Do you trust the Police to implement a safe and secure gun register? I don’t, and here is reason #63,472…they can’t keep existing data secure:
Police drones are at risk of the data they gather ending up in cloud servers the Chinese government can access, but this can be managed, and the benefits outweigh the risks.
That is the conclusion in reports on police trials of drones released under the Official Information Act (OIA).
“An internet-connected [drone] could send data to a server located in China, and firmware updates could compromise the integrity of the [drone] and any police systems to which it is connected,” said the main 96-page report on the trial.
An internet-connect drone of the type police use would, by default stores information on a server hosted by Chinese web giant Alibaba, the consultant who advised police, Dr Andrew Shelley, told RNZ.
Radio NZ
And as usual the Police blithely continue on with scant regards to the risks:
Despite this, the main trial report recommends:
– police triple their fleet of Chinese-made drones from 26 to 72
– buy a couple of much more expensive – and much more data-secure – drones approved by the US military
– consider putting a small, cheap drone “in every [patrol] car”.
Oh great, give the nosy, already-breaking-the-law snoopy Police even more technology to invade our privacy. No worries…because they’ll now have military grade hardware instead of cheap CCP drones.
A significant hurdle is that there are a “wide range of circumstances” where police could be guilty of “trespass surveillance” in the air above private property (although fewer than one in 10 flights in the six-month trial in 2019-20 was for surveillance, and this was targeted, not general surveillance).
Do you trust the Police to not use their new toys and trespass in the air above your property? I don’t. The Police have an uncomfortable habit of wilfully defying the law and then wanting to argue the toss in expensive court proceedings. There are many court cases where Police have been found to abuse their powers, or break the law themselves.
But these idiots who wrote the report think it is all fine and dandy and they will manage the risks. Well, how did that turn out with their pretty legal “formal warnings” that were actually illegal?
The police districts already had a small fleet of drones before the alarm went up in the US in 2017 about a technical backdoor that might allow Da-Jiang Innovations (DJI) drone data to be hijacked.
After that the Australian and New Zealand militaries, which also use DJI drones, forbade connecting their drones to the internet or their own networks.
But police were not aware of this.
Even if they were aware, they’d just press on regardless. The drones are Chinese…of course they have a backdoor into their code. But hey, says the report, no worries, buy more.
It “arguably could be the case” the Chinese government could access the drone data, he told RNZ.
“It’s hard to tell whether this is intentional, or whether it’s just an unintentional by-product of how the software has been developed.”
Police pilots had been loading apps to help fly the drones on their personal devices, because the apps were not allowed on police devices.
“So it might be appropriate to provide stand-alone police devices specifically for using these apps,” Shelley told police.
Overseas, security sleuths had found backdoor access to unencrypted flight logs, photos and live video, and user profile information including drivers licences and passports, the reports say.
They found when DJI’s GO 4 application was launched, a file was sent from the user’s phone to an Alibaba server.
Don’t worry…the Police used private phones to conduct Police business…no worries, buy more drones.
Data will be secure…including gun register data…no worries, Police have got this.
Yeah right.
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