A London-based artist has made it his mission to discover the locations of stealthy drones responsible for state surveillance and attacks, and is posting them online — one photo at a time.
Thirty-three-year-old James Bridle uses open-source satellite images from websites like Google Earth and Google Maps along with news articles and even Wikipedia to track down drones and photograph them.
Bridle, who identifies himself as a writer, publisher, technologist and artist according to his blog, is showing prints from the satellite photographs at an exhibit called “Watching the Watchers” at the Open Data Institute in London until January 2015, Mashable reports.
The artist hopes to increase the visibility and understanding of drones to the public. Bridle also maintains an Instagram account in the same vein called Dronestagram, which posts pictures of drone strike locales to almost 11,000 followers.
Recent drone strike campaigns in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen by the Obama administration have left an estimated 2,400 people dead — 273 of whom are believed to have been civilians, through the average civilian casualty rate has fallen from 3 during the Bush administration to 1.43.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Monday that the Justice Department must turn over a memo explaining the legal justification for overseas drone strikes against American citizens after three were targeted and killed in Yemen in 2011.