Drones used by farmers could be spying | Hacker News Reader

Drones used by farmers could be spying

taipeitimes.com

93 pointstomohawk70 comments

Key point: this is from Taiwan. Taiwan faces a very real threat of literal invasion by china. Footage, any footage, would be of interest to chinese military planners. The location of small bridges, the state of private roads, whether fields are flooded ... if you are planning a ground invasion you cannot have too much terrain information. But no, that doesnt mean every chinese drone is a threat everywhere. The chinese are not going to backdoor a drone to get footage of some kid's pot plants behind a barn in Iowa.

" The chinese are not going to backdoor a drone to get footage of some kid's pot plants behind a barn in Iowa."

Thinking very long term:

What if this kid is about to become someone important - you never know.

But if he does, it could be convenient to have lots of private footage and possible blackmail material.

Meaning, there is unlikely to be anyone watching the videos of kids flying drones now. But there might be the option that they automatically back it up to some server. Or that there is this option, that gets activated in some cases of interest to them.

No they'll probably only backdoor drones to get footage of stuff that interests them (wherever that may be).

That's the only sane approach to start with. Even the NSA, in a country which undoubtedly leads in its technical ability to collect and store vast amounts of data, didn't try to intercept every Cisco router on the planet to backdoor it. That increases the amount of data you have to process and store by orders of magnitude, and vastly increases the risk of detection.

Targeted strikes are way more effective until you have the capacity to effortlessly cast the widest net. I have no idea if China is there yet.

So it wouldn't be a stretch to believe that some innocent looking bugs are introduced here and there, with the ability to string them into a serious exploit. It creates a cover of plausible deniability making it impossible (with what we know) to say it was incompetence or maliciousness as proven by any number of vulnerabilities which stayed for years in all kinds of software before being disclosed.

Mass media works differently when reporting on the home-team vs. the enemy so you might get the idea that we know it's maliciousness when it's a Chinese drone manufacturer [0]. But it's just an accident when Webex is suddenly hit by a whole host of random bugs that allowed hackers to snoop on any meeting and needed multiple rounds of patches to be fixed, right in the middle of the teleworking setup [1].

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/chine...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/cisco...

Of course but in China you'll never see the (almost mandatory) "we're just as bad, if not worse" comment whenever an issue of national security comes up.

I also note that China blocks all foreign social media from their markets whilst running some of the most invasive apps (e.g TikTok) in ours.

Please enjoy your freedom to advocate on behalf of a foreign govt on a US based forum, a freedom not available to the good citizens of China.

You found a perfect way to drag the discussion into the gutter.

> Please enjoy your freedom to advocate on behalf of a foreign govt on a US based forum

Is this freedom transactional? Because you suggest that in exchange for "freedom" or access to "a US based forum" I should refrain from any remark that offends your sensibilities.

I made very specific points related to the likelihood that China is able to collect or process the amount of data for continuous global surveillance (rather than targeting what they're specifically interested in), knowing where the country with the highest such capacity was ~10 years ago at the time of the Snowden leaked data. Then I showed some evidence from mainstream quality publications exercising their freedoms by showing an obvious bias. This was also supported by a recent discussion on HN [0]. This is relevant because those are the kinds of sources the overwhelming majority of people (and you) in the free world use to form an opinion when deciding the relative positions of different countries on the surveillance/hacking map.

How is any of the stuff you said pertinent to this? Are you going to count how many civilians are freedom killed in the Middle East every day just so you can have the freedom of buying cheaper freedom gas? Oversimplified of course, to your freedom benefit.

You are not properly equipped to have this conversation. You took an opinion as is and support it with personal feelings and demonstrably biased sources, then instinctively fight any suggestion that doesn't fit your world view even at the cost of bringing trash arguments. The Chinese people have a gun pointed at their heads, you choose to be ignorant and aggressive. They are forced to accept biased sources, you are free to use unbiased one but here you are complacently putting in more effort to attack the person pointing out an issue than solving the issue. Good thing you're free to do that, how would society progress without people like you trying to shut up anyone highlighting a weakness that can be addressed.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835933

I think your opinions are so high-minded and naive in the extreme as to be effectively useless. We have to operate in the real world, not some frictionless, utopian ideal that is never going to happen. I dont think you are properly equipped to understand this reality etc...

