Bill to effectively ban DJI drones from US skies clears Congress committee hearing

A firebrand US House of Representatives legislator who usually rails against the size, cost, and over-reach of rights-crushing government is hailing the advance of her bill to deprive perhaps millions of state agency, business, and police, fire, first responder, and private users the ability to fly their DJI drones across the country. And there aren’t even “alternative facts” backing up the motives for the astonishingly repressive effort.

New York Representative and MAGA maven Elise Stefanik hailed her anti-China “Countering CCP Drones Act” clearing a procedural step towards what could eventually be passage into law, with it its legislative hearing in committee Thursday. The text seeks a tweak of the “Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019” to specifically prohibit DJI tech from using ubiquitous Federal Communications Commission and other government-owned infrastructure that UAVs habitually rely on to interface with pilots.

Operators would then presumably have the option of depending on the totally reliable, consistent, and eminently sane Elon Musk and his Starlink network as backup – if they have the millions to pay for it.

In case anyone has any doubts – including “well, at least she’s one of us” conservative-leaning drone community members usually inclined forgive Republican sins of excess – about Stefanik’s intention to block all DJI users from taking to the nation’s skies, behold her own explanation of the text’s goal.

“This legislation would add Chinese drone company Da-Jiang Innovations (DJI) to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Covered List, meaning that DJI technologies would be prohibited from operating on US communications infrastructure,” her statement read.

In other words, her H.R. 2864 bill wouldn’t do anything so un-American as to, say, prevent a maker of planes from a country she doesn’t like from operating in the nominally free nation and market the US is rightly so proud of. It instead does something closer to prohibiting those aircraft from using any airports, navigation systems, or airspaces linked in any way to the federal government in their activity. Which is, like, everything, everywhere.

Why not physically bolt every DJI drone in the US to the floor while she’s at it?

The initiative is the most extreme iteration to date of the blacklisting movement that has gained momentum in Washington and in several Republican-controlled states in recent years. Once passed, those drives have banned DJI and Autel drones for having been created and produced by companies based in China. As such, detractors on both sides of the aisle have claimed, those firms are obliged by Chinese laws to abet Beijing’s efforts to violate human rights at home, and provide it leaked user data collected by their UAVs abroad for the Communist Party’s spying and plotting activities.

While few people underestimate the Chinese government’s capacities and determination to advance its nefarious agenda by any means, the problem with those accusations – and increasingly broad blacklisting of DJI drones based on them – is that not a whit of evidence of alleged data leaking has been provided to substantiate them. DJI, meanwhile, has repeatedly denied those claims, and taken pains to point out how users can easily restrict data transfers from craft to secure, hard-wire links to their computers.

The coincidence that – by legislatively convicting DJI of crimes that DC pols acting as both prosecutors and judges failed to provide any evidence of – members of Congress have essentially replicated the judicial system in (ahem) China has been lost on Stefanik and her bipartisan drone-banning cohort.

Or maybe not, since both the absence of proof, and comments by supporters of Stefanik’s and previous texts since passed into law, clearly indicate the blacklisting effort is commercial rather than security in basis. The objective: deny, and now eliminate, DJI’s ability to continue selling its market-dominating drones by rendering them mute, blind, and deaf via infrastructure access bans. 

That (the protectionist logic runs) will leave current pilots no option but to buy US alternatives they initially dismissed as either more expensive, not as effective, or both. Since posting cops at every cash register in the nation to prevent UAV shoppers from buying the “wrong” kind of craft would seem too dictator-y, Stefanik and Co. are instead seeking to reserve the entire US market to domestic producers by unplugging DJI from FCC infrastructure.

If there’s any doubt about the real business and commercial foundation and goals of the nominal security-based continuing banning drive, witness again how the lady herself doth protest too much.

“Over 50% of drones sold in the US are made by Chinese-based company DJI, and they are the most popular drone in use by public safety agencies,” Stefanik said last spring, when she reintroduced the measure after her original bill bit the bitter biscuit of neglect as Congress opted to adopt a marginally less extreme ban. “This Chinese-controlled company cannot be allowed to continue to operate in the US.”

Of course, neither Stefanik nor her colleagues in the blacklisting movement can harangue DJI users themselves for their outrageous, dangerous, irresponsible, and presumably Commie-loving decisions of which drones represent the best quality for their money. Pilots vote, so you don’t want to piss them off even as you use the back door to remove the controller from their mitts and stomp them into bits. 

The “Countering CCP Drones Act” perished once already in Congress before its reintroduction last year, and despite Stefanik’s success in ushering it through committee hearings, it still has a long way to go before making it into law. But nobody should count on elections in November or more temperate, reasonable minds in Congress ultimately prevailing to shoot down the bill’s evident threat to DJI users in the US. After all, every blacklist and ban motion previously passed received bipartisan backing.