Comment by infecto

Comment by infecto 3 days ago

1 reply

Lots of ideas but you are missing the simple point. The CCP is partnered with their companies and actively support corporate espionage. Its a fact that the five eyes spy on lots of people including their own citizens. Some of this is certainly based off recent history but the way I frame it is China adulterates almost every piece of data they release. They limit their incoming internet. They aggressively monitor their citizens and will cull information on social media proactively. They participate in corporate espionage that sounds like its from a fiction story. Corporations in China are in some form or another tightly partnered with the government once they reach a massive scale. To find irony is to ignore everything China is doing. Again, absolutely everyone is running foreign intelligence. The difference is I don't believe anyone is as worried of drones made outside of China but its an obvious threat vector that drones made in China have the opportunity to phone home data and with the increased use of drones in industrial settings there are real risks to be thought about.

palata 3 days ago

Feels like your view is "whatever we do is okay, as long as we can point to someone else doing worse". Is that what you are saying?

> its an obvious threat vector that drones made in China have the opportunity to phone home data and with the increased use of drones in industrial settings there are real risks to be thought about.

Okay, let's take drones. Can you articulate concretely one of those "obvious threat vectors"? For instance, a DJI drone does not come with an Internet connection magically embedded into it. So you can be completely offline while you fly your mission.

Are you scared that the drone may save a 4K video in a hidden storage, and then upload GBs of it when you connect it to the Internet without you having a chance to see it? Why not instructing government operators to only connect through a router that filters the network? And that would be on top of the DJI Local Data mode that you don't have to trust.

Or are you scared that the drone may store few bytes of critical information? What would that be, a location? Why wouldn't the CCP just hack the smartphone of the employee, e.g. using something like NSO Pegasus (which is western technology, but I won't call any irony there)?

If it is obvious, please explain the national security threat caused by DJI drones that couldn't be solved with a simple external firewall.