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[Important Note: Some links (especially Ars Technica) are NSFW for US government employees as they contain slides that are marked "Top Secret". Exercise discretion/caution in this story's comments, too. -Ed.]
Yes, it is cloud-based, yes, it does decide about the fate of hundreds of humans, and yes, ultimately it does direct robots to kill innocent humans.
SKYNET is a system created by the NSA that applies machine learning algorithms to supposedly determine the likelihood of someone turning into a terrorist based on mobile phone metadata. According to slides published at Ars Technica, evil acts like switching off your mobile phone (= evading surveillance), switching SIM cards (= trying unsuccessfully to evade surveillance, thanks to IMEI, etc.), swapping phones with others (= trying unsuccessfully to evade surveillance, thanks to other surveillance data) will be taken together as indicators of your evil intentions.
Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the executive director 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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2016, @05:51AM
When civilians were in charge of intelligence, there was not so much emphasis on what is euphemistically called "kinetics". But the military mindset, as pointed out by Plato oh these many years ago (in the Republic, if you must know), is that of a dog. Friend or foe? Who goes there? Identify yourself, and tell us why you changed your phone number! Ok, boys, light 'em up, because better safe than sorry in today's coward military forces where the last thing we want is enough casualties to our side to turn public support like it did in the "Vietnam Not-a-War-at-ALL" thingy. Not surprising that the take over of the intelligence services by the military has resulted in the loss of any intelligence, properly so called. We are blind. Petraeus, head of the Central Intelligence Agency? That idiot Admiral, head of NSA? What the *classified* were they thinking? Of course, as recently with Brennan, these dinosaurs cannot not handle OPSECS in the modern world. Petraeus fell for the oldest, oh, there is a joke here! Ha, ha! Espionage is the second oldest profession, and just as honorable as the first.