This method stems from activity-based intelligence, or ABI. From the mass of information collected about a particular individual, group, or place gradually emerge patterns, or traceable themes. Activity becomes an alternative to identity. Once a target has been named, instead of trying to localize it, do quite the opposite. Start by establishing surveillance and gathering information. Next, make large-scale graphs to do an analysis of “big data,” picking out nodular points that, by reason of the position and scale they occupy on the diagram, can be identified as threats that need to be neutralized. “By compiling activity-based association data with its metadata over time and adding analysis and reporting from many analysts,” wrote Keith L. Barber of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, “a rich archive will be formed to harvest patterns of life, networks and abnormalities which may have been overlooked otherwise.” The tools of human geography and the sociology of social networks are now enlisted in the service of a policy of eradication in which “persistent surveillance” makes it possible to pick out dangerous individuals. The painstaking work of establishing an archive of lives progressively gathers together the elements of a file that, once it becomes thick enough, will constitute a death warrant.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 216