X
August 19, 2013 Andy Cush

It turns out Iran and small-town Colorado aren’t entirely different. According to the Associated Press, Iranian newspaper Etemad daily is reporting that students in the middle-eastern country may be taught to hunt drones in school. General Ali Fazli, acting commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’s Basij militia, said the anti-drone classes will be taught as a part of […]

Read More…

April 16, 2013 Andy Cush

The American Civil Liberties Union is appealing a court decision that allows the CIA and the Obama administration to keep secret their legal justification for its drone strike program. The decision, passed by U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon of New York in January, is almost comical in its catch-22 thorniness: … this court is constrained […]

Read More…

March 29, 2013 Andy Cush

We already knew that the U.S. Office of Naval Research has been hard at work building laser guns. Now, it’s come to light that the office would like to begin equipping Marine humvees with the futuristic weapons, in hopes of keeping them better protected from drones. They’re offering a contract worth up to $400,000 for […]

Read More…

March 27, 2013 Andy Cush

What is a 20-ft long wooden replica military helicopter doing on the roof of a Long Island City studio? Commissioned by Amnesty International and the Control Arms campaign, two New York artists spent three days creating the chopper to raise awareness about a UN treaty that would place new regulations on the international arms trade. […]

Read More…

March 25, 2013 Andy Cush

Created by the developers Pitch Interactive, this animated infographic plots every U.S. drone strike and all associated casualties. In just a few seconds, a flurry of strikes and deaths appear, beginning in 2004 and drastically upticking in 2008-2009, when  Pervez Musharraf resigned as president of Pakistan and President Obama took office in the states. All […]

Read More…

March 5, 2013 Andy Cush

At 11:45 Monday morning, a friend of ANIMAL art editor Marina Galperina sent her a GChat message saying that he’d seen a drone flying over East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “Maybe 10 foot wingspan. Probably 200 ft in the air. Not high, though it wasn’t armed with missiles or a visible camera,” Rhett Jones wrote. “I thought […]

Read More…

Andy Cush

The pilot of an Alitalia passenger plane was preparing to land at JFK airport yesterday when he reported seeing an unmanned aerial vehicle flying several miles away. “We saw a drone, a drone aircraft,” he said over the radio. The FAA and FBI are investigating. “He saw a small, unmanned or remote-controlled aircraft while on final […]

Read More…

February 19, 2013 Samer Kalaf

Micro Air Vehicles are the hot new drone for 2013, or whenever they’re actually created by the Air Force. In this simulated video, MAVs look like horrifying flying things that are “unobtrusive, pervasive, lethal.” These tightly controlled drones can spy, scan and shoot someone in the head. And these MAVs would range from the size […]

Read More…

February 6, 2013 Andy Cush

That illustration above is law student Asher J. Kohn’s concept of what a fully operational drone-proof city might look like. Rather than building barriers to keep people out and deter weapon strikes like traditional defenses, Kohn’s concept–called Shura City–includes several technologies that obscure people and their movements in order to make them untraceable by UAVs. […]

Read More…

Andy Cush

With Obama’s drone war in full swing and expanded to include the killing of Americans, the Department of Defense will continue to purchase new UAVs, but what will the U.S. do with it’s older models? The burgeoning drone industry will need to find some new buyers. The most obvious place they’ll look is with police […]

Read More…