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[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday on
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Tue Jun 18 10:40:09 2024
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2024 07:29:06 -0700
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Script of my national radio report yesterday on public safety orgs'
letter to Senate asking them to block House-passed drone ban
This is the script from my national radio report yesterday on the
letter sent by public safety/first responder organizations to the U.S.
Senate, asking them to block the House-passed ban on DJI drones,
saying the ban will cost lives and do vast other damage. As always
there were a few very minor wording variations from this script as I
delivered the report live.
- - -
So we've previously talked about congressional efforts to ban Chinese
drones especially from the market leader by far the Chinese firm DJI,
and now the situation has gone into major overdrive and the public
safety community in particular is so concerned, that they've banded
together to tell the U.S. Senate that if the bans go ahead it's likely
to cost lives and do enormous other damage as well.
Now this was triggered by the U.S. House recently passing a crucial
law, the National Defense Authorization Act, that included as one of
its components the "Countering CCP Drones Act" which is a ban on DJI
drones in the U.S. And while there are details about timing and new
purchases vs. existing drones in use, the bottom line is that
apparently over 90% of public safety drone operations would be
disrupted by the ban, because these public safety organizations
consider them to be the best drones and the best supported and the
most affordable compared to everything else available.
The letter makes it clear that they don't consider U.S.-made drones to
have reached parity in terms of quality with DJI and that switching to
U.S.-made drones would not only be more expensive but impractical and
dangerous now, and that critical public safety operations would be
disrupted, jeopardizing safety in communities across the country.
It's quite a strong letter. And of course there are all sorts of other
organizations using drones for agriculture, for emergency delivery and
pickup of crucial cargo in remote areas, inspection of power lines and
other critical infrastructure for tampering or potential failures, all
manner of really important stuff.
So the joint letter was sent some days ago to the Senate Armed
Services Committee with the letter representing a vast number of
police, fire, rescue, other first responder groups, agencies, and
other organizations, saying that the House drone ban would be terrible
for public safety, for the economy, for critical infrastructure and
more. And they say look, if you have security concerns let's talk
about how to deal with them, but to date there aren't really any
demonstrated cases that justify those concerns, just speculation, not
facts.
But the letter makes clear that the kind of ban the House passed would
likely be disastrous, and it asks for the Senate not to include the
ban in the Senate version of this important legislation. Remember that
both the House and Senate have to pass versions of the bill, then they
have to get together to work out an agreement between the two and then
pass a final version in both chambers.
Overall in this situation there's a lot of suspicions that the House
ban really isn't about security, after all we haven't seen a rush of
other countries jumping on the ban the Chinese drones bandwagon, and
that it's actually more about protectionism. Of course there's nothing
wrong with wanting to help U.S. companies catch up in producing drone
tech, but a ban like this clearly has the many organizations and
industries that depend on DJI drones enormously concerned as this
remarkable joint letter to the Senate clearly demonstrates.
These are the organizations that we entrust to maintaining public
safety, and if they feel this strongly that a drone ban is going to do
so much damage, it would seem wise for politicians in both parties to
pay attention to what these public safety experts are saying, because
this isn't a situation where politics as usual should be acceptable to
any of us.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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