Chinese firm is U.S.’ top drone maker; Washington not aboard
Officials see them as a security threat
The drones circled over the caves and crevices scattered around the mountain trails in northern Utah, feeding real-time video back to a search team on the ground looking for a missing hiker. Nineteen minutes later, they had her coordinates, bringing the rescue — a drill — closer to conclusion.
“In this kind of environment, that’s actually pretty quick,” said Kyle Nordfors, a volunteer search and rescue worker. He was operating one of the drones, made by the Chinese company DJI, which dominates sales to law enforcement agencies as well as the hobbyist market in the United States.
But if DJI’S drones are the tool of choice for emergency responders around the country, they are widely seen in Washington as a national security threat.
DJI is on a Defense Department list of Chinese military companies whose products the U.S. armed forces will be prohibited from purchasing in the future.
As part of the defense budget that Congress passed for this year, other federal agencies and programs are likely to be prohibited from purchasing DJI drones as well.
The drones — though not designed or authorized for combat use — have also become ubiquitous in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The Treasury and Commerce departments have penalized DJI over the use of its drones for spying on Uyghur Muslims who are held in camps by Chinese officials in Xinjiang province. Researchers have found that Beijing could potentially exploit vulnerabilities in an app that controls the drone to gain access to large amounts of personal information, although a U.S. official said there are currently no known vulnerabilities that have not been patched.
Now Congress is weighing legislation that could kill much of DJI’S commercial business in the United States by putting it on a Federal Communications Commission roster blocking it from running on the country’s communications infrastructure.
The bill, which has bipartisan support, has been met with a muscular lobbying campaign by DJI. The company is hoping that Americans like Nordfors who use its products will help convince lawmakers that the United States has nothing to fear — and much to gain — by keeping DJI drones flying.
But the influence campaign is facing a skeptical audience.
“DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk, and it is past time that drones made by Communist China are removed from America,” Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., one of the bill’s primary sponsors, said in an emailed statement this month.
Government agencies have shown that DJI drones are providing data on “critical infrastructure” in the United States to the Chinese Communist Party, Stefanik said, without elaborating. “Any attempt to claim otherwise is a direct result of DJI’S lobbying efforts.”
The bill that would effectively ground DJI drones, known as the Countering CCP Drones Act, was passed unanimously by the House Energy and Commerce Committee last month. The legislation could come to a floor vote in the House in the next month or two, said a lobbyist and a China expert who had been briefed on the plans, as part of what they described as a planned “China week” during which a number of curbs on the country’s business operations in the United States could be considered.
The bill is also likely to find backers in the Senate.
In the midst of the 2024 campaign, both parties are eager to show they are tough on China. The Senate on Tuesday passed a bill that would force Bytedance, the Chinese owner of the popular social media network Tiktok, to sell the app within a year or cease to operate in the United States.