Newly proposed Congressional legislation would require the US to conduct security reviews for connected vehicles built by automakers from China and “other countries of concern.” Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) introduced the bill on Wednesday.
Everyone knows that if a member of the PRC's secret police took a plane to LAX they'd be physically unable to write malware or backdoors. America has a circle of protection cast over it that prevents malicious actors.
Obviously, yea, we should empower an agency to check all software for backdoors... and, ideally, they should be checking for shit from the NSA too.
Software is easy. It's the hardware backdoors that are hard to find, and those have been being built for at least a decade. They were pretty simple to start; I can't imagine what they're capable of hiding in 5nm process chips.
Just for cars, though, right? If both cars and telecoms aren't allowed to freely sell our data to police how will the government continue violating our 4th Amendment rights?
I'm not even really sure any of it is really about China. This AP article updating about the progress of the attempt to ban DJI drones suggests Autel as "Best DJI drone alternative". Autel, a Chinese company based in Shenzhen.
Edit: I suppose that could just be the author(s) making an error, but, given the focus on one company in the drone market and a total lack of evidence about security concerns, I just wonder if these aren't all just companies trying to buy market control through lobbying.
I'd like to see a law that the owner can always see where data traffic is going from a product and selectively start or stop it whenever they want. Maybe this would make part our all of the product temporarily unusable or throw a flag somewhere else in the system depending on the purpose (as specified in prepurchase literature), but it should be transparently allowed. That's how consent works. I can dream
There are security concerns. Cars are the worst product category for privacy. The issue is that goes for all cars, not just cars from opposing superpowers.
TBH, all connected cars have security concerns, but cars built by an opposing superpower would have National Security concerns, too. The two concerns are related, but separate.