Sounds interesting, can you link a source? Who was doing the hacking? Whose drone? what was the exploit and how severe was it?

Still, as a broad strategy it's absurd. It isn't true that literally anything can be hacked. A correctly encrypted message? You're never decoding it, ever, with any amount of time or resources. The impression that everything is vulnerable comes from how much of our technology was built with a massive attack surface and no concern for security, it doesn't mean there's no need to worry about murderbots enforcing the will of a totalitarian state because you can always just hack them. The task of building them to keep that from happening is something they can put a lot of thought into and largely succeed at.

And again, it's pointless, because mass surveillance is already more powerful. You want to hack something, why not turn the NSA backdoors to your own purposes? It's not realistic.