First, the bad news: our government is assassinating people based loosely upon the whereabouts and history of their SIM cards. Without even confirming that their intended target is indeed in possession of this card, the United States government is targeting drone missile strikes based on this data.

Now, the good news: A new media organization, First Look Media has just launched its first “digital magazine” called The Intercept that is actually investigating and reporting on these crimes by our federal government. Read their welcome message here.

First Look is the media and technology venture started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar along with investigative reporters Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill. Here are Greenwald and Scahill talking about it on Democracy Now!:

From The Intercept’s article:

as the former JSOC drone operator recounts, tracking people by metadata and then killing them by SIM card is inherently flawed. The NSA “will develop a pattern,” he says, “where they understand that this is what this person’s voice sounds like, this is who his friends are, this is who his commander is, this is who his subordinates are. And they put them into a matrix. But it’s not always correct. There’s a lot of human error in that.”

And later on, discussing one of the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden:

One top-secret NSA document provided by Snowden notes that by 2009, “for the first time in the history of the U.S. Air Force, more pilots were trained to fly drones … than conventional fighter aircraft,” leading to a “‘tipping point’ in U.S. military combat behavior in resorting to air strikes in areas of undeclared wars,” such as Yemen and Pakistan.

The article goes on to dissect just how egregious this new phase of US Military conduct has gotten, with one NSA document likening it to the atomic bomb dropped on Japan as a “dawn of a new era.”. And President Obama himself has acknowledged to his aides that it “turns out I’m really good at killing people… Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”