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" &amp;quot;Drones. They&amp;#039;re the third most annoying thing in the sky after mosquitoes and plastic bags caught in the breeze.&amp;quot; John Oliver began the most recent featured segment on Last Week Tonight with a joke, but by the end of his 12-minute expos\u00E9 on the U.S. drone program, he&amp;#039;d made it clear that how we&amp;#039;ve been using the armed, unmanned aircraft for targeting killings overseas is nothing to laugh about. Why are we laughing in the first place? Why are we passing around YouTube videos of drone-filmed engagement gone wrong and why is President Obama making jokes about how a predator drone is going to come after teenage boys who pursue Sasha and Malia with anything but the purest of intentions? As Oliver points out, it&amp;#039;s because the havoc they&amp;#039;re wreaking and the terror they&amp;#039;re evoking overseas is just not being reported. This is partially because it&amp;#039;s too convenient not to think about, but also because the information is simply not available \u2014 the government often doesn&amp;#039;t even know how many people drone strikes are killing \u2014 and what information is available has been dubiously justified. For example, the government&amp;#039;s definition of an &amp;quot;imminent threat,&amp;quot; which is necessary to carry out a strike, does not require the U.S. to have &amp;quot;clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.&amp;quot; As Oliver notes, the government might want to look up what the word &amp;quot;imminent&amp;quot; means. Just as conveniently for the government, any able-bodied male is classified as a militant unless there is specific evidence to suggest otherwise, meaning that drones may be killing far more civilians than are being reported. But the most affecting portion of last night&amp;#039;s segment came when Oliver showed footage of a Yemeni boy who&amp;#039;d lived in the U.S. explaining that &amp;quot;the drone strikes are the face of America to many Yemenis&amp;quot; while speaking at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, along with a video of a 13-year-old Pakistani boy whose grandmother was killed in a drone strike testifying about how he lives in fear of blue skies because he knows the drones are watching. &amp;quot;It is completely natural for us not to want to think about the consequences of our drone program,&amp;quot; Oliver says. &amp;quot;But when children from other countries are telling us that we&amp;#039;ve made them fear the sky, it might be time to ask some hard questions.&amp;quot; Watch below:      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a30272/john-oliver-drones/>