by Dan Gettinger and Arthur Holland Michel When the news broke that the Israeli Iron Dome anti-missile system had downed a Hamas-operated, possibly weaponized drone, the internet exploded. But the news hardly comes as a surprise. Hamas and Hezbollah have been developing and operating drones targeted at Israel for almost …
Tomas van Houtryve is a prolific photojournalist who explores conflict and state-sponsored surveillance. In March, Harpers Magazine published a folio of his photographs titled “Blue Sky Days,” the longest folio in the magazine’s 164 year history. The photos, which van Houtryve took with a small drone over everyday spaces and scenes in …
By Dan Gettinger On April 2, 2014, Army Specialist Ivan Lopez opened fire on his colleagues at Fort Hood, Texas, killing three people before turning the gun on himself. The mass shooting, the second at Fort Hood in the past five years, focused attention nationwide on the difficulties that U.S. …
By Dan Gettinger On April 20, 2008, a Russian MiG fighter shot down a Georgian unmanned surveillance drone over Abkhazia, a separatist region that declared independence in 1999 and maintained a close allegiance to the Kremlin. In response to what it called an “unprovoked aggression,” Georgian troops were deployed to …
By Dan Gettinger On February 10, the Associated Press reported that the Obama administration is considering targeting an American citizen with a drone. According to unnamed government sources, the target, whose identity remains a mystery, is a member of al-Qaeda and is “actively planning attacks against Americans overseas.” In a …
By Dan Gettinger As darkness set in on the evening of January 27, 2014, in the aftermath of the American drone strike, masked al-Shabab fighters collected the scattered body parts of Sahal Iskudhuq, a senior al-Shabab commander, from the side of a road in southeast Somalia. The al-Shabab fighters chanted …
By Dan Gettinger On the morning of September 3, 1914, an aerial observer by the name of Lieutenant Watteau assigned to the Paris garrison rushed to the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence agency, with urgent news. In the four weeks since the outbreak of World War I, German armies …
By Dan Gettinger, @GettDan On December 26, 2013, the day after bombs killed 37 people in Baghdad, the New York Times reported that the United States was secretly selling drones and missiles to the Iraqi government in order to aid the fight against a resurgent al Qaeda. By all accounts, the …
By Dan Gettinger, @GettDan On September 9th, the Japanese Air Self-Defence Force scrambled an F-15 fighter jet in response to an aircraft that had intruded into Japanese airspace . The offending vehicle: a Chinese military drone. The surveillance drone was spotted flying over the Senkaku Islands-known in China as the Diaoyu …
By Dan Gettinger A solitary drone flies over a far away mountain valley in Afghanistan operated by a pilot thousands of miles away on a distant base in the Mojave desert. The drone is the icon of remote-controlled warfare. In Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban …
By Dan Gettinger On Thursday, the United States and Japan signed a new security agreement that broadened the cooperation between the militaries of the two nations. As part of the agreement, the United States will establish a drone base at an undisclosed location in Japan. Up to four Northrop Grumman …
By Dan Gettinger At the 1964 World Fair in New York City, enormous modernist pavilions displayed the latest technological creations. It was a time of great advances in science. Amidst the monuments to the achievements of the Atomic and Space Age, computers were first unveiled to the public. At Maker …
