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Quotes About Drones

The Obama administration has vastly expanded the use of armed drones and concentrated a great deal of diplomatic effort on building and maintaining alliances that share information about terrorists, provide access to get near them, and then strike against them.
~ Elliott Abrams
As a general point, the United States has an extreme budget commitment to prisons, guns, warplanes, armored vehicles, detention facilities, courts, jails, drones, and patrols - to law and order, meted out discriminately.
~ Annie Lowrey
Curiously, while drone operators are perhaps the safest of all combat troops physically, they have among the highest rates of depression and post-traumatic stress in the military and national security services. Sitting at a video console in Colorado or New York City, killing someone six thousand miles away and then collecting the kids at gymnastics or football practice, having dinner and sitting down to watch Dancing with the Stars in your suburban den was disorienting beyond belief.
~ Jeffery Deaver
Hellfire missiles, the explosives fired from drones, are not always fired at people. In fact most drone strikes are aimed at phones. The SIM card provides a person's location; when turned on, a phone can become a deadly proxy for the individual being hunted. When a night raid or drone strike successfully neutralizes a target's phone, operators call that a "touchdown.
~ Jeremy Scahill
Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word "assassination.
~ Jeremy Scahill
Obama once reportedly told his aides, "[It] turns out I'm really good at killing people.
~ Jeremy Scahill
the notion that critics of the drone program are being manipulated by propaganda from terrorist organizations "would be laughable, were it not so offensive towards civilian victims of drone strikes." A
~ Jeremy Scahill
Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata. People get hung up that there's a targeted list of people, he said. 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.
~ Jeremy Scahill
special forces and drones replaced the type of large-scale ground invasion that destroyed Iraq. But the defining essence of the Bush-Cheney template—that the United States is fighting an endless war against terror suspects who have no due process rights of any kind—is very much alive and, in many cases, stronger than ever.
~ Jeremy Scahill
The United States is the first nation to regularly conduct strikes using remotely piloted aircraft in an armed conflict. Other nations also possess this technology. Many more nations are seeking it, and more will succeed in acquiring it.
~ John O. Brennan
Where there are drones, there will always be police. Where there are police, there will always be violence.
~ Unknown
As for the claim that drone 'pilots' are not engaged in the extinguishing of human life via video games, the military's own term for its drone kills - 'bug splat,' which happens to be the name of a children's video game - and other evidence negates that.
~ Glenn Greenwald
she lowers the pistol. She watches the precisely arrayed drones slowly fading to the northeast.
~ Dean Koontz
In some respects, a society in which the members reach a universal level in which they are anonymous drones by choice is even more frightening than one in which they are forced to be so against their will. When human beings relinquish their individuality and identity of their own volition, they are also relinquishing their claim to being human.
~ J. Paul Getty
If you think back to the fight over drones, when I was proud to be standing shoulder to shoulder with Rand Paul filibustering for 13 hours, that was viewed as a fringe issue, as a quixotic issue, and yet millions of Americans engaged, spoke up, got online.
~ Ted Cruz
We have no regulation of drones in the United States in their commercial use. You can see drones some day hovering over the homes of Hollywood luminaries, violating privacy. This question has to be addressed. And we need rules of operation on the border, by police, by commercial use, and also by military and intelligence use.
~ Dianne Feinstein
I'm witnessing the problems that the federal government is passing down in terms of drones, in violation of our civil liberties, spying on our citizens, death panels in the form of the government taking over the health care system and the national debt they're just saddling our grandchildren with.
~ Matt Rosendale
We live in a time of astounding technological advancements. There are deep-sea drones and live-streaming virtual reality.
~ Jenna Wortham
The scary thing about the future... there will be tiny cameras everywhere, and they'll be flying around like mosquitoes and drones. That will be bad. Drones are scary. You can't reason with a drone.
~ Matt Groening
1) CodeBundle.LockItDown had closed all the hatches on board except those directly between SecUnit 3's position and the shuttle access. 2) CodeBundle.FuckThem had fried all targetDrones. 3) CodeBundle.FuckThisToo had cut the connections between the solid-state screen device and the humans' implants. Oh, and I shut down life support on the bridge so the Targets in there would be thinking about other things besides restarting their screen.
~ Martha Wells
Plus, it was Preservation and there were no scanning drones, no armed human security, just some on-call human medics with bot assistants and "rangers" who mainly enforced environmental regulations and yelled at humans and augmented humans to get out of the way of the ground vehicles.
~ Martha Wells
The London-based Reprieve organization found that 1,147 people were killed by drones in efforts to kill just forty-one men.
~ Matt Taibbi
Donald Trump, a man whose idea of policy is a big wall, was the Republican front-runner for months, and ceded the lead to a man who wants to fight immigrants with drones. This whole thing is a joke.
~ Matt Taibbi
Underneath the drones, the pedestrians and board riders along Plough Lane had stopped to look around in confusion as power and digital connectivity was taken from them—basic human rights since before they were born
~ Peter F. Hamilton