I'd rather think it's because Google sucks now, and those keywords just bring up too many similar articles, but my metaphorical tinfoil hat is my hands.
Your tips got me to this one, where it more clearly spells out the "rewind" capability. I think the problem was that the tech was attached to a low-flying, piloted plane, not drones.
There was a website shown on HN a few years ago that used AI and plane transponder data to find circling planes which were presumably doing this kind of surveillance over American cities. It might have used further parameters to narrow it down, e.g. “over a city, circling for >3 hours” to rule out planes waiting to land. I thought it was named something simple like “plane-circles.com” but I’m not having any luck finding it again.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/sheriff...
https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... (search for "rewind")
I'd rather think it's because Google sucks now, and those keywords just bring up too many similar articles, but my metaphorical tinfoil hat is my hands.