There is a drone you can buy that flies better than anything else in the sky. The camera is superb. The software is beautiful. Pilots who have tried everything else come back to it.

It is not popular because people are foolish. It is popular because it is the best. Hold that thought, because everything that follows depends on it.

To use this drone, you tell it your name. Your email address. Your telephone number. The address where your bills arrive. And then, every single time you fly it, exactly where you are standing.

None of this is hidden. It is all written down, in terms you accepted — accepted the way every one of us accepts them. By pressing a button marked I agree, on a document you did not read, written in a dialect of English built to be technically true and practically unreadable.

SerpentZA — “This was Spying on me all Along?”  |  watch it, then come back

01  /  What the judge actually said

In September 2025, an American federal judge ruled that the company would stay on a Department of Defense list of Chinese military companies. The company had sued to get off it. The company lost.

But it is what the judge wrote that I cannot stop thinking about. Modified versions of these ordinary consumer drones had turned up in the war in Ukraine. And the judge observed that whether or not the company's own policies forbid military use was beside the point entirely. The technology has military application whether anybody intended it or not.

Read that again slowly, because it is not really about drones. A thing good enough to be trusted is good enough to be turned. The quality is the vulnerability. They are not two facts. They are one fact.

This is the oldest lesson there is, and we keep having to learn it again. The dangerous thing is rarely the thing that looks dangerous. It is the thing that is charming, competent, useful, and already inside the house. Nobody hands over their front door key to someone who frightens them.

They hand it to someone who is helpful.

02  /  Now look at the other end

Here is the part almost nobody in the West is told, and it is the part that makes the whole story sing.

While Washington argues about whether these drones are a security risk, Beijing has already made up its mind — at home.

Since the first day of 2024, every civilian drone in China, regardless of weight, must be registered under the owner's real name with the aviation authority. Not the big ones. Not the professional ones. Every one of them. Real identity, real documents.

Then it got sharper. Under national standards taking effect on the first of May 2026, drones must transmit identification and operational data continuously — identity, location, speed and status, from the moment of power-on through the entire flight. Not a log you hand over later if asked. A live feed. Authorities watching in real time, always.

And in Beijing itself, from that same date, the whole city became controlled airspace. Every outdoor flight requires prior approval. And the sale and transport of drones into the capital was banned outright.

That is why the shops are empty. That is not a rumour. That is the law.

A state that demands real-time data transmission, identity-linked registration, and outright sale bans at home is telling you something it will never say out loud in an export brochure: it does not regard these as ordinary consumer gadgets. It regards them as networked, surveillant, potentially militarised systems.

They know exactly what these machines are. They know because they built them.

03  /  The door that opens one way

So consider the shape of it.

In America, the company hired lawyers, filed motions, argued before a judge, lost, and is appealing. Openly. On the public record. Anyone can read the ruling.

In China, where its products were restricted at least as harshly, there was no lawsuit. There was no press conference. There was no appeal. Because there is no door to knock on.

I want to be fair here, and fairness is not weakness. I do not blame the company. It is a company. It exists in the country it exists in, under the government it exists under, and it does what it must to survive. Any firm would. If I am pointing at anything, I am pointing above their heads.

And I would say the same of any government, mine included — hypocrisy is not a Chinese invention. Every state on earth writes one rule for the people it governs and another for the people it wants to sell to. The Chinese Communist Party is simply the most fluent practitioner currently working.

But notice what an open society actually is. It hands its protections to everyone who arrives — including arrivals from places that would never return the favour. That is not a bug. That is the entire point. You cannot run courts that are open only to people you like. The moment you do, they are not courts any more.

The freedom is real. And the freedom can be used as a lever. Both things are true at once, and adults have to hold both.

04  /  And now the machine in your pocket

Let us stop pretending this is a story about one country. That is the comfortable version, and comfortable versions are usually the useless ones.

I run a business. So I try to be everywhere, because that is what you are told to do. Facebook, Meta, WhatsApp, the lot of it. I do it for the same reason everyone does it — because that is where the students are.

Twice today alone, my WhatsApp was locked down for hours. Security reasons. No explanation, no appeal, no human being. My Facebook account has now vanished on me twice, and this second time is the last time. I will not be making another attempt to resurrect it. Life is finite.

My honest experience, after years of it: Facebook Business ought to be renamed Facebook No Business. That is not a clever line. That is a report from the field.

Here is what nobody says plainly. On these platforms you are not the customer. You never were. You are the inventory. And when the inventory is inconvenient, the inventory is removed — without notice, without a name, without anyone you can actually speak to. You built something on rented land and one morning the landlord changed the locks and left no forwarding address.

