alt Hacker NewsNational Security Determination Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Robotic Devices [pdf]
Comments
The irony is this will harm US manufacturing, not help it. Manufacturing is the sector that most depends on robotics. Companies will now have to sue the administration so they can continue operations without this new regulatory hindrance. I thought this president was supposed to eliminate regulations, not impose newer and stupider ones.
> In response to this threat, the White House convened an executive branch interagency body with appropriate national security expertise, see 47 U.S.C. § 1601(c)(1), comprising agencies that included appropriate national security agencies, id. § 1601(c)(4), which determined jointly and severally that: All foreign-produced advanced robotic devices pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of U.S. persons and should be included on the FCC’s Covered List, unless the Department of War (DOW) transmits to the FCC a specific determination that a given foreign-produced advanced robotic device, or a class of such devices, does not pose such risks. The interagency group and the agencies comprising it determined that foreign-produced advanced robotic devices presented the specific unacceptable risks of (a) posing a supply chain vulnerability that could disrupt U.S. economic and national security, and (b) creating a cybersecurity risk that threatens the security of critical infrastructure and thus the safety and security of U.S. persons.
>
> To facilitate this transition period, entities that produce advanced robotic devices in a foreign country are encouraged to apply for Conditional Approvals (Annex A) which, if approved, will allow such producers to continue to receive FCC authorization for their products while they work to onshore manufacturing and address the U.S. government’s national security concerns described above.
Amazingly ironic that the administration most deeply in bed to the finance sector's bidding is now identifying the result of the finance sector's 50 year push to offshore everything a problem for National security
There is a threat, but they are exaggerating it. Most of the advanced legged robots are glorified cameras and pack animals and are still in the research phases of implementation. Still, as someone who owns one of these, the amount of black-box software inside them is concerning. It's easy to chalk this up to intellectual property guarding, but who knows... I'd love to purchase *quality* domestically produced legged robots for research, but they are generally nonexistent. All this policy is going to do is hamper our efforts in research, which is a terrible idea if we want to produce a domestic supply chain. I'm sure they had absolutely 0% input from anyone who knows anything about robotics. Rather than this policy, why not simply require a full open source software stack?
Why doesn't the U.S. simply ban all Chinese products that have an internet-connected computer in them? That would solve almost all security problems in one strike and force Chinese manufacturers to communicate via Bluetooth and update software through USB sticks or memory cards.
The apps communicating with said devices through Bluetooth obviously can't connect to the internet either otherwise there'd still be an avenue for subversion.
Just banning one Chinese product category at a time willy nilly doesn't help as there are a zillion other product categories of Chinese stuff with internet connections. From toys (with camera's in them), to refrigerators, power converters, microwaves, televisions to smartphones.
i got a better solution. make open firmware and user flashing mandatory. if anyone can inspect the code for backdoors and replace it with brand new software then any security issues go out the window.
should apply to domestic products too for good measure.
I hope there's a plan for local production in the US with all the banning of stuff right, left and center.
Soon they'll ban Colombian coffee for being too good and making people want more of it. Or who knows whatever else.
The true intention of all of these seems to mostly be to give the government justification to pick winners and losers. Anyone that bends the knee gets their carveout or special exception, anyone that doesn't gets hit with all sorts of restrictions on top of the randomly applied tariffs.
It seems the way to get Americans to embrace a centrally planned economy was to combine unashamed xenophobia with blatant corruption while calling it capitalism.
Why does department of defense, excuse me I mean the illegally named department of war aka cosplayer Hegseth’s wet dream, get put in charge of this? They are properly staffed to review thousands of robots? Hahaha.
I see a funny pattern here.
England created the Industrial Revolution but barely has any manufacturing these days.
The U.S. created several industries (mass car manufacturing, electronics, clothing, etc) but today China produces more than them. They had more than half the worlds' GDP in 1944, they have less than 16% today. They're slowly following England's path.
This makes me wonder if we've ever had any evidence that "onshore manufacturing" prevents or even lessens foreign backdoors or security vulnerabilities. Honestly, to me it seems like onshore manufacturers are generally far more clueless than they have any right to be, so it's highly unlikely that they could both write materially better code and act as any meaningful barrier to internal compromise.
I have to point out how deeply unserious it is that the following line...
> As the technology matures, advanced robotic devices have growing use cases in monitoring and securing critical infrastructure.
...cites:
'Secret Service uses robot dogs to guard Trump's Mar-a-Lago in FL' as reported in the Palm Beach Daily News
Ah, the newly popular "let's make the policy unusually broad and treat all foreign production as presumptively dangerous, regardless of country, manufacturer or security practices, this way we're more transparent about prioritizing a bribe rather than our stated concerns".
> Advanced robotic devices are inherently networked systems which creates broad attack surfaces and leaves them vulnerable to data exfiltration, remote disruption of the physical robot, and dependencies on unsecure over the air updates.
Good thing this isn't a concern in ones produced locally.