You'd think when choosing the name of a top-secret surveillance program, the National Security Agency would be careful not to choose a name synonymous with artificial intelligence gone rogue and nearly destroying humanity.

You'd be wrong.

According to a report by The Intercept, the NSA mislabeled an Al Jazeera journalist as a terrorist using a program called SKYNET, which analyzes cellphone metadata in order to detect suspicious activity. The report was based on a document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Movie buffs are familiar with the name — Skynet is the AI from the Terminator movie franchise, which gains self-awareness in the near future and decides it's best to wipe out the human race, which it perceives as a threat. We don't know who chooses these names at the NSA, but here's a piece of advice: Associations with entities that aim to destroy all humans are probably best avoided.

Just like the movie version of Skynet, the NSA's SKYNET isn't perfect, either. According to the report, Al Jazeera's Islamabad bureau chief Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan was flagged as a member of both al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, likely based on his travel patterns and call logs.

Zaidan denies the accusations. “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,” he told The Intercept. His account is further corroborated by CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen, who calls Zaidan "a first-class journalist."

The NSA is silent on both SKYNET and this particular case. If the report is accurate, it highlights more than just the NSA's poor habits when it comes to naming top-secret programs; it also seems that some of these programs have their flaws when it comes to identifying actual threats.

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