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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

> In their determination, national security agencies referenced, among other things, concerns that that foreign-made UAS could be used for attacks and disruptions, unauthorized surveillance, sensitive data exfiltration, and other UAS threats to the homeland.

So people planning attacks and disruptions and unauthorized surveillance will have to buy drones made in the USA?

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No: the threat model as stated is referring to, in restated terms, “China could silently occupy DJI headquarters and control US-deployed DJI drones into quasi-military strikes using firmware updates, remote controls, or other such mechanisms.” Same theory as Huawei 5G routers could be remotely wiretapped in various ways, etc.

(It’s important to distinguish it from the “buy drone-as-weapon at US retail, use drone inside US” threat model, but beyond telling them apart, I have no position prepared on the relevance of either model.)

With the way DJI drone updates are deployed, that isn’t actually that far fetched, technically. Assuming the targeted event was known in advance in time/space.

It would likely be an obvious act of war, but technically it wouldn’t be that hard to pull off.

As another commenter pointed out, the vast majority of drones are in storage, indoors, with no battery connected.

and the ones near an event are going to generally be on and with some sort of internet connection.

what is your point?

it doesn’t need 100% effectiveness to be useful. even 1% with someone as popular as DJI will be a sight to behold!

Because drones without explosives strapped to them are so effective.. not to mention they spend 99.9% of the time in storage with battery disconnected, so easy to make a bunch of them attack at the same time (because once people know the drones are malicious it’s game over for the attackers).

pure idiocy.

No, they can buy previously authorized DJI drones, or used ones on eBay, no problem.

But nobody can import batteries, motors or flight controllers.

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