12 - Death by Metadata

Source: https://www.spreadshirt.ie

In the chapter “Death by Metadata” (2016), questions around surveillance and “conduct of contemporary wars” guided Joseph Pugliese toward the understanding of the connections between the United States’ Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the “US’s drone kill program” (3).  Pugliese attempt to comprehend NSA’s technologies used in the DoD’s drone program to reveal the use of metadata guiding drones to kill violently, what he called bioinformationalisation of life (4).

Based on a speech from Michael Hayden, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and NSA director, NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker’s and documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, Pugliese asserts that “US drone operators rely on metadata in order to determine what targets to terminate on their kill lists” (4). In one of Snowden’s revealed documents, a drone operator speaks coldly about to use mobile-tracking systems to target people without human interference. Along with this finding, Pugliese proposes to discuss two main points: 1) the content replacement by metadata and 2) the need of a victim’s own technology as a condition to killer drones’ work. To exemplify the last point, Pugliese used the Geo Cell tracking program. The Geo Cell system can identify the cell phone and the geographic place in which it is situated, but it not necessarily recognizes who is behind it, which enhances the possibilities of error (5). Like Mark Andrejevic in his study “The Droning of Experience” (203), Pugliese also argues that the development of drone technology to kill opens a discussion about the role of human control in the decision-making process of a target.

Considering these newly technologies of war and their impact upon life, Pugliese brought up the concept of bioinformationalisation of life emerged from Heidegger’s discussion on contemporary science (6). For him, the digitization of life made it trackable and liable to be killed anonymously through the application of an algorithm. The drone usually searches for a cell phone to kill “…in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.” (6). Protected by the right of defense, United States kill drawing on what they categorize as an ‘imminent threat’ (6). According to Pugliese, the term allows US military to target a consistent number of subjects without effective confirmation of their participation in some possible attack. This uncertainty between “known and unknown” and “probability and chance”  is termed by Pugliese as ‘drone casino mimesis.' His concept goes around the adaptation of gaming’s structure (joysticks, screens and consoles) and its algorithm to drone's “digital kill technologies” (8)

Drawing on Merleau-Pointy theory of flesh and biopolical concept, Pugliese explored the materiality of the dead flesh of human and animal as evidence of the carnage made by the supposed “surgical” strike (11), “What we witness in this scene of carnage is the transliteration of metadata algorithms to flesh.” (13)

By studying the relations between killer drones and metadata through a range of examples and theories, Pugliese showed in his chapter the way scientific knowledge are mobilized to attend military demand for remote killing devices emphasizing the human side of a technologic story.

Work Cited:

Pugliese, J. (2016). Death by metadata : the bioinformationalisation of life and the transliteration of algorithms to flesh. In Randell-Moon, H. and Tippet, R. (Eds.), Security, race, biopower : essays on technology and corporeality. London : Palgrave Macmillan.

Andrejevic, M. (2015). The Droning of Experience. The Fibreculture Jornal, 202-217.