The NSA software that takes a journalist for a terrorist – Focus

A few years ago the US government had identified a member of Al Qaeda and had traced the movements, monitoring his calls and crossing them with the movements and calls to other suspected terrorists. Except that it was not a terrorist, but a journalist of Al Jazeera . The story emerged a few days ago thanks to the site The Intercept, which has unearthed a sophisticated surveillance system of the NSA, named Skynet , and has put the American agency in the spotlight due the implications of its comprehensive surveillance system.

Things to film. After discovering that the NSA can spy on us through the hard drives of our computers, we We are faced with another movie scenario, literally. Perhaps fans of the movie Terminator , the engineers of the NSA-hacker software called Skynet. One of the film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was a defense system that, suddenly, throwing a nuclear strike to destroy humanity. The software of the American is not anything like that uses the metadata of the phones to trace the location and follow the people who use them. Specifically, the NSA uses (or used) Skynet to chase and apprehend suspects couriers of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, monitoring their movements between Pakistan, Afghanistan and other countries.

How does it work. The scheme has been designed to scan networks of telephone companies of Pakistan and analyze data in large quantities. It is based on an algorithm that identifies connections and anniversaries deemed suspicious. The software then responds to questions such as: who has moved from Faisalabad to Lahore last month? what equipment is called by this machine? Skynet also monitors the continuous changes, and therefore suspect, SIM cards and mobile terminals.

The blunder. It is not known if Skynet is or has been a successful program, but it is certain that in doing its work, at some point you run into an error rather sensational. In 2012 Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Syrian journalist of Al Jazeera based in Islamabad would be identified as a possible terrorist and track its movements.

Only he with Al Qaeda seems there ‘enters nothing: he would just blame in his career to have interviewed some members of the terrorist organization, including Osama bin Laden. His contacts and movements over time have suspicious software, which issued the journalist movements comparable to those of the couriers of Al Qaeda, when in fact it would have meetings with his sources of information . These details are contained in the revelations of Edward Snowden, who uncovered the pot and US intelligence, desecretando an official document of the Skynet project where you could see just the details of the journalist, called ‘member of Al Qaeda’. To write the article for The Intercept is, among others, Glenn Greenwald, the journalist of the Guardian that was among the first to receive the revelations of Snowden in 2013.

Zaidan, after learning of the matter, issued a harsh comment to the site, denying all along the line of being a member of Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood and accusing the American surveillance system “is a violation press freedom and the right to information. It is an absurd distortion of the truth and a violation of the journalistic profession. “

Skynet? A program such as Terminator , the Nsa seems that we have the real. It consists in a surveillance system can recognize cyber attacks to American structures
 
 and reject them with the counter attacks, increasingly virtual. It’s called MonsterMind, another name at least suggestive.