Where America Drones

By now, the Obama administration's use of killer drones is just another bit of dinner-table talk over the casserole dishes of Middle America. At the same time, it's doing its best to keep the whole bloody awful mess in the shadows. We know the strikes continue to happen (this despite the president's nod to a drastic scaling back of strikes into 2014), and we have a good idea precisely where it's all going down. But it's easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

Coder Mantas Jasinevicius wants to change that. With real-time and historical strike data pulled from Dronestream, Jasinevicius has created a slate of heat maps, charts, and graphs depicting those areas most ravaged by drone strikes, the countries where the bulk of attacks occur, and the injuries and casualities wrought about in the process, respectively.

Here's a punch-in on the Af-Pak hot zone:

You can check out the rest of the visualizations here. They're equally predictable and chilling, part and parcel of a push to visualize something deliberately being kept in the shadows, albeit shoddily so. Like Dronestagram, Out of Sight - Out of Mind, and the aforementioned Dronestream, Mantas' maps help us wrap our heads around the scope of the ninth layer of Hellfire.

@thebanderson