
Drone Maker D.J.I. May Be Sending Data to China, U.S. Officials Say - nbmh
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/technology/dji-china-data-drones.html?_r=0
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crappybird
All android phone are definitely sending data to United States. Why is sending
data to one country better than sending data to another?

For US citizens, this might be irrelevant (not so much if we go by the leaks).
But for everyone living anywhere else on the globe, owning a smartphone means
usually owning an endpoint for one of the giant corporate data sinks which its
government can easily access.

I understand that it is the price I have to pay for a free (sic) OS and play
services. But I use it because of a lack of viable libre and open alternative.

And I have about as much choice as someone in the market for a decent
quadcopter unwilling to send data to China.

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astebbin
The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure,
as shown in the Apple vs. FBI case after the San Bernardino attack. My
understanding is that China has no such privacy protections, either in
principle or in practice.

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trhway
>The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure

i don't think these protections apply to the people outside of US. The same
way whatever laws China has wouldn't apply to for example the people in US,
ie. outside of China.

Also it reminded about that typical arrangement when UK spies on the people
inside US at the request of US government and vise versa in order to
workaround those domestic legal protections.

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wbl
That last part doesn't happen: it's part of the intelligence agreements not to
do that.

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kuschku
The snowden leaks, 4 years ago, offer proof that this happened, and you still
deny it?

Officials of the BND admitted it in a parliamentary hearing, too.

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wbl
What proof did Snowden show of this?

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kuschku
I don’t have his documents on hand, but I’d instead recommend you read the
transscripts of the NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss of the German Bundestag, which
investigated the NSA and BND affairs. They’re official government documents,
and are transscripts of people testifying under oath.

The head of the BND stated that the BND did not record any information about
Germans, and the NSA did not record any information about Americans, but that
the BND shared whatever it collected about Americans with the NSA, and in
reverse.

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saurik
The response to this issue, which was mostly news from August but is coming up
again today due to the new probe, was that DJI decided to add an "offline"
mode.

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/14/dji-adds-an-offline-
mode-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/14/dji-adds-an-offline-mode-to-its-
drones-for-clients-with-sensitive-operations/)

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irunbackwards
I thought this was like a for sure thing already.

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abakker
Yeah, the army already issued a memo saying that they were not using DJI until
this was resolved. That was back in August.

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seanmcdirmid
That the Army is considering using them at all is interesting.

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wmf
Aren't DJI drones the best? The military applications of quadcopters seem
obvious.

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flavio81
Quadcopters are in the lower tier of all drone types. Fixed-wing drones are
more suited to military applications due to greater range and payload
capacity, not to mention speed.

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pjc50
But Raptor/Predator drones aren't man-portable.

Highly maneuverable portable drones are going to be a key part of urban
conflict in the next century of the ongoing war in the middle east, just as
the RPG and IED have been.

~~~
Density
The army uses man portable fixed wing drones very often.

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mmagin
Relevant link from recently [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/11/dji-l...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/11/dji-left-private-keys-for-ssl-cloud-storage-in-public-view-
and-exposed-customers/)

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pjc50
For every $1,000 drone bought from DJI, the military isn't buying a $10k+
drone from Raytheon or Lockheed-Martin. I'm sure that factors into this
somehow ..

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dovdovdov
Data rates might be higher to the US. ;)

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tobiasbischoff
you dont say...