Nation states send nuclear submarines to the bottom of the ocean to tap into communication cables. You dont think there going to hack a couple of routers if the opportunity presents?

There just appears to be a remarkable complacency on national security issues in the west.

I wonder if its because every time the issue comes up, somebody always comes back with the predictable "we're just as bad" comment. As if the idea that competing great powers using whatever resources they think will give them an advantage is some incredible insight that hasnt occurred to anybody else.

And no I'm not suggesting the west should stoop to the level of China. There is a happy medium. But I am suggesting we deal with national security issues effectively rather than doing nothing because "we're just as bad".

Anyway regardless, I'm sure the CCP appreciates your naivety (or loyalty perhaps?).

Also, you wouldn't risk using that ability where it isn't needed as there's always a risk of discovery ruining the whole operation.

If you use it indiscriminately everywhere then no one will know where you need it and everyone will become inured to such behaviour.

That only works if people are forced to use the product. Obviously if their spying is proven, nobody will use it :)

> Obviously if their spying is proven, nobody will use it

This is demonstrably false. There are already installations of surveillance camera with known backdoors but they remain installed.

See, for instance, https://www.mnemonic.no/blog/exposing-backdoor-consumer-prod..., https://xplora.no/

I do expect them to backdoor every drone, and only activate the ones they care about. That means your drone could start sending images at any time, but it probably doesn't and never will.

That said, this is the exact same situation of not intentionally backdoored IoT.

oh yeah, sounds like china can't afford a spy satellite

Satellite images are to drone footage what Poleroid is to 4k hdr. Both are images but that is where all practical similarity ends.

Also:

Drones fly under the clouds.

And:

If you've subverted the drone imaging you can use it to hide stuff.

If you've subverted drone control you could use it as an active agent in conflict.

What evil things can you do with 4K HDR images of crops that you couldn't do with what's on google maps satelite view?

You can get way higher zoom/detail from cheap drones compare to GoogleMaps:

https://www.mobiddiction.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/D...

You can use stereoscopy from overlapping drone images to get depth maps:

https://www.mobiddiction.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/T...

I have no doubt major world powers have satellites that can match and exceed those sorts of capabilities from space, instead of from 100m up, but if you can get end users to pay for it themselves, why the hell wouldn’t you take it.

(Note, that was a DJI drone, and I would have no real surprise if the Chinese couldn’t have taken all my imagery if they’d wanted to. I _might_ have noticed them exfiltrating a few 10s of GB of data somehow, but I might not have as well… They are already geo fencing every single flight it makes, to trigger a warning and ensure I can’t fly over airports (or out the front of my house, since I’m only a few km out one on the flight path from my local airport). I’d hardly be surprised if the drone triggered some other action if someone chose to fly one near/over a nuclear reactor or a military base…

Also think of angles. At 100m your drone is looking down, in basically the same direction as a satellite. But during those few seconds when you takeoff/land your camera is probably pointing sideways, a perspective that a satellite cannot replicate. Rather than simply a higher resolution, those few seconds at low altitudes give a very different perspective on an object. If you want to see the underside of a bridge, to determine if its support can handle tanks, you won't get that information looking down from 100m. You will get it looking sideways from 2m.

You can get much better detail from drones if the drone happens to be pointing at what you're interested at in a time frame you're interested in. And, as you point out, if they can get the GB of data back.

China has access to better Earth Observation resources than Google Maps anyway, so a collection of EO imagery from tasked satellites of different types up to 0.25m pixels of something they actually want to monitor when they want to monitor it is a lot more useful than even higher resolution image collections of some random farm at random times. The latter wouldn't be entirely useless for intelligence purposes if the backdoor exists, but neither is Googling for images of locations voluntarily uploaded to the public web by smartphone users...

