On Tuesday, NYU student Josh Begley attempted to tweet the history of 10 years of US drone strikes in 10 minutes as part of a graduate project.
Twelve hours later, he had only reached March 2010.
"At first, I wanted to visualize frequency – to see if I could tweet 10 years in 10 minutes," Begley told the Guardian. "Clearly that didn't work out. After tweeting for 12 hours I've only reached 2010, and as many folks will tell you, the strikes only pick up from there."
The Twitter handle @dronestream will recount every known drone strike since the first recorded instance in 2002, including links to accompanying news stories. The data, pulled from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, covers Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and will fit into roughly 400 tweets, according to Begley. "And that's not including attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, which are rarely reported on," Begley said.
In the first 10 minutes, almost 80 tweets were fired.
Nov 3, 2002: In the first known US targeted assassination using a drone, a CIA Predator struck a car, killing 6 (Yemen) news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2402479.s…
— Dronestream (@dronestream) December 11, 2012
Dec 1, 2005: 5 people were killed, including 2 children, when drones fired on a house "for about 8 minutes" (Pakistan) csmonitor.com/2005/1205/p04s…
— Dronestream (@dronestream) December 11, 2012
Aug 12, 2008: 2 pilotless planes fired 4 hellfire missiles at about 10pm, killing between 13 and 25 people (Pakistan) thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDet…
— Dronestream (@dronestream) December 11, 2012
Many similar tweets followed, reaching March 10 2010 by midnight – an eight-year span.
Mar 31, 2010: 6 people were reported killed and 2 injured in an attack on a former school (Pakistan) via @tbij twitter.com/dronestream/st…
— Dronestream (@dronestream) December 12, 2012
The @dronestream project, which has attracted just over 3,500 followers so far, will continue through Wednesday – or as long as it takes to send the several hundred more tweets Begley has lined up.
"I suspect a fair amount of Americans don't know where our drone missiles land – or on who. I certainly didn't," Begley said.
"I'm interested in a simple question: even if we have access to the data about drone attacks, do we really want to be interrupted by it?"
Previously, Begley built an iPhone app that tracks drone strikes, which pulled on the same Bureau of Investigative Journalism data. However, Apple rejected the Drones+ app several times.
