The U.S. Air Force’s fleet of drones and manned spy planes recorded nearly 50 days’ worth of surveillance video every 24 hours in 2012, according to one former top official.
The video comprised a portion of the roughly 1.3 million megabytes of data that the Air Force’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency gathered daily, then-lieutenant general Larry James said at an industry event in April 2012.
Today James works for NASA.
The general’s remarks—and other surprising insights into the Air Force’s spying efforts—are included in the ISR Agency’s official history for 2012, a heavily-redacted copy of which War Is Boring obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
In the two years since James revealed the extent of the flying branch’s aerial spying, the Air Force has changed significantly—retiring many aircraft and adding others, all in line with the Pentagon’s shifting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other war zones.
But it’s unlikely the aerial spies are less busy today than they were in 2012.
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