A stockpile of federal documents were leaked by an unidentified whistleblower on Thursday, detailing the extensive use of drones by the U.S. government in foreign countries.
Dubbed the “New Edward Snowden” by the media, this unidentified whistleblower leaked a slew of federal documents showing the military’s reliance on drones to target enemies in countries like Yemen and Afghanistan and how often the attacks go wrong.
Called “The Drone Files,” the documents were released on the investigative website called The Intercept, and reveal that under what The Intercept calls “Obama’s Drone War,” 90 percent of drone killings allegedly exterminated the wrong targets.
“We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it,” the whistleblower told The Intercept.
The data is based on just a five-month period, according to Wired, and was divulged by only one whistleblower. All of the killings were listed as “EKIA” — Enemy Killed In Action — even though the majority of deaths were unintended. The documents note the accidental killings include a former British citizen, as well as others who were struck down after the government looked at their profiles and deemed them expendable.
“This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the whistleblower told The Intercept.
The Intercept’s eight-part series notes that drone strikes became commonplace under the Obama administration, with many of the attacks getting direct approval from the president.
These leaks come just two years after Edward Snowden leaked the extensive global surveillance methods of the National Security Agency, and five years after Julian Assange revealed diplomatic documents on his website WikiLeaks. (RELATED: Edward Snowden Says Massive Surveillance Won’t Stop Terrorism)