New anti-DJI rules could ground public-safety drone programs, IWCE speakers say

Public-safety aerial drone initiatives provide an ever-growing level of situational awareness to first responders, but many of these programs could be undermined by rules designed to ban the use of drones from China-based DJI because of national-security concerns, according to panelists speaking at IWCE 2022.

Tony Loperfido, a sergeant with the technical operations unit of the Miami Beach Police Department, said that the Florida Department of Management Services (DMS) has directed public-safety agencies to only buy drones from five American manufacturers—not from DJI, which dominates the U.S. drone market today.

“That has completely—or will very soon, unless there are some changes to this list—ground my program,” Loperfido said during an IWCE 2022 session about strategies for mission-critical drone use. “So, my $100,000 worth of inventory of drones I will not be able to fly, because of this new state mandate that public-safety agencies have to purchase from these five manufacturers.

“It’s getting even more complicated, because … what’s supposed to come soon is that it will be not only these five [drone manufacturers], but it will be those five manufacturers and specific drones. So, now I need to ask for more money.”

In addition to the operational and budgetary impacts, Miami Beach drone pilots will need to be retrained to utilize non-DJI drones, which promises to be challenging, in terms of operating the drone optimally to provide video or thermal-imaging information, according to Loperfido.

“There’s going to be a learning curve there,” he said. “Until we identify, first, the funding and then what aircraft are going to meet our defined missions, … I don’t know. I don’t know, because we’ll have to untrain all of my pilots on something they used to do naturally.”

Backend software practices also will have to be revamped, Loperfido said.

“DJI has a phenomenal user interface that’s built very well and that all of us are very used to,” Loperfido said. “Am I going to get the same functionality out of this new aircraft that’s going to cost me a lot more money? That’s still to be seen. I don’t know yet, but I’m worried about it.”

Ted Kalnas, a fire captain and drone pilot for the Los Angeles Fire Department, echoed these concerns about rules that would prohibit the use of DJI drones, which typically are less expensive than U.S.-made drones with similar performance characteristics.

“It could be a very big problem, because budget is everything,” Kalnas said during the IWCE 2022 drone session. “For mission-specific drones, we’re not going to be able to get the drones that we want. Then we have a low-bid process—because I work for the city of LA, it’s all low-bid … Unfortunately, I love American-made products—I own a ton of it—but sometimes I can’t get that drone for low bid.”

At the heart of this discussion are ever-increasing concerns that U.S. first-responder entities should not depend on DJI, a firm that many U.S. officials believe is obligated to share information with the Chinese Communist Party, if asked. While some state and local entities already have established rules banning the use of DJI drones, the FCC could take action restricting the sale of DJI drones in the U.S. as early as next month, according to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.

Douglas Spotted Eagle, who has supported numerous law-enforcement drone initiative in the Las Vegas area as production/education director for Sundance Media Group, said he used DJI products for more than a decade, but any regulatory measures taken to limit DJI use in the U.S. are warranted.

“Anything you do on any DJI product … Everything you do is shipped to a bunch of servers in Szenzhen, China,” Spotted Eagle said during an IWCE 2022 session examining the use of sensors, wearables and drones. “There are people who say, ‘Oh, this is just speculation.’ No, it’s not. We absolutely know for a fact. It’s demonstrated time and time again.”

Spotted Eagle also noted a recent article that claims that Russia is using DJI Aerocope—a platform that identifies the location of drone operators—to establish missile targets in the ongoing war with Ukraine.

“The point is, this data is going back to China, and—at some level—China is sharing the information forward,” Spotted Eagle said. “So, if you are setting up a drone program and you are a municipality or you are a utility [and choose to use DJI products], … you’re a fool.

“You’re a fool, and let me tell you why. What happens when [Chinese Communist Party General Secretary] Xi Jinping gets pissed off? What happens when [DJI CEO Frank Wang] gets angry at Joe Biden? I’ll tell you what happens: They turn it off. Those drones no longer will be flyable in this country, and we will have thousands of infrastructure pieces that can no longer be flown.

“So, the United States Air Force and the Department of Defense in general—DoJ, DoE and DoI—have all grounded and banned their DJI products, in great part for this reason: China has great control over our drones, whether it’s your nephew or your grandson or whether it’s an infrastructure company like Rocky Mountain Power, PG&E or whoever else it might be.”

