Anyone who has seen them Movies Terminator knows that Skynet is a program of mass destruction. A science fiction scenario? But here's where Skynet appears to actually exist as an NSA program. 
As Wired reports today, the NSA has a program called Skynet, but unlike Terminator's stand-alone defense system that, with a nuclear attack, destroys most of humanity, is a surveillance program that uses telephone metadata to locate the activities of suspected terrorists.
A reporter for Al Jazeera in fact, he was reportedly one of the agency's targets.
Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, head of Al Jazeera's office in Islamabad, was monitored by Skynet after the US secret services considered him a possible Al Qaeda member. Syrian Zaidan managed to make a series of exclusive interviews with senior Al Qaeda executives, including Osama bin Laden himself.
Skynet uses the phone's location and call metadata to identify suspects and track their communication habits, according to a 2012 Transparency posted by Intercept. The leaked slide comes from Edward Snowden's records.
The presentation shows Skynet looking for terrorist links based on queries like “who has traveled from Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore (and back) in the last month? Who does he call when he reaches his destination?” Skynet also appears to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior, such as someone constantly changing SIMs or their phone only receiving incoming calls. calls.
The goal of the proletterof the NSA, was or is to identify individuals moving in accordance with Al Qaeda plans who are used to transfer information between the group's senior leaders.
The program watched Zaidan because his movements and interactions with Al Qaeda and the Taliban leaders were very suspicious and pre-agreed.
It should be noted that the NSA has a second program similar to the Terminator Skynet. It's called Monstermind, as Edward Snowden says.
The Monstermind program, like the movie version of Skynet, is a defense surveillance system that can instantly and autonomously neutralize foreign cyberattacks against the USA.
Under this program, algorithms clean up the metadata metadata collected by the service, analyze them and recognize normal network traffic from abnormal or malicious traffic. Armed with this knowledge, NSA agents could instantly and independently identify and block a foreign internet threat.
Snowden also said that Monstermind could one day start attacks automatically, without human intervention, against the attackers.
It sounds like Terminator's Skynet, do not you think?
