[unchocked]

The article talks about less than 20 missions over a 9 year period. This is hardly mass surveillance and it's disingenuous to suggest it is simply because the platform was unmanned. I'll add that it's detrimental to the quality of discussion we enjoy here on HN to conclude such hyperbole with a holocaust reference.

I think all of us on HN are familiar with the qualitative effects of "big data" both in general and as it pertains to surveillance. I hope we're all sophisticated enough to realize that the issues at hand revolve around scale, probable cause, and data retention/mining, rather than the canard of whether the platform involved was manned or unmanned.

[newman314]

My original comment did not mention anything about manned vs. unmanned. I was merely responding to your claim that it does not make a difference which I do not agree with.

As to your statement that it's <20 over 9 years, at the risk of sounding a little tin-foilish, but that's what is publicly being admitted to.

Such activities always start small. https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/U...