World Destruction? Bad Humor?
Unlike In Terminator, Skynet developed by NSA does not overthrow humanity,Or does it?
Skynet is a surveillance program which uses metadata to track suspected terrorists. An Al Jazeera Journalist, who was placed on terrorist watch list has become one of its targets.
According to Al Jazeera this is not the first time government has suspected their staff linked to Al-Qaeda.
In a interview, Zaidan (the target) said, his career has spanned many years of dangerous work in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
For us to be able to inform the world, we have to be able to freely contact relevant figures in the public discourse, speak with people on the ground, and gather critical information. Any hint of government surveillance that hinders this process is a violation of press freedom and harms the public’s right to know,”… “To assert that myself, or any journalist, has any affiliation with any group on account of their contact book, phone call logs, or sources is an absurd distortion of the truth and a complete violation of the profession of journalism.
The document cites Zaidan as an example to demonstrate the powers of SKYNET, a program that analyzes location and communication data (or “metadata”) from bulk call records in order to detect suspicious patterns.
In the Terminator movies, SKYNET is a self-aware military computer system that launches a nuclear war to exterminate the human race, and then systematically kills the survivors.
Skynet identified it’s potential targets by looking at “who has traveled from Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore in the past month, who does the traveler communicate with upon arrival. And also looks at suspicious activity such as phone/sim swapping or receiving incoming calls only. The pattern is similar to Al-Qaeda couriers.
As reveled by Edward Snowden, NSA has much similar Skynet program, somewhat similar to the movie. Program named Monstermind. It is defense surveillance system which autonomously neutralize any foreign cyber attacks and to launch cyber strikes as well. Edward Snowden suggested that this Monstermind program could actually backfire one day, when an attacker manages to tweak the code.
