The More You Know About Drones
Drone strikes and deaths, visualized
The more Americans know about drones, the less they like them, Cato vice president Gene Healy pointed out here at Reason.com earlier today in a piece surveying the national conversation on drones in the wake of Senator Rand Paul's 13 hour filibuster on the issue. A large component of the criticism is the secrecy (it doesn't exist) and lack of transparency (trust us, it works) surrounding the policymaking. Healy notes the DC circuit's ruling that the Obama administration shouldn't stonewall the ACLU's drone-related FOIA requests. Nevertheless, despite the attempts to obfuscate U.S. drone policy and its consequences, quite a bit of information is available. And on that front, Pitch Interactive, a self-described data visualization studio, has done an incredible job at, what else, helping visualize drone policy with the data available. They present "the story of every known drone strike and victim in Pakistan" in slideshow form. Partial screen cap's on the right and the link to the whole thing's here. Data set comes via the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and here are some caveats via Dave Weigel at Slate and a Reddit thread.
