SKYNET is a program by the U.S.

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...

that performs

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

analysis on

communications data Communications data (sometimes referred to as traffic data or metadata) concerns information about communication. Communications data is a part of a message that should be distinguished from the content of the message. It contains data on the com ...

to extract information about possible terror suspects. The tool is used to identify targets, such as

al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda (; , ) is an Islamic extremism, Islamic extremist organization composed of Salafist jihadists. Its members are mostly composed of Arab, Arabs, but also include other peoples. Al-Qaeda has mounted attacks on civilian and military ta ...

couriers, who move between

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation ( 2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such as ...

cellular network A cellular network or mobile network is a communication network where the link to and from end nodes is wireless. The network is distributed over land areas called "cells", each served by at least one fixed-location transceiver (typically thre ...

s. Specifically, mobile usage patterns such as swapping

SIM card file:SIM-Karte von Telefónica O2 Europe - Standard und Micro.jpg, A typical SIM card (mini-SIM with micro-SIM cutout) file:Sim card.png, A smart card taken from a Global System for Mobile Communications, GSM mobile phone file:Simkarte NFC SecureE ...

s within phones that have the same ESN,

MEID A mobile equipment identifier (MEID) is a globally unique number identifying a physical piece of CDMA2000 mobile station equipment. The number format is defined by th3GPP2 report S.R0048but in practical terms, it can be seen as an IMEI but with he ...

IMEI The International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) is a numeric identifier, usually unique, for 3GPP and iDEN mobile phones, as well as some satellite phones. It is usually found printed inside the battery compartment of the phone but can also ...

number are deemed indicative of covert activities. Like many other security programs, the SKYNET program uses graphs that consist of a set of nodes and edges to visually represent social networks. The tool also uses

classification Classification is a process related to categorization, the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Classification is the grouping of related facts into classes. It may also refer to: Business, organizat ...

techniques like

random forest Random forests or random decision forests is an ensemble learning method for classification, regression and other tasks that operates by constructing a multitude of decision trees at training time. For classification tasks, the output of th ...

analysis. Because the

data set A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more database tables, where every column of a table represents a particular variable, and each row corresponds to a given record of the ...

includes a very large proportion of

true negative A false positive is an error in binary classification in which a test result incorrectly indicates the presence of a condition (such as a disease when the disease is not present), while a false negative is the opposite error, where the test result ...

s and a small

training set In machine learning, a common task is the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data. Such algorithms function by making data-driven predictions or decisions, through building a mathematical model from ...

, there is a risk of

overfitting mathematical modeling, overfitting is "the production of an analysis that corresponds too closely or exactly to a particular set of data, and may therefore fail to fit to additional data or predict future observations reliably". An overfitt ...

Bruce Schneier Bruce Schneier (; born January 15, 1963) is an American cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer. Schneier is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Cente ...

argues that a

false positive rate In statistics, when performing multiple comparisons, a false positive ratio (also known as fall-out or false alarm ratio) is the probability of falsely rejecting the null hypothesis for a particular test. The false positive rate is calculated as th ...

of 0.008% would be low for commercial applications where "if Google makes a mistake, people see an ad for a car they don't want to buy" but "if the government makes a mistake, they kill innocents."

Participation and partnerships

NSA directorates participating: * Signals Intelligence: S21, S22, SSG * Research: R6 * Technology: T12, T14 It has partnerships with TMAC/FASTSCOPE, MIT Lincoln labs and

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

Controversy

The SKYNET project was linked with drone systems, thus creating the potential for false-positives to lead to deaths. According to

NSA The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collectio ...

, the SKYNET project is able to accurately reconstruct crucial information about the suspects including their social relationships, habits, and patterns of movements through graph-based visualization of

data. However, scholars criticize that current security literature conflate statistical discrepancies with behavioral abnormalities and that the anomaly detection methodology SKYNET perpetuates the self/other binary. For example,

Al-Jazeera Al Jazeera ( ar, الجزيرة, translit-std=DIN, translit=al-jazīrah, , "The Island") is a state-owned Arabic-language international radio and TV broadcaster of Qatar. It is based in Doha and operated by the media conglomerate Al Jazeera ...

's bureau chief in

Islamabad Islamabad (; ur, , ) is the capital city of Pakistan. It is the country's ninth-most populous city, with a population of over 1.2 million people, and is federally administered by the Pakistani government as part of the Islamabad Capital T ...

Ahmad Zaidan Ahmad ( ar, أحمد, ʾAḥmad) is an Arabic male given name common in most parts of the Muslim world. Other spellings of the name include Ahmed and Ahmet. Etymology The word derives from the root (ḥ-m-d), from the Arabic (), from the ve ...

, was wrongly identified as the most probable member of

and the

Muslim Brotherhood The Society of the Muslim Brothers ( ar, جماعة الإخوان المسلمين'' ''), better known as the Muslim Brotherhood ( ', is a transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt by Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan ...

on their records.

References

{{reflist , 30em , refs = {{cite web , last1 = Grothoff , first1 = Christian , last2 = Porup , first2 = J. M. , date = 16 February 2016 , title = The NSA's SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people , url = http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people , website =

Ars Technica UK ''Ars Technica'' is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, sc ...

{{cite web , title = SKYNET: Applying Advanced Cloud-based Behavior Analytics , url = https://theintercept.com/document/2015/05/08/skynet-applying-advanced-cloud-based-behavior-analytics , website =

The Intercept ''The Intercept'' is an American left-wing news website founded by Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Laura Poitras and funded by billionaire eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar. Its current editor is Betsy Reed. The publication initially reported ...

, date = 8 May 2015 {{cite web , last = Crockford , first = Kade , date = 8 May 2015 , title = MIT and Harvard Worked with NSA on SKYNET Project , url = https://privacysos.org/blog/mit-and-harvard-worked-with-nsa-on-skynet-project , publisher = Privacy SOS {{cite news , date = 18 February 2016 , last = Robbins , first = Martin , title = Has a rampaging AI algorithm really killed thousands in Pakistan? , url = https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2016/feb/18/has-a-rampaging-ai-algorithm-really-killed-thousands-in-pakistan , newspaper =

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/02/skynet-courier-detection-via-machine-learning-p17-normal.gif {{Bare URL image, date=March 2022 National Security Agency operations Intelligence agency programmes revealed by Edward Snowden Drone warfare Extrajudicial killings Targeted killing

Participation and partnerships

Controversy

See also

References