A memo from the Los Angeles office of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau (ICE) has been making the rounds and it states some pretty bold claims about drone-maker DJI.
The memo, which was apparently issued in August, says that the officials assess “with moderate confidence that Chinese-based company DJI Science and Technology is providing US critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.” The LA ICE office also says that the information is based on, “open source reporting and a reliable source within the unmanned aerial systems industry with first and secondhand access.”
Part of the memo focuses on targets that the LA ICE office believes to be of interest to DJI. “DJI’s criteria for selecting accounts to target appears to focus on the account holder’s ability to disrupt critical infrastructure,” it said. The memo goes on to say that DJI is particularly interested in infrastructure like railroads and utilities, companies that provide drinking water as well as weapon storage facilities. The LA ICE office concludes that it, “assesses with high confidence the critical infrastructure and law enforcement entities using DJI systems are collecting sensitive intelligence that the Chinese government could use to conduct physical or cyber attacks against the United States and its population.”
The accusation that DJI is using its drones to spy on the US and scope out particular facilities for the Chinese government seems pretty wacky and the company itself told the New York Times that the memo was “based on clearly false and misleading claims.”
But this isn’t the first time that the US government has butted heads with DJI. In August, a US Army memo directed its members to immediately stop using all DJI products due to cybersecurity concerns — something that the Australian Defense Force also did temporarily. Shortly thereafter, DJI released its Local Data Mode, which allows users to cut off drones from all internet activity. And there have been some legitimate security vulnerabilities brought up in regards to DJI’s systems. But the idea that one of DJI’s main goals is to spy on the US seems pretty absurd.
In a statement to the New York Times regarding the ICE memo, DJI said,
“The allegations in the bulletin are so profoundly wrong as a factual matter that ICE should consider withdrawing it, or at least correcting its unsupportable assertions.”
Source: engadget
It is far more likely that hackers for China and other potentially hostile entities are probing DJI. DJI in and over itself is not likely to be handing any such info out. Since the information and acusations are based off of ““open source reporting and a reliable source within the unmanned aerial systems industry with first and secondhand access.” ( for those who do not speak Beltway, that is political doublespeak for Rumors and innuendo with a smattering of content that attempts to link DJI to some nefarious scheme.
If Open Source data is the concern, maybe we should look at the Open Source controller that all the #DR Solo products and others use. Or maybe the autopilots that virtually every drone in current manufacture is using, *which is of course, designed, assembled and programed by Chinese companies. America has virtually no drone autopilot source that is suffienctly capable , reliable, and cost effective for the vast majority of uses that DJI products aer being used in at least a thousand times a day and probably 10 time that many.times.
This is just another political hit piece that aims to scare people into a much more expensive and yet ultimately no more secure product made by tiny fly by night U.S. Drone companies. The Fact that 3DR has ceased to manufacture or to upgrade or in any meaningful way update the Solo, is a perfect example.
the federal Government bought a large cache of 3DR Solo units, so that they had something tu use while they figure out what to do next… They are parsing these out to Federal Agencies that demonstrate need and operational competency, but to be honest they have no ACT 2 to follow up with.
If the world was in such dire straights that we needed a US built Drone Autopilot I would think Intel, would begin producing them in mass quantities. they do it for their own drones but somehow they seem to have forgotten everybody else…..
Seems it is smarter to expend resources on insuring info does not get moved to China with a more sophisticated filter software scrub system for Military and Law Enforcement. Oh that’s right, doing that would not scare everybody away from the Boogyman DJI and into the waiting arms of ….. who….
To put a finer point on it, China may indeed be spying on DJI, but Everybody who owns DJI Products and flies them can according to this in essence be considered to be spying for China. But only if you sync to the cloud. Wow, this is hard, If I don’t upload all my stuff to the DJI cloud then I don’t have a problem… wow, so hard to figure out a solution here……
On a larger scale, having someone at DJI write the code so that internet flows TO the drone for map functions and updates, but not back up the link should be a difficult problem for an ICE Agent, but probably less than a few minutes of coding for DKI. It is a problem of motivation….If someone in the government says “hey DJI, you need to fix this at once and we need to vet any new software releases as a mater of national security… or we will turn your container ship around at LA Harbor, then I bet it gets attention really quick.
No Really it is that simple, don’t kid yourself. DJI makes phenomenal products, and the sooner they understand the global implications of their actions will affect their largest market, then they will either fix it, or loos a serious butt-load of money and put in place a condition where a competitor will HAVE to come along.