Department of Homeland Security Recommends Passage of Drone Origin Security Act | Hacker News Reader

Department of Homeland Security Recommends Passage of Drone Origin Security Act

dronelife.com

47 pointsjonkratz15 comments

> including hot new drone company Skydio, offering a competitive product at a competitive price

This honestly looks like a hidden advertisement ...

> We provide our clients a three-legged stool of branding, lead generation, sponsored and native content that allows them to “get the word out” to thousands of prospective clients and partners in the Drone space, explore financing options for your drone business, or help with content, marketing, and business development services to help grow your business.

It seems you can get native content as part of advertising [1]. So, this could be an advertisement tucked in there.

[1] https://dronelife.com/advertise-with-us/

Sponsored content should still be labeled as such even in a native format.

'Native Advertising' is more sinister than simple sponsored content in my opinion, and should be outlawed. Masquerading a promotion in a journalistic format to trick readers is just plain wrong.

Isn't this actually fraud?

Yes! If they got payment from "hot new drone company Skydio" then it is in violation of FTC disclosure rules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

By extension, it's astroturfing and sponsored content all the way down.

There are security angles to this that it's the governments job to consider. For example, there is the case of sole source of components from a company or country and there is the case of back doors from countries that are known to spy on the US.

I would expect a country like China or Russia to do the same thing with goods designed or manufactured in the US that could have the same kind of impact.

> or any drones with parts manufactured in covered countries, including gimbals or cameras.

Is it even possible to build a modern day electronic device that doesn't have capacitors, diodes, resistors, oscillators, memory chips, cpu's, etc., that weren't manufactured in the "covered countries?" Or, are those not considered "parts?"

The full quote in the bill seems to be "uses flight controllers, radios, data transmission devices, cameras, or gimbals manufactured in a covered foreign country or by a corporation domiciled in a covered foreign country."

So it's apparently not all parts. Which I agree would be, at a minimum, very difficult to make 100% US--certainly not in a COTS product.

The title is wrong. It's “Committee on Homeland Security”, not “Department”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_American_Act

I do not understand all of a sudden everyone is freaking out about the Federal Register Entity List.

The list grew significantly way more in the past than recently. Why the sudden interest, weeping and gnashing of teeth?

My guess would be because there has been a surge in American xenophobia, and an expected outcome of that might be abuse of things like the FREL to irrationally discriminate against foreign entities.

The sudden shift of politics against globalization is more likely a root cause. The xenophobia was there, a little, in the background but it's been stoked into a bonfire by the politics/media press.

Meanwhile, you can't tell me the camera gimbal on a drone is any kind of national security problem. It's more like a trade leverage problem.

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