Remove Drone Remote Identification Broadcasting

As part of a lengthy discussion, due to Chinese drones being discriminated against on European / USA markets, DJI proactively added a function to broadcast an identifier for the duration of flight.

The identifier payload contains amongst others:

• the serial number,
• the position, roll, yaw, imu data,
• the return to home position (where more than like the drone operator is to be found),
• the drone ID

that is broadcasted all the time.

The argument is made that the proactive broadcasting of this potentially private data is against the 4th amendment, namely the fact that the information should not be made available without a warrant. Similarly, one could argue that also the 5th amendment is infringed upon, considering that the proactive offering of a the data definitely can be seen as self-incrimination thereby voiding the 5th implicitly. Finally, even if one would mark the government as fair by definition, in spite of the legal problems, then the data is still too sensitive to be offered up in the air and thereby potentially allowing third-non-governmental-parties to intercept the data.

In any case, CIA Jeep Doors is a python program, also now packaged as a simple binary executable that can run on Windows and will patch the drone to not emit any remote ID at all, or, in the case of the python command-line executable, will allow partially toggling bits to disable parts of the data packet. It is recommended to do this for all DJI drones, and make sure that the remote data can be disabled.