The Pentagon's New Partner for Building Drones Should Make Us All Nervous

On Tuesday, a privacy and security report published by Gizmodo revealed that Google and the Pentagon are collaborating on developing drones. Known as Project Maven, the Department of Defense pilot project involves analyzing, combing through, defining, and categorizing visual data amassed by aerial drones. It wouldn't be too far off to say the project would function as the Pentagon's all-seeing eye. According to Greg Allen, a Center for a New American Society adjunct fellow, the current amount of obtained footage is so vast it isn't possible for human analysts at the defense agency to sift through it and correctly define objects in the footage. As it stands, the United States' drone strike program is already criticized by human rights groups like Reprieve for reportedly killing hundreds of civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and beyond in spite of claims of "surgical" precision from former CIA director John Brennan in 2011.