Unreliable evidence

I hadn’t really thought much about pixels before, despite spending a large portion of my day looking at them. After all, a pixel is just a tiny unit in a digital image, and we all tend to look at the bigger picture. But how about this: this humble unit has now become a key feature of drone warfare. Drone-fired missiles have reportedly been developed that can burrow through targeted buildings, and leave a hole that appears smaller than a pixel on publicly available satellite images. This means that drone strikes are often invisible to groups who try to monitor attacks, such as NGOs or the UN.

As Eyal Weizman, an expert in ‘forensic architecture’, puts it: ‘One of the foundational principles of forensics since the 19th century has been inverted: to resolve a crime the police should be able to see more, use better optics, than the perpetrator of the crime.