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Armchair killers: life as a drone pilot
In the film Good Kill, Ethan Hawke plays a drone pilot troubled by his work. What's it really like to take a life from thousands of miles away with the push of a button?
9:52AM BST 11 Apr 2015
Its nickname is Predator Porn, and Paul Rolfe used to watch it 12 hours a day. Sometimes it was horrific, sometimes it was life affirming; mostly it was just dull. But whenever fellow soldiers at his airbase in Nevada wandered past the "live feeds" from his console, he'd notice how their eyes would wander to the screen and have trouble looking away.
Small wonder. For the cameras on the Predator drones that Rolfe once operated offer a voyeuristic experience unlike no other.
...en opOften they would be unsuspecting farmers or market traders, women hanging out the washing or children playing, but sometimes it might be a high-value al-Qaeda or Taliban figure.
At which point, Predator Porn goes well beyond mere voyeurism.
The pilot sitting next to the camera operators would pull a trigger on a joystick, and a missile would snake down from 15,000 feet.
"The feeds from the Predator drones are available for hundreds of different people to watch all over the drone operating centre,” says London-born Rolfe, 43, who served for six years with the task force on secondment from the RAF.
“It can be hard for people to take their eyes off it. If it's an operation to hit some well-known terrorist, you'll see people crowding around the screens."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film ... story.html
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