[Infowarrior] - Hacking the Drone War¹s Secret History

[Richard Forno]

Danger Room (Wired.com)
May 30, 2013

Hacking the Drone War¹s Secret History

BY DAVID AXE 

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/05/drone-api/

In 2008 U.S. troops in Iraq discovered that Shi¹ite insurgents had figured
out how to tap and record video feeds from overhead American drones. Now you
too can hack Washington¹s globe-spanning fleet of silent, deadly armed
robots ‹ although legally, and only in an historical sense.

Josh Begley, a 28-year-old NYU grad student, has just created an application
programming interface ‹ basically, a collection of building blocks for
software development ‹ that allows anyone with basic coding skills to
organize, analyze and visualize drone-strike data from Pakistan, Yemen and
Somalia dating back to 2002.

Based on information collected by the U.K. Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, the API can be used to create interactive Websites (similar to
this) that add depth, context and even a little humanity to the sterile news
reports of the latest Unmanned Aerial Vehicle strike in some far-away
conflict zone.

Begley tells Danger Room he¹s trying to bridge the ³empathy gap² between
Western audiences and drone-attack victims. ³To Americans like me, what may
have previously been blank spots on the map all of a sudden have complex
stories, voices of their own. From 30,000 feet it might just be cars and
buildings. But there are people in them. People who live under the drones we
fly.²

Begley has already experimented with a few interfaces using his API. One, he
says, ³assembles every covert drone attack on a Website, hides them behind
numbered blank tiles, and lets you filter through the various years and
countries where these attacks happened.²

³Another interface is more practical,² he adds. ³It¹s just a simple search
function ‹ for researchers and legal scholars who want to look for a
specific drone attack, or more easily go to the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism and read the corresponding articles they¹ve assembled.²

The drone API, which is actually Begley¹s master¹s thesis, is not his first
foray into capturing robot-attack data. His @dronestream Twitter feed, which
documents all reported UAV attacks. Last year Begley created an iPhone app
that tracks drone strikes, but Apple rejected it. Other developers have
jumped on the bandwagon, too. London-based artist James Bridle runs a Tumblr
blog that matches overhead satellite imagery to reports of drone attacks.

The public release of Begley¹s API, which took five months to complete, is
timed to coincide with the White House-promoted National Day of Civic
Hacking on June 1. Hacking Day aims to ³liberate government data for coders
and entrepreneurs.² The ACLU, for one, is commemorating the event with an
API linked to the group¹s vast database of documents related to
U.S.-sanctioned torture of terror suspects.

³I¹m actually not sure what people will learn,² Begley says of his own
drone-strike API. ³I just feel like I¹ve been iterating on this data set for
a little while and there are probably a bunch of more talented developers
and designers who could find stuff in the data that I¹m not seeing.²

With Pres. Barack Obama¹s recent promise to rein in robotic attacks, the
time is ripe to begin making sense of 12 years of drone warfare that has
claimed thousands of lives. Begley¹s API makes that vital self-reflection a
whole lot easier.


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