"... if you gather enough metadata, it will supplant the need for 'content'; and that human targets, in the context of meta-driven kills, become so somatechnically instrumentalised as to be entirely coextensive with the technology they use - in this case, their phones." (pp 4 -5)
While most people are mildly miffed to discover that Facebook, Google, and YouTube are using their data to decide which WISH advert or which politician to force into their social feeds, few are concerned with what their metadata is let alone where it might situating them in the eyes of - for want of a better term - the powers that be.
Our cellphones are increasingly more akin to our computers than to a telephone - and our increasing reliance on them is the very thing, according to Pugliese, that puts us in the quite literal firing line. He cites the 2014 Reprieve report noting 874 unknowns killed by US drone strike in the hunt for 24 targeted individuals and a 96.5% of casualties from drone strikes as civilians (p7). Metadata allows for very precise identification in terms of location but dispenses with the need to ensure that the hand holding the phone is in fact that of a terrorist. Collateral damage takes on a new meaning. "The Reprieve report documents that 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." (p7)
The ability to locate and 'identify' metadata in this way allows the individual(s) charged with location to create a template that then identifies the 'owner' of the metadata without actually truly identifying them. A cellphones electronic identifiers become the users identifiers - and more worrying, can be used to 'locate and identify' anyone in proximity. If they are there, they are that person - or more accurately that cell phone.
A drone strike on December 12 2013 in yemen killed 12 people in a wedding procession. According to the Pentagon all who were killed or wounded in the strike were Al Qaeda militants, thus making the strike both lawful and necessary. Testimony from survivors is denounced - and with it their very humanity. By reducing the human targets to algorithms and metadata, they relieve the attackers of the need to consider such ideas (and ideals) as innocence, guilt, and humanity. They are simply targets - and as a post script - hopefully the correct target.
When the victims of strikes are so decimated that it is impossible for survivors to tell child from adult, human from animal, they are stripped of their remaining human identifier - recognition by survivors. furthermore they become what Pugliesi refers to as a "violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body with the geopolitics of war and empire."(p13) This geobiomorphology gives the physical landscape a flesh and tissue - that of those who minutes before passed through it and who now have become a part of it. The faceless, human less attacks, designed and controlled through alogrithms are transformed to creations of actual flesh.
A drone strike might be a way to give precision to an attack, to render it facile, to allow for an objective observation. The resulting landscape of shredded flesh, spattered blood, and dismembered humanity serves to remind us that it is none of these things.
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