Determine whether that crop field is firm enough to support a tank driving over it. Or whether a helicopter can land on it without getting stuck. Or whether the crop is dry enough to catch fire. Or is the crop high enough to mask troop movements. And that is just the field. The nearby hedgerows, roads and other infrastructure is a big deal too.

The hedgerows of France! The allied forces greatly underestimated how difficult it will be to travel through them during WWII.

Because of American planners. The age of the oldest hedge in the US is measured in decades. Hedges in France are aged in centuries. American tanks thought they were driving though some bushes. They ran into oak trees.

Are you sure about this, or just speculating?

Definitely not the case for US DoD / NRO satellites.

I wonder how long this will be true. Right now I think the US has 10cm/pixel resolution, but I imagine it's not long before that is far better? It might already be, we just wouldn't know about it

We got the Hubble after they made spy satellites about the same size. Maybe there is the equivalent of the JWST looking down at us?

JWST would be totally useless as a spy satellite. It sees in IR. It is in space specifically because IR does not penetrate the atmosphere very well. That applies when looking down equally as up. Everything from the mirror and sensors to the entire cooling operation is optimized to see that IR blocked by earths atmosphere. So any spysat version wanting to actually see through that atmosphere would share almost nothing in terms of design or parts.

This is what real spysats looks like. They make JWST look like a toy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite)

"is according to NRO director Bruce Carlson "(...) the largest satellite in the world".[3] It is believed that this refers to the diameter of the main antenna, which might be well in excess of 100 m (330 ft)."

I think its kind of amazing how little is known about Orion. Not even the manufacturer is publicly known.

Impressive job keeping secrets.

Its not only in space, but very far away from the Earth and the Moon, so it doesn't become saturated with IR. That apart, there is a lot of important IR a spy satellite would search for. The heat signature from a fighter jet is much larger that its visual signature, for example.

IR is how satellites see clouds at night. Seems to work pretty well.

Weather-related sats see the clouds because IR is blocked by moisture, the stuff that clouds are made of. Spy sats generally want to see things that are not made of water.

Yawn. https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...

Depends? Humans are made out of water (mostly) ;->

Orion is a spy satellite for radio frequencies ("sigint satellite"). While it is massive, it's not an optical spy satellite and certainly does not have <10cm resolution.

JWST is fairly old tech now so probably better - by better I mean in some colloquial sense based on the passage of time, i.e. JWST would be pretty useless pointed at the earth one imagines.

Pointed at earth from k2 it would be useless.

But a similar diameter in the same orbit as current spy satelites may be able to resolve objects 1/3 of the size. If OP is correct about 10cm, that would place it at around 3.7cm.

It still is incredibly poor compared to what a high flying aircraft could capture, much less a drone spraying chemicals.

There are other considerations. The atmosphere is wobbly. You can have a mirror 100f across. That won't help the distortion. The only option is active optics, mirrors that adjust in real time, something very hard to on the ground let alone in space.

May not. But the key to Facebook, … mainland is data. Tik tok is not going to …

If there is concerns about cameras on drones, what about CCTV cameras in general?

My mother just recently paid to have a few cameras installed, the cameras are magically on the cloud and accessible from her phone/ tablet, so that the footage could be viewed anywhere

I've not had time to look at these cmeras yet but I suspect the cameras are sending the images back to the country of origin; where all the live video data would be extremly useful to a foreign miltary.

a few ideas come to mind eg face recognition, number plate recognition, your wifi and password for other equipment to connect to, potential to access your local LAN etc..

The very popular Chinese state-owned Hikvision cameras are known to have backdoors:

https://ipvm.com/reports/hik-backdoor

It's puzzling why they are not yet banned in my country.

Siemens is even RECOMMENDING Hikvision cameras to their clients...