Which is why, given a choice, I would rather you sent me a plain email, a text message, or an iMessage. When you do that, I know who you are. You know who I am. And there is no third party standing quietly in the room between us, taking notes, building a file, selling the file.

Old technology. Boring technology. Nobody's product.

05  /  Who actually hurts you

I want to tell you about a man named Leo Leger.

Leo was from New Brunswick, as I am. He spent his working life with the Crown in Toronto — one of the most culturally diverse cities on the face of the earth. He was my friend from the time I was a boy, and a better mentor than I probably deserved. God rest his soul. I loved him very much, and I am glad to put his name in writing.

He told me something once that I have never been able to set down.

The files that crossed his desk, year after year, were rarely strangers harming strangers. Again and again it was people harmed by their own. Same country of origin. Same language. Same community. People had arrived braced against a danger from outside — and when the danger came, it walked in through the front door speaking their mother tongue.

There is nothing mystical in this, and nothing about it belongs to any one people. It is arithmetic. Trust is what grants access, and access is what makes harm possible. Nobody is defrauded by a person who never had their phone number.

You cannot be betrayed by a stranger. A stranger was never let in.

And that is the same sentence as the drone. It is the same sentence as the app. The instrument of harm is almost never the thing you were watching. It is the thing you had already decided was safe.

I do not use certain platforms because of a specific person, in a specific country, who took a specific interest in me that he had no business taking. I will not name him and I will not describe him. But I will say this much: these systems make that behaviour effortless. They hand a determined creep a map. And I have decided I would rather be harder to find than easier to market to.

06  /  So what do I ask you for?

It would be cheap of me to write all this and not turn the light on myself. So here is the whole list, in plain English.

When you study with me at rosscline.com, I ask for your first name and last name. Your birthday. Your email address and phone number. A small photo of your face. Your city and country — not your street, I have no idea where any of my students actually live and no wish to know. And your native language.

Why? Because I am going to sit on a video call and teach you, personally, one human being to another. If I am not permitted to know your name, your face, your birthday and the language your mind was built in, then something is wrong — and frankly I do not want to teach you. Your native language tells me which sounds will fight you. Your birthday means I can wish you a happy one. That is not data collection. That is being on friendly terms.

And here is my end of it. I do not share your information. With anyone. Ever. If somebody asks me for another student's phone number, the answer is that I will ask that person whether they would like it given out. Permission travels in one direction only — from the person whose information it is, outward. Never the other way round. That is basic courtesy before it is ever a legal matter, and I would hold to it if no law existed at all.

As for money: I do not handle your card. Payments run through Shopify, which holds PCI DSS Level 1 certification — the highest tier of payment-security certification that exists. That means annual on-site audits by a qualified assessor, quarterly network vulnerability scans, and compliance against more than three hundred separate security requirements. Your card details live inside their encrypted environment, not in a folder on my laptop in Phnom Penh. It is genuinely one of the safest ways to pay anybody anything online.

07  /  The English that was built to be skipped

Which brings us back, at last, to that button.

I agree.

Two of the shortest words in the English language, carrying more weight than almost any sentence you will ever write. And above them sits a document written in a very particular dialect. Look at how it works:

“We may collect certain information to improve your experience. Data is shared with selected partners.”

may — so nothing is promised, and nothing can ever be proved false. certain — so nothing is specified. improve your experience — and whose experience, precisely? is shared — look closely at that one. Shared by whom? The sentence has no actor. Somebody did the sharing, but grammatically, nobody did. The person responsible has been quietly deleted from their own sentence.

That is not bad writing. That is expert writing. It took skill to build. Every one of those choices was made on purpose, usually by a lawyer, usually to be lawful and unreadable at the same time.

And this is precisely where I stop being a man with opinions about drones and start being an English teacher again — because learning to read this dialect is not an academic exercise. It is how you protect yourself when you sign a lease in a country that is not your own. When you accept a job. When you hand over a passport number to a stranger behind a counter. Millions of people every day agree, in a second language, to things they were never meant to understand.

English hides its most important business in its smallest words. Learn the small words.

08  /  Words to know

09  /  True or false?

Decide first. Then tap to open.

10  /  One last thought

We are living in a strange season, where up is reported as down and left is insisted upon as right, and a great many people have quietly agreed to stop noticing.

I am not asking you to throw your phone in a river. I have a phone. I sell lessons on the internet. I am not standing on a hill of purity waving at you.

I am asking for something much smaller, and much harder. Read before you agree. Notice the small words. Notice when a sentence has no one in it. Notice who benefits from your not noticing.

Because the drone was never the problem. The drone was excellent. The problem was that we have all been trained to press a button marked I agree without once asking the only question that has ever mattered.

Agree to what?