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> I don't think UAVs are the best option for mass surveillance.

I agree for these kinds of UAVs, but ARGUS [1] blimps are probably super effective and worrisome.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS

> > an unnamed mayor asked the Marine Corps to use a drone to find potholes in the mayor's city

Maybe he's trying to figure out if he can use a DHS grant to buy "OMG TERRORISM" drones, that just happens to look for potholes whenever it has a few minutes off between terror attacks?

EDIT: On second thought, is finding the holes really the bottleneck in The War on Potholes? And if so, isn't this better fixed with an answering machine, and/or a $5000 Rails app?

The app is cheap getting people to use it is expensive.

Is it really hard to get people to complain about potholes, if complaining is actually going to get them filled in? And if you're not going to fill them in, then why care where they are?

It's easy to get people to complain. The drone is probably able to produce far better data assuming the main problem is pothole triage (ie you're only going to fix ~30%, of which around half will be patched quickly and the other half properly re-tarmacked. Which ones and in which order?)

> Is it a really good way to find potentially dangerous potholes? Probably. It just seems... excessive.

It can even make the potholes first by firing off a few missiles

"since the last update, we have increased our pothole detection by at least 200%"