NSA experiment tracks over 55 million phones

May 9, 2015 07:27 GMT  ·  By

In the secret document cache leaked by Edward Snowden, there is a PowerPoint presentation about an NSA (National Security Agency) program called SkyNet, used by the agency to identify individuals based on phone call metadata.

The document describing the program explains that SkyNet looks for terrorist connections based on the location of an individual, the calls they make, where, when and how frequently they travel to a place of interest to the agency.

Additionally, SkyNet has behavior-based analytics capabilities that track data such as if the mobile phone has incoming calls only, the target changes the SIM card or the device frequently, or if the phone goes off the grid or gets shut down often.

SkyNet is a collaborative project between 5 organizations

Published by The Intercept, the document describes NSA’s program as relying on “complex combinations of geospatial, geotemporal, pattern-of-life, and travel analytics to bulk DNR [dialed number recognition] data to identify patterns of suspect activity.”

It appears that SkyNet was borne from the cloud research collaboration efforts that included five different organizations, mainly involving three NSA directorates (Signals Intelligence, Research, and Technology).

Partners in the project are MIT Lincoln Labs and Harvard. The team from the TMAC (Travel and Mobility Analysis Center) program was also involved in SkyNet.

So it seems that Cyberdyne Systems is not the creator of SkyNet, after all.

In another document, called “SkyNet: Courier Detection via Machine Learning,” it is stated that the agency used metadata from more than 55 million mobile phone records from GSM operator in Pakistan to test the system.

SkyNet has false positives

The objective was to identify people related to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. However, one of the individuals that met all the criteria for marking him as a member of a terrorist group (Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood) was Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, a highly respected journalist leading Al Jazeera’s bureau in Islamabad.

As a journalist, Zaidan has created a network of contacts that allowed him to interview multiple Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.

“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.