We had a threefold objective in our brief:

(a) to raise global awareness of this human rights violation which was otherwise mostly ignored,

(b) to do it in a completely new and impactful manner, so that it may get noticed not only by the public and the press, but also by governments and - most importantly - resonate with the drone operators themselves,

(c) to ultimately affect government lawmakers who have the power to make the changes needed to minimize civilian collateral deaths.

We decided to target the very person who has their finger on the trigger: the drone operator sitting thousands of miles away from their victim.

Drone pilots refer to human casualties as “bug splats” – because people do look like bugs from so far above: faceless dots in a vast landscape. We decided to counter this dehumanization process by showing the actual face of a child victim.

At high personal risk of being bombed ourselves, we installed a large 90 feet by 60 feet poster in an affected area of NorthWest Pakistan, using artwork of an actual victim who had lost her parents and siblings to a strike. The image would be transmitted via satellite from the drone camera and beamed thousands of miles away to an operator’s screen. Never before had a drone operator’s monitor itself been turned into a media device to deliver a protest message. This created a forced visual dialogue between predator and prey: the famed thousand-yard stare.

Once the poster was installed, we uploaded the image on an informational website open to anyone - including the press, and pushed the campaign with a hashtag that delivered our powerful message: #NotABugSplat

The campaign went viral overnight, making its way into the global news-sphere. We registered over 3.5 billion impressions in the news and 62+ million impressions on Twitter, amounting to a staggering $182+ million in earned media.

And all for a budget that was under $1500.

The campaign was tweeted about by members of National Assembly of Pakistan, who raised the concern of drone strikes with the International Court of Justice. Two months later, the High Court in Islamabad registered a criminal case against the operators, a first of its kind. Rights activists in USA and Yemen have protested using our image, and the Tate UK has included the campaign in their learning program.

The latest US Government Accountability report indicates that all the negative publicity is affecting pilot morale. The pressure created by the hype against drone strikes has caused a shift in policy to now have stricter guidelines that prohibit drone strikes unless there’s a near certainty civilians won’t be harmed. Strikes have lessened, and the total number of civilians and children killed by drones since this work was put up last year - according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism - has been brought down to almost zero.

Since 2004, Predator drone strikes in Pakistan have killed an estimated 3500+ people, a disturbing percentage of which have been innocent civilians. Including more than 200 children. The Foundation for Fundamental Rights has been working to raise awareness of this crisis, but most protests in Pakistan go unnoticed.