This from a September Homeland Security Inspector-General report on Customs and Border Protection (CBP)’s border drone program:
(“GCS” are the ground control stations communicating with the border drones. “NASOC” are National Air Security Operations Centers, managing manned and unmanned border surveillance flights, located at Sierra Vista, Arizona; Corpus Christi, Texas; and Grand Forks, North Dakota.)
Windows XP came out in 2001. So incredibly, a sensitive Predator-B surveillance program flying over the U.S.-Mexico border, recording images of U.S. citizens going about their daily lives on U.S. soil, is running a 17-year-old OS on its computers.
Unsurprisingly, the Inspector-General is a bit concerned about how secure these drone-gathered images of U.S. citizens are, and how this affects their privacy.