DJI drone ban set to go in to effect on December 23

[Dan Robinson]

Yeah it's like everything else. Most have this attitude of resignation that they can't change things. Enough of an uproar *can* make a difference (as we saw with the OK bill), but everyone has to have the collective will. So many battles to fight in this field...(sigh).

I'd like someone to ask a lawmaker and the FCC these two questions:

1.) If the audit hasn't happened, how can they know that the drones pose a security risk?

2.) How are drones a bigger security risk than TikTok (who apparently is escaping their ban)?

 

[Warren Faidley]

Yeah it's like everything else. Most have this attitude of resignation that they can't change things. Enough of an uproar *can* make a difference (as we saw with the OK bill), but everyone has to have the collective will. So many battles to fight in this field...(sigh).

I'd like someone to ask a lawmaker and the FCC these two questions:

1.) If the audit hasn't happened, how can they know that the drones pose a security risk?

2.) How are drones a bigger security risk than TikTok (who apparently is escaping their ban)?

A lot of this has to do with politics, e.g., the current administration wanting the US to build drones instead of China. (A kind of tariff). It would not surprise me if politicians are doing some insider trading supporting US companies. I think the US also wants a master switch built into every drone so they can be shut down with the flick of a switch, or so the theory goes.

 

[Hannah.Taylor]

Thanks for the update. I purchased a new DJI Mavic 4-Pro on Sunday and extra parts that should arrive tomorrow. Used DJI drones and parts are about to go through the roof. DJI has already said they will supply updates.

I bought a used Mavic Pro 2 over Black Friday. I wish I had the coin for a brand new Mavic Pro 4 but I don't. Oh well. I'm sure there will be a black market. There's always a black market for everything that gets banned lol.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Yeah I almost bought a 4 pro this week, but I don’t have the budget currently. I think this will probably be resolved within a few months if the community can muster the motivation.

 

[Warren Faidley]

One thing we don't know is if dji is negotiating with a US company to make them here, or maybe some other arrangement the US approves of. The move today might be a motivational step in encouraging such a deal... or maybe not.

 

[Dan Robinson]

If there are truly built-in security risks with the DJI drones as they are, I would think that it wouldn't change anything for them to be manufactured here. The Chinese-sourced parts are also banned, which means *everything* would have to be made here, down to the smallest chip. DJI would have to divest itself from China completely, which is what was *supposed* to happen with TikTok (but mysteriously, now isn't).

The impetus for both bans is that Chinese law requires DJI, Bytedance and any Chinese company to become a state military asset if and when they demand it. Which means the CCP could push a firmware update that could make every US-based drone a wartime intelligence asset. But they can already do that with TikTok - and there are already billions of Tiktok users constantly gathering orders of magnitude more useful intelligence than the relative handful of occasionally-flying DJI drones ever could. Nothing about any of this makes any logical sense.

The issue in the meantime is that there aren't US facilities that can make many of the components. Those *could* be built of course, but it could take years - and the final product will still be 4x the cost (maybe even more).