Airmen load an inert Hellfire missile on a Predator drone in New Mexico in April. Photo: Air Force
By David Axe
In 2008 U.S. troops in Iraq discovered that Shi’ite insurgents had figured out how to tap and record video feeds from overhead American drones. Now you too can hack Washington’s 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 he’s trying to bridge the “empathy gap” between Western audiences and drone-attack victims. “To 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.”
Begley has already experimented with a few interfaces using his API. One, he says, “assembles 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.”
“Another interface is more practical,” he adds. “It’s 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 they’ve assembled.”
The drone API, which is actually Begley’s master’s thesis, is not his first foray into capturing robot-attack data. His @dronestream Twitter feed 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 Begley’s 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 “liberate government data for coders and entrepreneurs.” The ACLU, for one, is commemorating the event with an API linked to the group’s vast database of documents related to U.S.-sanctioned torture of terror suspects.
“I’m actually not sure what people will learn,” Begley says of his own drone-strike API. “I just feel like I’ve 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 I’m not seeing.”
With Pres. Barack Obama’s 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. Begley’s API makes that vital self-reflection a whole lot easier.
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