Anything with a camera that can connect to the internet and sold as a retail product could be spying. The problem with Government and Company surveillance is that if a device has a camera and can connect to the internet somehow, it might as well be sending unauthorized information to someone who is not the purchaser of that device.

It shouldn't be that surprising to all of us here that there are Chinese internet connected security camera with IR that costs less than just the RPI camera module. Some of them even have free cloud storage offering! You can make a case of economies of scale and expertise and what not but on a economic level you have to at least entertain the idea that there is the possibility of these devices are generating revenue somehow after sales.

>it might as well be sending unauthorized information to someone who is not the purchaser of that device.

It shouldn't matter, getting hundreds of thousands of cameras collecting at least images/ video streams +wifi information and who knows what other sensors are in the cameras. Also this will lead to countries almost having blanket covereage.

I've counted at least 10 to 20 cameras that I walk past on the way to my local pub (and also in almost every bloody pub and shops!!!!). if these are fitted near military bases extra bonus for intelligence finding!!

I'm surprised that other countries are not subsidising almost free cameras to other countries(eg with free cloud storage), so that they could obtain this amount of intelligence

The truth is you can just say "[Internet connected devices] used by [persons] could be spying" and it's true.

This is correct. Whether it be because of a regime such as discussed in TFA or because of malware or just awful programming and infrastructure, this can be true.

So, am I misreading this, or is the risk, attributed to an anonymous source, entirely theoretical, based on what the companies "might" do, since the government "might" call on them to do it?

I think the point is worth foot-stomping that the technology doesn't care. Capabilities and data exist, they will be leveraged however they are leveraged.

Legal restrictions are good as far as they are heeded. Legal restrictions usually include some "emergency" exception mechanism.

The government merely needs to torture some facts to meet "emergency" criteria, and, behold!, all of those heretofore useful capabilities do the unexpected.

One can call this an "entirely theoretical risk", but, given recent abuses, others might call it an inevitability.

Then autarky is the only answer, because it's hardly a problem unique to China. Companies pretty much everywhere answer to intelligence services' demands, unless they're operating in a country that's a basket case with incredibly weak control.

Risk is, by definition, always theoretical. In assessing risk of the kind we are discussing here, you are literally estimating (guessing) two things: (1) likelihood and (2) severity of an unwanted event. So yes, this risk is also “theoretical.”

Now, given the track record of the Chinese government in matters of this type, it is highly likely they will use their legal right and get the information they want/need.

As regards severity, this element is individual: what could be the damage if a particular piece of information would leak? The more sensitive information is, the more damaging the leak may be (and more likely it will be wanted/needed). So if we’re talking about Taiwan, then yeah, aerial imaging information is probably quite pertinent to the Chinese government interest, sensitive or not.

So I’d say this risk is material.

Plus, I have heard plenty of first-hand accounts indicating certain Chinese drone company being very cosy with the Government, enjoying massive subsidies, so likely cooperating without much hand-twisting needed.

OK, well, we know the US actually does this. And any other country besides China could just as plausibly do it, since I'm not aware of any that gives companies an exemption from complying with the authorities, especially in matters of supposed "national security." So what's actually here besides "I think we should not do business with Chinese people at all because they cannot be trusted in any instance"? Nothing, but it sounds more compelling when it's dressed up as though there's some find to justify the claim.

Have you ever heard of threat analysis? If someone was already doing something, it may be too late. I assume you use a password even though your sensitive accounts may have never been hacked.

The article and headline are, in my view anyway, designed to confuse the reader into believing that there is some evidence that the drones are doing this.

Yes. The same claims could be made by any government about any perceived threat actor. It's mostly politics in this case.

Something else was found and they aren't saying.

I don't buy it. I think if they had something they wouldn't run with a piece this vague and noncommittal. There's no meat here.

When critical information is found, intelligence agencies often do NOT want to expose it, at least to the extent that the release could reveal HOW they found it, and thus alert the adversary to the leak path so they shut it off.

This is just bog-standard operating procedure.

Just because they aren't telling us, does NOT mean we can therefore infer that nothing more exists.

