In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that "we kill people based on metadata." Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.
Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person's likelihood of being a terrorist.
Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullshit." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.
So, yeah, way to go NSA.
The article also mentions how their top flagged potential terrorist based on travel behavior and such turns out to be a journalist for Al-Jazeera who often reports from areas with increased terrorist activity. Clearly a false positive.
What's pretty shocking here is that the NSA is patting itself on the back for supposedly only having 0.008% false positives. For a company like Google, targeting wrong ads at only 0.008% of their user base is superb. The consequence of that is insignificant (one might see ads for a product you're not interested in). However, if you're wrongly flagging 0.008% of the population of Pakistan as terrorists, then we're talking about 15,000 innocent people potentially getting targeted by death squads and drones.
Having said that though, it's not entirely clear what the NSA does once a person is flagged as terrorist. The fact that the Al-Jazeera journalist is still walking the Earth means that a flag doesn't automatically mean a kill. There must be some human reviewing element involved here, but still, lets just hope that of those 15,000 people, not a single one is erroneously approved for the kill list by a human element that had a bad night before.
