Spies in the air? US wants to ban Chinese drones and in Spain they are everywhere | Technology



The United States Government is preparing to cancel its civil drone program for fear of Chinese espionage. The nearly one thousand devices of Chinese origin of the Department of Interior have been on the ground since November. Now, according to him Financial Times, the definitive suppression of the program seems imminent. The end of the service is serious because civil drones are responsible for monitoring emergencies, forests, borders or sensitive areas. Without these drones, many of their work should return to manned flights, more expensive and dangerous.

Chinese devices do not have a simple alternative: the country's companies dominate the global small drone market with a lot of competitive advantage. The decision may become another episode in the technological battle between China and the United States, where Huawei has been the victim main, linked to the new cold war for the 5G, and the app of the moment, TikTok, the most controversial controversial (TikTok is Chinese and is in millions of mobiles around the world).

Among all these Spanish institutions, they gather more than one hundred DJI drones

In Europe and Spain, as in the other examples of the technological war with China, the concern is less or concealed. In Spain there are five DJI drone dealers. THE COUNTRY has contacted everyone and at least three have explained their sales and commercial relations with Spanish security forces and agencies: Civil Guard, General Directorate of Traffic, National Police, Tax Agency (for borders) and a multitude of local and regional police . Among all these institutions, they gather more than one hundred DJI drones, with numerous negotiations underway to continue growing.

Chinese drones have been under suspicion in the US since 2017. The US military then banned the devices of the DJI (Da Jiang Innovations) company, which dominates the global market, for fear of espionage. In August of that year DJI opened a challenge for hackers to find vulnerabilities in their systems and prove that they were reliable. One of the hackers, Kevin Finisterre, was able to access his servers and found everything: "Passport information, driving license, state cards and flight diaries. Another thing I did to judge the impact of the exhibition was to search for '.mil', '.gov', 'gov.au' domains; immediately summaries of flights to a lot of potentially sensitive locations appeared, "Finisterre explains in the report he wrote about all the legal problems he had with DJI over the revelations.

"That the drones of that Chinese brand may be sending the data, for me there is no doubt because it has already been demonstrated in the past, as did Finisterre," says Pedro Cabrera, founder of Eton Shield, an ethical telecommunications hacking company . "And not only from Chinese manufacturers. I was able to verify the same with a French brand. I was able to get all the information about flights of that brand that had flown over several cities, including Madrid; they all contained the basic flight information (time, route , state) and some even contained the photos or videos the pilot had taken, "he adds.

Silence of the Ministry

The Spanish Ministry of Interior, to questions of this newspaper, has declined to comment if they are going to take any action against Chinese drones. The Ministry of Defense, on the other hand, has admitted that it has no DJI drone and has detailed its guides to acquire small drones: "The Ministry of Defense is aware of the need to have RPAS systems [vehículo aéreo no tripulado, en sus siglas en inglés] of reduced size that allows to cover the need to obtain information of tactical level ".

For this, Defense has created a "General Staff Requirements" and now prepares "the Stage for Determination of the alternative of obtaining. In this step the concrete material resources to be obtained are evaluated and the industrial, technological, logistic, contractual aspects are assessed. and cost associated with the proposed operational or functional solution. These aspects include the evaluation and certification of security in information technologies and telecommunications (ICT), which allows to assess and prove their ability to handle information in a secure way " .

Proof of the difficulty of replacing these small drones with viable alternatives is that the US special forces keep buying them, Despite the veto. Your option is to add software that limits the potential security hazards of drones of Chinese origin. "We know that much of this information [de los drones] it is sent to China, so it is something we cannot use, "a senior Pentagon official told reporters in December.

There is no need to be a military strategist to understand the value of chronologically ordered and detailed images of sensitive areas of another country, with the option of mapping hypothetical objectives, both physical and human. It is not something that the satellites have at the moment solved: "The image that can be obtained by satellite has its limitations, and that also assuming that China has a satellite system that allows us to obtain photos of the United States," explains Cabrera.

"But how many DJI drones are there in the US? Millions. Whether those drones belong to a public Department or to a citizen, it doesn't matter, they have the same operating system. We cannot know if the manufacturer gives a different treatment to the information of the drones depending on the user or if they mark certain drones to be more attentive to their information, but of course it is perfectly feasible, "adds Cabrera. Obtaining useful intelligence from thousands of hours of video is not easy yet, but being able to distinguish drones that record in interesting places is valuable.

The company Da Jiang Innovations (DJI) insistently denies that all this happens

This Monday, January 13, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech in Silicon Valley about technology and China. He did not refer to drones, but to how China sees the Trump Government: "With [el presidente] Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has prioritized something called 'civil-military fusion'. It is a technical term but with a very simple idea: under Chinese law, Chinese companies and researchers must - I repeat, must - under penalty, share their technology with the army, "he said.

The company Da Jiang Innovations (DJI) strongly denies that all this happens: "We hope to review the findings of the 'deep review' of the drone program of the Department of Interior given the lack of credible evidence to support a wide restriction by country of origin of drone technology. DJI drones are still among the safest and most used in the industry, "DJI said in a statement following FT news.

Drones pose a new nuance of the balance between convenience, both economic and technological, and security. Is it worth taking into account all hypothetical risks in exchange for not being able to use the technology more by hand? The US does not need huge drones, manned thousands of kilometers, which cost millions of dollars: with one of those, a Reaper, They killed Iranian General Soleimani. But it does try to promote its own small drone industry. If this maneuver is only to improve your business position or a real concern for national security, it is the big question. Also for other countries.

The United States government is clear on who to press: "You go to Europe and they are very careful when it comes to protecting the private information of their citizens, their medical records, everything that nobody would want in the public space, and at the same time they are ready to allow all that to circulate through Chinese infrastructure, "Pompeo said. "I remind you - and I know it's an imperfect analogy - none of us would have installed Soviet technology, right?"

.



Source link