control (eg: controlling a drone's movements, intercepting a camera feed, etc). We'll still use TCP/IP, HTTPS, and…

That's not what I was suggesting at all.

If you control the cell infrastructure you absolutely can put cellular capabilities into products that aren't explicitly advertised. That would be a bigger risk for surveillance tech.

Your complaint ignores my original statement about controlling both components (cellular and device). There is no need to tamper with someone else's TLS-secured communications or anything, you can just plant cellular capabilities into the devices.

Re: U.S. Warns Of Spy Dangers Of Chinese-Made Drones

#44

Why not publish a specific threat? These vague "The Chinese are up to something but we cannot reveal what" isn't really helpful, particularly given the current trade tensions (and political motivations e.g. "bring jobs home"). I'm not really "siding" with the Chinese, they may be up to something, but the US has really done themselves a great deal of damage when their own allies don't really believe them. Just publish…

There have been instances whereby a robotic hoover (Xaomi(sp?) one?) have been sending their generated floor maps back to servers in CN, so I don't think it's unreasonable to assume drones could be doing the same thing.

Teslas send loads of stuff back to Tesla servers which I'd assume are in the U.S. It's not an unusual thing to do in this cloud-happy day and age.

Re: U.S. Warns Of Spy Dangers Of Chinese-Made Drones

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been instances whereby a robotic hoover (Xaomi(sp?) one?) have been sending their generated floor maps back to servers in CN, so I don't think it's unreasonable to assume drones could be doing the same thing.

We're talking national security. I hope nobody is running a Xiaomi robot vacuum at a sensitive or classified site, or any other brand of robot vacuum for that matter... There's a difference between individual invasions of privacy and national security. There's definitely Chinese apps that invade your privacy. There's also Western apps that do too. The question is of national security however.

Observing private homes can help select your targets. By observing the inside of the home you may learn if the owner has access to secrets (national security or commercial), what kind and what level. From where you can switch to traditional methods. My 2c.

Re: U.S. Warns Of Spy Dangers Of Chinese-Made Drones

#50
post #31

Isn't this the US's fault for letting manufacturing move to China in the 1980-present? Any large global migration of industry will have this same threat eventually.

Lack of foresight is a collective trait of the human condition. It'd be interesting to see who the protestors of said outsourcing in the 80s were, and see what they say now. How did they foresee it in the first place? Is the current outcome better or worse than they thought it'd be? What's their current prediction for the state of things in another 40 years? A good article topic for the journalists out there.
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