US May Ground Civilian Drone Fleet Over China Spy Fears

[MacCool]

Not boards. I design them for military, I know. Many chips are made in pacific rim, e.g. Malaysia, but I don’t recall any from fabs in China.

Now, assembly is a different thing. Loads of assy in China. Still, not military.

Korea is a vastly more common source of silicon fabrication than China.

 

[Rangerider]

If this 'ban' is enacted, it would fit perfectly with the FAA's and large corporate drone operations plan to get rid of all those pesky drones that could 'negatively' impact commercial drone operations. See my post on some opposition to the NPRM that is also another facet of the 'plan' to remove 'civilian' drones from the skies! Experimental Aircraft Association Opposes FAA's NPRM

 

[Rangerider]

Given you can put your controller/phone into flight mode and still fly, then securely download any imagery or whatever from the memory card, and that you can download firmware updates for offline application as well, there's absolutely no need for a drone to ever be either directly online or connected to a device that is. There is a corner case where a foreign operative using something like Aeroscope might be able to eavesdrop on Drone-RC comms while a drone is in operation, but that would entail being within range (possibly extended via the use of a parabolic antenna) of the drone and/or RC.

I'm going to go with a "No" on your question, unless you are either A - incompetent, or B - routinely doing flights over sensitive locations that are within maybe 10km of adjacent publically accessible land. Both of those scenarios probably do apply to government agencies and their sub-contractors though, so while for most of us this should be a non-issue, it's definitely a valid concern to a small number of operators.

I am wondering if the NPRM for RID by the FAA would now allow monitoring of drone flights via the internet since an internet connection would be required under the proposed new FAA rule? Since cell phones can be cloned, wouldn't there be a possibility that a drone could be commandered by a cloned cell phone via the internet connection that will be required by the new FAA rule? Isn't this opening the door to this potential drone theft?

 

[zocalo]

I am wondering if the NPRM for RID by the FAA would now allow monitoring of drone flights via the internet since an internet connection would be required under the proposed new FAA rule?

It wouldn't be the first time that legislation designed to improve security/privacy/whatever has had the opposite effect, and in some cases at least I suspect that was probably by design (AKA "lobbying efforts"). The devil is in the details, or more likely in this case, in the implementation; a drone version of FlightRADAR is absolutely what they are ultimately looking to produce, but putting an ID next to a dot on a map is not the same thing as preventing a third party hacking into the link and taking control of a drone for their own ends. Any such system clearly needs to provide both, but given the modus operandi of some of the cheaper drone vendors out there, I suspect we'll just get further proof of the saying that the "S" in IoT stands for "Security".

 

[strdr]

Update on this post:

Looks like they went ahead and grounded them.

Dept. of Interior grounds its drones amid cybersecurity concerns

The U.S. Department of the Interior has confirmed it has grounded its fleet of non-emergency drones amid concerns over cybersecurity. Interior spokesperson Carol Danko said the department affirms with a formal order the "temporary cessation of non-emergency drones while we ensure that...

finance.yahoo.com

 

[Thomas B]

Update on this post:

Looks like they went ahead and grounded them.

Dept. of Interior grounds its drones amid cybersecurity concerns

The U.S. Department of the Interior has confirmed it has grounded its fleet of non-emergency drones amid concerns over cybersecurity. Interior spokesperson Carol Danko said the department affirms with a formal order the "temporary cessation of non-emergency drones while we ensure that...

finance.yahoo.com

The official doc was posted in another thread yesterday... search it, ....
and note that there are a huge number of stated instances where flying DJI drone is officially OK’d by the agency.
This “grounding” does not affect civilian owned drones.

 

[kjphoto]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

/sigh

This is government drones not civilian.