How could this happen, you ask?
“The data links between the drone and the ground control station were never encrypted. Which meant that pretty much anyone could tap into the overhead surveillance.” And did.
How could the US military be so freaking stupid as to not encrypt data sent from surveillance drones to ground control?
A little bird told me it was due to latency issues re: the need for real-time video, but who knows.
I heard that too, could be, but jeez, they can’t develop a chip to do compression real-time in hardware? In fact, I think such chips already exist.