You are discounting the difference between a toy and a device reliable and competent enought to put peoples lives at stake.
I’m just still thinking there should be a middle ground. People have brought up objections related to the difficulty of making it “ubiquitous”, be able to be operated “with minimal training”, “thrown in a soldier’s backpack”, etc. But I’m thinking that if it cost a billion dollars (or more), its operators required a great deal of training, and there were only a very few of them and they were treated very carefully (not thrown in anyone’s backpack by any means), it would still be worth it to our intelligence services.
How about a cat?
No one would ever suspect a cat of being up to no good.
There are quite a few things that seem like obvious and brilliant ideas that I’m sure most of us have come up with occasionally. “Hey,” thinks I, “It would only need A, B, C, and D and it’d work like a dream!” But I am no engineer, and if I presented said genius concept to one such professional, they’d be sure to come back with “You failed to realise W, X, Y, and Z, and without those your concept just won’t work.”
For example, I thought that if I got a Go-Pro camera and attached it to a four-bladed RC chopper, a very commonly found arrangement these days, but instead of controlling the camera’s POV from a remote unit, instead what if I had some sort of targeting device that I could place somewhere, such as for example in an actor’s pocket, so that when the chopper came flying by, it was steadily targeted and focused at that precise spot, with only its flight requiring any manual control. It’d be really cool, and eliminate a potentially troublesome factor.
But is that even possible? I fear not. I don’t think there is a device that a servo can target in that way. Expecially as I’d also want it to be really rock-steady, with smooth pan-and-track motion in three axes, and all be lightweight.
Oh well.
I am not quite sure what you mean. Bird and insect sized UAVs have been flying for some time now.
Do you mean a UAV that someone seeing it up close would think is a bird? I am not aware of any device of any size where that has been even attempted. The uncanny valley is a notable issue for human-sized devices, the problem exists at every size.
There are small mini UAVs being uses by the British Army as well as the Pakistan Army which weigh a few tens of grams. There range is about a few hundred yards so I am not sure of they fit the OP.
The other major problem is giving yourself away.
First, it’s a small town. Bin Laden might have gotten away with being there by never being seen. (“How not to be seen” - Monty Python’s BBC films) A bunch of white guys in nice cars wandering the town would result in some serious gossip and spook (sorry) the bin ladens.
So you have a UAV drone. Making one that looks is one thing. Making one that can be operated reliably, from a decent distance away (a mile) and still maneuver up to windows and hover without hitting them, when wind could be a factor, etc - tricky. (The ones we use for target practice on civilians fly well above all obstacles, probably hard to see)
One false move, hit a branch or power line or brick wall, and there goes the element of surprise, and possibly your target departs for places unknown. Heck, a professional pilot was sitting right in the copter pilot’s seat after practicing the maneuvers, and still one out of 2 copters didn’t make it.
And if Osama wants some privacy and closes the curtains?
Despite all the fancy toys the CIA might have, better to settle for the element of surprise ahead of the chance to maybe see what’s in there with a significant risk of giving away the game.
I’m surprised they even went with the “free vaccination” ruse, but even then they apparently spent a week doing the rest of the town to set the stage, and used a real Pakistani doctor - who is now incarcerated in Pakistan.
I think that nano UAV is clever in the way that it perfectly replicates the sound of a hummingbird driven by a 1 cl lawnmower engine, which I understand is a very common species in that part of the world. Nobody would ever notice! 
Bear in mind the requirement for a camera, which is a significant limiting factor due to the size of the lens.
Ran across something on this the other day - another approach which is being tried is to electronically control the brains of actual insects so you can fly them around:
The insect has the very large advantage that you don’t need to figure out how to power it. That article talks about wiring into the insect’s own sensory apparatus, but it’s possible that you could mount a teeny little camera on it, too.
We can turn nature off and on like a faucet, we’ll be careful, what could possibly go wrong.
You’ll be the first to get eaten by the T-Rex.
Combine the above idea with the CIA’s Operation Acoustic Kitty and you’re more or less there. Just need to convince the terrorist that cats can fly…
What is missing is good batteries. All of the fit into the palm of your hand micro drones have battery life less than an hour and probable less than 5 minutes. Everything else is there high data rate radios with range of a few miles are carried around by 30% or more of the world population. Small flying helicopters have been around for 5 years. The issue is as a spy device it needs to operated in the field for many hours or better yet days. The battery issue already has billions of dollars poured into it over the last 20 years so I don’t think that a breakthrough on the order of 10 to 100 times current energy to weight ratio is coming.
The big issue seems to be you’re being vague on the specs of this device. What are the specs? How small does it need to be? How much power does it need to have? How far away can the operator be? At what distance do you need for signals to reach the device and be received from it? At what distance should it be
If you want it to be wasp sized, receive satellite transmissions, beam back satellite transmissions, be indistinguishable from a wasp from 10 yards, along with a small power pack that allows it to operate autonomously for a few days, a billion dollars (or even 10 billion) isn’t going to cut it. There are several fundamental technologies that don’t even exist to tackle that kind of miniaturization.
But if you want it to be wasp-like, transmit/receive at 100 yards, and only need to operate for a few hours, obviously the problem is much easier and cheaper.
Beyond that, there really are some basically fundamental physical limitations at work. As alluded to above, if you want full 720p video for targets 10-20 yards away, the camera is already going to be bigger than insect sized. The memory/disk to store the video will also be sizable. There’s no getting around that. Or if you want high fidelity audio, you get similar issues. Basic physics gets in your way.
Worst yet, let’s say you’re in charge of an intelligence agency. How do you prioritize your spending. Even if you have an explicit research budget, do you use it all on your bird/insect sized probe idea that may be pie in the sky? Or on incremental improvements for 200 other different projects? What gets you the most “bang for the buck”?
And say Joe Q Senator gets wind of this project. Maybe you can claim it’s all in the interests of national defense. Or maybe they tell you it’s a waste of money and the taxpayers shouldn’t have to shoulder it.
Here’s a robotic, albeit flightless, bird good enough to fool other birds - Penguin-cam!
Will it explode on the television?
Ok, it’s well established that I’m a bad person, and I know this is off topic for GQ, but I’m watching this video and imagining the Pythons dressed up as Bin Laden just before the penquin bomb takes them out.
sure, there’s always some congressman too stupidly proud not to brag about this.
The Israelis are also famous in weapons design. To the Uzi and Galil they have added the rifle cat.
Link is to short YouTube. More description available elsewhere.