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Comment by khazhoux

14 days ago

> While I agree with you, I doubt banning Chinese tech will remedy this problem.

I don't mean this as a political issue, but in your comment I see one of the reasons Trump appeals to people. He promotes a mindset of "stop handwringing and just fix the damn problem."

Here we know the following:

1) DJI devices have an always-on connection

2) Chinese government is unfriendly to US and exerts strong control over Chinese companies

3) China regularly blocks US companies for whatever reason they decide.

So yeah, we can say "but banning DJI won't solve the general problem of bad companies; we shouldn't just focus on China; is a ban really fair? etc etc. Or, we can just say "screw it -- China treats US companies like shit and we're not gonna just hand over all our drone info"

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khazhoux

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segasaturn  13 days ago

I'm not sure how that would actually "fix the damn problem"? My point is that American tech companies are just as data-hungry as DJI, probably more, and Chinese tech products are more likely to let users control their devices off-line than American brands. You're right though that creating a boogeyman and attacking it while ignoring the much larger and more complicated problems is great politics (and always has been)

  • khazhoux  13 days ago

    See, that's exactly what I mean.

    Here [1], CISA assesses China-made drones as a national security risk. That is a non-partisan agency. But your response is:

    * American tech companies are just as data-hungry, if not more. -> irrelevant, this is about foreign cyberattacks or foreign data mining

    * China produces more user-controllable devices than American brands. -> irrelevant

    * Boogeyman -> Scare word

    * Ignoring the much larger and complicated problem -> Deflects and says we can't do /anything/ unless we consider all angles and do /everthing/

    This leads to endless handwringing, and is one of the reasons the left has support of only 50% of Americans, when it should be (in my opinion) a huge majority. Because we're endlessly caught up in the attitude of "nope, we really can't do anything in the face of obviously problematic issues." Gosh, it feels racist to ban a Chinese tech company (even though the Chinese government does actually target our cyber infrastructure). Gosh, what about the bad American companies?

    [1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24362988/cybersecurit...