Lauren Weinstein on Nostr: ***** Drone Ban Radio Report ***** This is the script from my national radio report ...

***** Drone Ban Radio Report *****

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.

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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.

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L