New App Notifies You Of US Drone Strikes

USAF

A new iPhone application called Metadata+ has just been released through iTunes App Store.

The app, developed by Josh Begley, is a lesson in minimalism. All it does is send a push notifications to users every time a U.S. drone strike takes place.

Originally, Apple found this app potentially offensive and rejected it multiple times.

The name Metadata+ is of course still a political statement, referencing the NSA's extensive tracking and storage of call metadata in the United States.

Metadata does not just refer to the NSA bulk surveillance practice, anymore. Glenn Greenwald revealed earlier this week that the NSA has been supplying the U.S. Military with information from their metadata collection efforts. The military then uses this information to triangulate a suspected militant's location for a drone strike.

Messages sent from Metadata+ are inherently brief, such as "Abdulrahman, a 16-year-old US citizen, was eating dinner with his teenage cousins when a missile came out of the sky."

The application is currently free.

Hat tip to Adam Clark Estes at Gizmodo.