UPDATE: Today the House of Representatives passed a bill which effectively bans DJI drones, which could now very well become law. We look at the prospects for the Senate overturning the DJI drone ban here, and what will happen to your DJI drone here.
It didn’t happen the way American children learn how a bill becomes law. An idea is debated in both houses of Congress, and approved, before being signed into law by the President. An elegant system of checks and balances, you might think, but right now (as The Simpsons learned) amendments and consolidation are where the real action is.
On Tuesday, the White House put out a combined policy document HR8070 – the goal being to lay out its ambitions for a 64th consecutive bipartisan National Defense Authorisation Act (NDAA). In other words the, the law that gives the cash to the armed forces for another year. This law has stayed on the floor all week.
Here is where drones are at risk. This is a whopping big bill, and it needs to be bipartisan in general (the US armed forces aren't cheap) and especially in an election year, which means that ordinarily fairly crazy ideas like banning consumer drones from a certain Chinese company are getting a lot of attention. We've covered in the past a certain ambitious Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.
The White House policy includes the heading "Countering Drone Threats in the United States". This cites House Resolution 4333 and Senate Resolution 1631. These create more powers against domestic drone use, but come at it from an anti-terrorism perspective.
There is also a section (223) attached requiring a DJI drone to be taken apart and examined by government agencies (but after banning it that'd seem a bit unfair.
Stefanik's proposed anti-drone law, House Resolution 2864, however, is also a bill waiting in the wings to be thrown in as bills are bundled together in committee before the NDAA becomes law and hers poses much more damage to DJI users since it specifically names the company and seeks to ban them.
To give an idea of most of the amendments up for discussion (and the kind of representative who might have included them), they largely involve preventing the DoD from spending anything on diversity/equality/abortion/electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
DJI had already responded by ending the Sync Flight Data function; American customers can no longer send data to the flight cloud, but it was too late to make an impact. On Friday the House of Representatives added the amendment and passed the bill to the Senate.
Just the loss of the Sync Flight Data function negates useful features for American users, but it seems to be a public relations decision as it takes away the argument that people like Stefanik and others use that the drones send data to DJI, and by extension China and the Communist Party.
For the most part these arguments seem to be made by people showing a limited understanding of the tech (or the usefulness of the data for espionage) – or, more likely, are made on a soft target by politicians who want to appear tough.
If the amendment is approved by the Senate too as the bill works its way through, it seems likely that the bill will be made law given the forced sale of TikTok was approved recently.
