Connecticut jumps on protectionism-fueled DJI drone ban-wagon

Legislators in Connecticut have taken a significant step toward banning the purchase and use of DJI drones by state and municipal agencies, after a Democrat-led majority of Senate members passed a draft law phasing out use of the company’s UAVs over the weekend.

As DroneDJ previously reported, officials in Connecticut had tabled a bill inspired by laws passed earlier in Florida, Arkansas, and a few other US states banning official agencies from using DJI drones. Those local initiatives have followed the lead – and parroted the language and unsubstantiated reasoning – of federal measures prohibiting the operation of the company’s craft for official uses. 

After its 26-10 approval by Connecticut’s Senate, the bill now heads to the State House, where the push will be on to pass it into law before the legislative session ends on midnight Wednesday. The measures banning drone purchases from China and not-so-drone-powerhouse Russia, were wrapped inside a consumer protection package.

In leading the the upper house’s clearance of the DJI drone prohibition, Senate majority leader Democrat Bob Duff replicated the claims – and often babble – that have thus far gone unchallenged as rationale for federal, state, and municipal ban campaigns.

“Most people are unaware of the risk that these foreign-made drones present in our communities,” Duff told The Hartford Courant before the vote. “When people get drones, they go for the lowest price, and the lowest price is the Chinese drones — and that’s on purpose… What we are seeing from the FBI and Homeland Security is there are real problems with the way they are built and they infiltrate our networks.” 

Duff’s tenuous understanding of how drones operate – and the leaking threats they may pose – echo the studiously alarming, yet evidence-free warnings US federal agencies have made against DJI, and prohibition-bent legislators in states have repeated. 

Those claims maintain DJI UAVs secretly transmit collected user data to government servers in China for espionage purposes. Those allegations have been leveled without corroborating proof of significant, much less widespread leaking. 

DJI has repeatedly refuted those accusations and has pointed out its drones can be easily configured to protect data from interception or diversion by prohibiting their wireless transmission of information. 

In addition to the Connecticut bill, those leaking allegations are serving as the basis for a draft law before the US House of Representatives seeking to effectively ban operation of DJI craft by all US users – official, enterprise, and private pilots. That text has continued to clear committee vetting, and looks likely to head towards a full vote later this year.

In another commonality with federal and other state campaigns, the Connecticut bill does little to mask its protectionist objectives in seeking to sideline – or entirely lock out – DJI from nominally free US markets.

That objective, as made clear by Connecticut Democrat Melissa Osborne, is to provide artificial support and financing to private US drone companies that simply can’t manage to compete with DJI in pricing or tech terms on their own – as if that’s DJI’s fault, and as though local taxpayers should pay for those subsidies.

“I share the concerns about the potential municipal cost and the fact that American drones just aren’t there yet,” The Courant quoted Osborne, speaking – it must be repeated – about private US drone companies that have recruited hundreds of millions in equally private capital. “That’s because we haven’t invested in them. For me, the overarching concern is that a potential bad actor in the international sphere seems to think that it’s important that they have the right to obtain the data from these drones. I may not be able to understand why that’s important, but if they think it’s important and they want it, I pretty much don’t want them to have it.”

There are a lot of things Osborne doesn’t understand in the current US DJI blacklisting drive, which is another thing her state and municipal peers share with the national colleagues. Astonishingly, that very tech cluelessness and at times militant ignorance is now being paraded in full daylight as patriotism advancing market deforming protectionism.