In another milestone in the growing integration between the military-intelligence complex and Silicon Valley, Google's parent company Alphabet has confirmed that it has provided software to identify targets used in the illegal US government drone murder program.

Since initiating its drone assassination program in 2009, the United States claims to have killed close to 3,000 "combatants" in drone strikes. Internal military documents show that for every one person targeted by a drone strike, nine bystanders are killed, meaning that the true toll of the US military's airborne terrorism campaign in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq potentially rises to the tens of thousands.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, "A program of targeted killing far from any battlefield, without charge or trial, violates the constitutional guarantee of due process. It also violates international law, under which lethal force may be used outside armed conflict zones only as a last resort."