The Wire meets NSA and the War on Terror meets New Aesthetic meets Design Fictions

First article in Greenwald's new journal 'The Intercept' https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/
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James Bridle's art project "Under the shadow of the drone" James Bridle - Meet The Artist

Wondering if the US would like to take humans out of the loop completely. Here we have NSA Sigint leading to geo tracking cell phone SIMs then calling in a drone strike on the cell phone's last known location. So no humint checks on the intelligence side. The humans controlling the drone are on the other side of the world so no body bags. And no human checks on the fall out. It's assumed that the phone is held by an "unlawful enemy combatant" no matter where in the world they are. The other side responds with a kind of Russian Roulette where they have SIM swapping parties. If they've worked that out, you'd expect them to be using large quantities of 'burner' phones. Or just reverting to paper.

Here's a member of the team talking,
“People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” he says. “It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people – we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”