Here is my guess: as you probably know, how much engagement to have with China is a hot-button topic in Taiwanese politics. If you were the type who thought less, why not call up a friendly reporter on background and get him to write up an ominous report on what China could, thereotically, do, based on absolutely nothing.

The alternative of "let's just assume spies have something they don't wish to disclose, except they kind of do and want to put it in the papers" strikes me as a bit too trusting but I can't tell you what to think.

This is not just Taiwan.

US has all but banned Chinese drones for most govt-related flight ops.

Japan has banned Chinese drones.

In Europe, internal risk-assessment memos are circulating advising security agencies to avoid using Chinese drones.

You’re missing a massive part of the context here.

This particular article may be missing factual evidence to support some of the voiced concerns, but it’s hardly a singular shout in an ocean of silence. It strongly resonates with a rather diverse chorus of voices coming from multiple independent sources.

So yeah, it’s a thing.

Yes, I am well aware that there is an internationally-coordinated "decoupling" campaign from China, which is precisely why I view this story as politically motivated and intentionally misleading. In fact, dubious stories like this are essential to the operation -- you have to give some sort of public cover to get people onboard. There's a reason spies so much time "leaking" stuff to the press.

This is absolutely 100% correct. Perfect explanation for what I was unable to espouse.

Or they can just look on Google Maps? That will contain most features like foot bridges etc.

I think the US would probably be the hardest country in the world to invade due to the amount of arms people have, even if you got past the army somehow you’re still in trouble.

Has any thought been given to arming civilians in Taiwan as a further tactic to prevent invasion?

China has absolutely nothing to worry. The evidence is overwhelming that complacency is the dominant narrative here.

The Chinese own over 2 million acres of American farmland, more than any other nation. By having that drone backdoor they can get advance information on the condition of all American crops. Possibly scout future land for purchase? They could acquire some of this information by satellite but the pictures from the drones are of higher quality.

The American government has acted decisively to prevent to prevent Chinese telecom equipment being used in the telephone system where it could monitor our communications. They've also convinced Japan and most European nations of the same. Yet they aren't restricted from buying our farmland and monitoring our crops. Farmers are quite concerned about both but so far not the U.S Congress.

The Chinese own over 2 million acres of American farmland, more than any other nation.

This doesn't line up with government reporting here:

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11977

Even if this wrong by a factor of 10 (which it would have to be to match your number), it's peanuts compared to the US Agricultural land owned by Canada and less than half of Dutch-owned land.

Wow, off topic but why do the Dutch own so much farmland in America!? That's an unexpected one...

Ok, I searched around for a few minutes and this was the best answer I could find:

> Stephen Raes, economic minister for the Netherlands embassy in Washington, D.C., explained in an article in USA Today that the Dutch nationalized pension system is about 130 percent the size of that nation’s gross domestic product, thus making it the world’s largest relative to the size of its economy. That pension plan favors conservative investments, such as American farmland, he said, adding that historically Dutch immigrants to the U.S. became Midwest farmers all throughout the 19th century.

And apparently, they also own a fair amount of wind energy farms in the US.

The Dutch own farmland everywhere where it matters, not just in America, because they do quite efficient industrialized farming.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...

https://www.politico.eu/article/netherlands-farmers-flee-env...

The Netherlands is also historically big into industrial agriculture (windmills, greenhouses, reclaimed land, helping invent capitalism, etc) so it all sort of adds up.

You're correct it's around 200,000 acres or $2 billion. Chinese also own the largest hog producer, Smithfield Farms.

I saw a news report this week that China was the largest holder of U.S. farmland. A quick web search shows the Canadians own far more, 4,000 times as much. How bad is it in this country when you can't believe the facts American media is giving you?

Do you remember the outlet by any chance? I'm curious how something ended up being both so specific and off at the same time.

Hmm, since those land is already own by Chinese, they can easily get detailed data on those. For all farmlands, wouldn't satellite data be good enough? So why would they need it anyway?

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