Josh Turner, a partner at the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Wiley, said DJI “would dispute everything [Spotted Eagle] just said,” but the concerns shared by Spotted Eagle increasingly are being accepted by decision makers in the nation’s capital.

“Putting aside the truth or untruth of any of that stuff—and I’m not challenging it—your view has certainly ascended into Washington, and a lot of folks in D.C. are very, very concerned about what DJI is or is not doing,” Turner said. “They’re very, very concerned about the ubiquity of DJI in all of these various different networks, and that is a recipe for public-policy action.”

“It seems to me that it’s very clear that action is going to be taken against DJI, because this view of them has become sort of entrenched in D.C. That is just a fact about the public-policy world.

“If you are thinking about putting together a drone program, it’s something you need to be aware of and need to be thinking about. How do I diversify my program, so I’m not beholden to one particular manufacturer or one particular supply-chain problem, so I don’t have this issue?”

Will Egner, Axon’s senior director of wireless strategy, said the controversy surrounding DJI caused Axon to ink deals with drone manufacturers that don’t have ties to the Chinese government.

“This is exactly why Axon pivoted away from DJI to Skydio and Fotokite was because of this situation—making sure that the equipment we buy for video-evidence capture is certainly not compromised any way,” Egner said moments after Turner provided his assessment.

Another Axon representative—Verne Sallee, drone strategist at Axon Air—offered a different perspective about DJI during a separate IWCE 2022 session conducted earlier Thursday afternoon.

“Axon is an American manufacturer,” Sallee said. “We’re very proud to be American and sell to U.S. police departments, so we would never partner with somebody that we didn’t trust. There have been extensive studies of DJI drones, but there also are mitigations, if you’re not confident in the facts that all of these studies show that there’s not this information being sent back [to China].

“This is a geopolitical issue, not a technological issue.”

Sallee suggested that departments with concerns about DJI products use air-gapped architecture—a technique he used while heading the groundbreaking drone program for the police department in Chula Vista, Calif.—and other mitigation methods, if they want to continue using DJI aircraft.

“So, there are ways that you can use DJI drones very confidently,” Sallee said. “And there’s never been a breach, to my knowledge, where you’ve seen video or other sensitive information that’s given out.”

Fritz Reber, Skydio’s head of public safety and a former colleague of Sallee’s at the Chula Vista police department, cited big-picture concerns about U.S. public-safety agencies depending heavily on DJI products in their drone programs.

“I think originally the arguments were data security and network security—who cares if they see my video? I think, for me personally—and others I’m talking to—[we] see some supply-chain risk,” Reber said. “I mean, you don’t want to just give up the whole industry to DJI. Because maybe we’re getting along today, but maybe down the road we don’t.

“We haven’t spent the money domestically to build our own solutions, so do we just want to give it all to them [DJI]? In Ukraine, they can just down the drones by increasing geofencing or maybe with some firmware or whatever. You just don’t know where those things are going.

“In the long term, I think the United States benefits from controlling this great, viable asset. To do that, you need to invest in the industry, and it’s really hard to do that when DJI is selling all of the drones.”

Reber acknowledged the challenges associated with existing drone programs being required to halt use of DJI products.

“We’re in a Catch-22,” Reber said. “I think admittedly to get there it’s probably going to be some painful time for the end users dealing with drones … They’re used to dealing with DJI, and they have to expand and deal with the different types of drones for a little while. That’s just sort of the realistic [scenario].

“It’s just sort of where our eyes are and what we want to do … That’s why you have the president, the legislators, the mayors and the decision makers not really concerned about the day-to-day operations. They’re going to make these things [policy decisions], and the end users kind of have to suffer until they get through it. It seems like that’s the conversation.”

Some in the industry have questioned whether DJI is a threat, noting the proliferation of smart devices that have China-made parts or are at least partially assembled in China. But Spotted Eagle said there are differences.

“Somebody in this room—I guarantee you—is thinking, ‘Well, I have one of these [smartphones]. It’s Chinese made, so what’s the difference?’” Spotted Eagle said. “Well, there’ are two differences. The people that manufacture this are not [tied to the Chinese Communist Party], and the people you buy this from have very strict compliance controls with manufacturers, so this data doesn’t go somewhere.”