What are the effects of the increasing use of surveillance technologies in the conduct of contemporary wars? What are the relations of knowledge/power that undergird instrumentalising technologies that focalise life, transmute it into generic and anonymous data, and thereby render it killable through lethal militarised targeting? 1 Drawing on the revelations of Edward Snowden and two former drone operators, in this chapter I attempt to answer these questions by pursuing the lines of convergence between the United States’ Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the conduct of the US’ drone kill program. In the first part of the chapter, I focus on new tracking technologies developed by the NSA that have been incorporated into the DoD’s drone targeting program. Specifically, I examine the interlocking of the NSA’s metadata with the DoD’s algorithmic formulae used to conduct drone kills in which often the identities of those killed are not known. In the latter part of the chapter, I situate what I will term the bioinformationalisation of life within the geocorpographies of Pakistan and Yemen in order to disclose the violent transliteration of abstract metadata to flesh.
Death by Metadata and the Bioinformationalisation of Life
In the course of a debate at Johns Hopkins University on the topic of the NSA’s bulk surveillance programs, Michael Hayden, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and NSA director, confirmed NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker’s observation that ‘metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content’ (cited in Cole 2014). I want, presently, to discuss this notion of metadata as superseding the need for content but, at this juncture, I want to focus on Hayden’s comments. After remarking that Baker’s observation was ‘absolutely correct’, Hayden asserted: ‘We kill people based on metadata’ (cited in Cole 2014). As has been well documented, US drone operators rely on metadata in order to determine what targets to terminate on their kill lists. Furthermore, as was evidenced by documents released by Edward Snowden, ‘the agency analyzes metadata as well as mobile-tracking technology to determine targets, without employing human intelligence to confirm a suspect’s identity’ (RT 2014). An unnamed drone operator succinctly outlines this practice: ‘People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people … It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people—we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy’ (cited in RT 2014). Two things are operative in these collected remarks that are worth unpacking: that if you gather enough metadata, it will supplant the need for ‘content’; and that human targets, in the context of metadata-driven drone kills, become so somatechnically instrumentalised as to be entirely coextensive with the technology they use—in this case, their phones. This practice is further evidenced by a former drone operator who worked with Joint Special Operations Command. The former drone operator has disclosed the expansive and mobile dimensions of the NSA’s surveillance and tracking sweep:
the NSA doesn’t just locate the cell phones of terror suspects by intercepting communications from cell phone towers and Internet service providers. The agency also equips drones and other aircraft with devices known as ‘virtual base-tower transceivers’—creating, in effect, a fake cell phone tower that can force a targeted person’s device to lock onto the NSA’s receiver without their knowledge. That, in turn, allows the military to track the cell phone to within 30 feet of its actual location, feeding the real-time data to teams of drone operators who conduct missile strikes or facilitate night raids. (cited in Scahill and Greenwald 2014)
The NSA’s program deploys ‘advanced mathematics to develop a new geolocation algorithm intended for operational use on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) flights’ (Scahill and Greenwald 2014). The former drone operator has also revealed crucial details about the NSA’s use of the tracking program Geo Cell. Geo Cell identifies and ‘geolocates’ a tracked cell phone or SIM card without necessarily being able to determine who the person on the other end of the phone is:
‘Once the bomb lands or a night raid happens, you know that the phone is there,’ he says. ‘But we don’t know who’s behind it, who’s holding it. It’s of course assumed that the phone belongs to a human being who is nefarious and considered an unlawful enemy combatant … They might have been terrorists,’ he says. ‘Or they could have been family members who have nothing to do with the target’s activities … It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone’. (cited in Scahill and Greenwald 2014)
The practice of killing by metadata underscores the intensification of what I will term the bioinformationalisation of life. Drawing upon a Heideggerian critique of contemporary science, the bioinformationalisation of life results from positivist science’s demand ‘that nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that it remains orderable as a system of information’ (Heidegger 1978, p. 304). The convergence of metadata systems and digitised identification systems exemplifies the rendering of life into an orderable system of information through the application of algorithmic formulae. Through processes of bioinformationalisation, life, in all of its forms, becomes transmuted into anonymous digital data that is trackable and that can be killed extrajudiciously, that is to say, with impunity. I say ‘anonymous’ precisely because the US often kills targets whose identities are not known. Geolocation technology, the DoD says, has ‘cued and compressed numerous “kill chains” (i.e., all of the steps taken to find, track, target, and engage the enemy)’ (Scahill and Greenwald 2014). The compression of the drone kill chain has been enabled by the often critical conflation of a cell phone with the unknown identity of the user—in the words of the above-cited drone operator, ‘We’re not going after people—we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.’
The investigative journalist, Jeremy Scahill, provides in his book, Dirty Wars (2013), a powerful exposé of the covert wars that the US is conducting through its drone campaign. He explains what is at stake in this drone targeting program: ‘In some cases, the specific individuals are being targeted, even though the United States doesn’t know their identities, and may not have any actual evidence that they’re involved in terrorist activity’ (cited in Channel 4 2014). Operating under the dubious rubric of exercising its right to self-defence in response to an imminent threat, the ‘US believes determining if a terrorist is an imminent threat “does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interest will take place in the immediate future”’ (Serle 2014). The category of ‘imminent threat’ is inbuilt with an extraordinary latitude in terms of the subjects it enables the US military to target. It has resulted in the deaths of innumerable subjects whose names are unknown and who, when they are finally identified, are found to have no connections at all to such targeted groups as al-Qaeda. In its analysis of 400 US drone strikes in Pakistan alone, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that ‘fewer than 4% of the people killed had been identified by available records as named members of al-Qaeda. This calls into question US Secretary of State John Kerry’s claim last year that only “confirmed terrorist targets at the highest levels were fired at”’ (Serle 2014). A recent report by Reprieve (2014) has brought to light that up to 874 ‘unknowns’ have been killed by US drone strikes in the hunt for 24 targeted individuals. The Reprieve report documents the extraordinary toll on civilians that has been exacted by these metadata drone kills. It estimates that ‘96.5% of casualties from US drone strikes are civilians’ (Dvorin 2014). Reprieve’s Jennifer Gibson, who led the study, elaborates on the meaning of these statistics: ‘Drone strikes have been sold to the American public on the claim that they’re “precise.” But they are only as precise as the intelligence that feeds them. There is nothing precise about the intelligence that results in the deaths of 28 unknown people, including women and children, for every “bad guy” the US goes after’ (cited in Khan 2014). The Reprieve report documents the manner in which certain targeted individuals have been listed as having been killed up to six times, with the result that dozens of unknown civilians have actually been killed by the time the reporting process authenticates a targeted strike.
The geolocation technology’s foundational dependence on an algorithmic formula provides a calculus of risk probability for a designated target whose identity remains unknown. In other words, this algorithmic program works to transmute difference into serial sameness and interchangeability. Knowledge, in this scientific schema, is what Friedrich Nietzsche would term as ‘the falsifying of the multifarious and incalculable into the identical, similar, and calculable’ (cited in Babich 1994, p. 102). What is operative here is the serial conflation of a technological signature with the unknown identity of the user of the cell phone. The knowledge of the one is rendered as interchangeable with the non-knowledge of the other. The contours of this convoluted scientific episte...