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Comment by bicx | Hacker News Reader

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.?

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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.

They do, the DJI app can send whatever it wants. In China, all flight logs are sent to the relevant authority for enforcement.

It can't send "whatever it wants." The user has to grant access to various categories of personal data.

And whatever it sends can and would have been sniffed by now. It's incredible how much time people have to expend on way-more-obscure snooping than that.

It has your location and your phone number and flight logs. The later are systematically sent to the Civil Aviation Administration of China along with your phone number which is a unique ID in China. I am not talking about hypotheticals, I am talking about what's happening right now in 2025 in China and that will happen all around the world as governments tighten the grip.

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.

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.

And they run heavily encrypted firmware, so you have no idea what is actually happening. There is so much CPU power in those things it puts your cell phone to shame and a lot more sensors to boot. Some models have 8 onboard cameras.

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.

We have a big semiconductor industry! We just didn't have TSMC.

Skydio and Freefly and a bunch of defense contractors. Skydio is pretty big, IIRC

The entire point is to force the creation of one

A US drone industry would still have to compete with China on the global market. The entire developing world doesn't give a shit about US sanctions.

Perhaps Trump Jr's Unusual Machines.

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

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