We’ve suspected it all along—that Skynet, the massive program that brings about world destruction in the Terminator movies, was just a fictionalization of a real program in the hands of the US government. And now it’s confirmed—at least in name.

In the Terminator franchise, Skynet is an evil military computer system that launches war on humanity. And at some point, someone in the National Security Agency sat down and thought, “Damn, that’s a sick thing to name a secret system!” Malevolent undertones of aspirations to unchecked aggression be damned, I guess, because Skynet is real.

The document cites Zaidan as an example to demonstrate the powers of SKYNET, a program that analyzes location and communication data (or “metadata”) from bulk call records in order to detect suspicious patterns. In the Terminator movies, SKYNET is a self-aware military computer system that launches a nuclear war to exterminate the human race, and then systematically kills the survivors. According to the presentation, the NSA uses its version of SKYNET to identify people that it believes move like couriers used by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. The program assessed Zaidan as a likely match, which raises troubling questions about the U.S. government’s method of identifying terrorist targets based on metadata.

RT @coracurrier: NSA's SKYNET looks for suspect behaviors in millions of Pakistani cell records

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents. The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

Parallèle Citizenfour et projet de loi

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President Obama said he would support measures opening backdoors in communications and social media technologies last January. Such measures would force companies like Apple and Google to create holes in their programming that would let the government track suspected criminals or terrorists. “Social media and the Internet is the primary way in which these terrorist organizations are communicating,” Obama said in a Jan. 16 press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on cybersecurity.

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Humans are natural storytellers, and the world of stories is much more tidy, predictable, and coherent than reality. Millions of people behave strangely enough to attract the FBI’s notice, and almost all of them are harmless.