Anyone who has seen the Terminator movies knows that Skynet is a mass destruction program. Scenario of science fiction? However, Skynet seems 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.
An Al Jazeera journalist, in fact, was according to information one of the objectives of the service.
Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera's Islamabad bureau chief, was under surveillance by Skynet after US intelligence considered him a possible member of Al Qaeda. Syrian Zaidan managed to get a series of exclusive interviews with senior Al Qaeda officials, 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 that Skynet is looking for terrorist links based on questions such as "who has traveled from Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore (and back) in the last month?" Who does he call when he arrives at his destination? ” Skynet also appears to be looking for suspicious behavior, such as when someone is constantly changing their SIM or receiving only incoming phone calls.
The goal of the NSA program was or is to locate people moving in accordance with Al Qaeda's plans that are used to transfer information among senior team 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 Skynet's cinematic version, is a defense surveillance system that can instantly and independently neutralize foreign cyber attacks against the US.
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?
