A program by the National Security Agency, which uses metadata and learning algorithms to select targets for drone strikes, may be targetting thousands of innocent people, a report has said.
Unfortunately named the SKYNET (the evil artificial intelligence, that features in theTerminator movies), is a surveillance programs that uses cellphone metadata to track call activities and GPS location of suspected terrorists to either create profiles on them or to eliminate them.
Now new data (revealed by former NSA staffer Edward Snowden) suggests that many of these people killed based on the metadata may have been innocent.
According to the bureau of journalism, somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and most of them were classified by the US government as ‘extremists’.
According to thehackernews, last year, the leaked documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme published by The Intercept showed that NSA had used a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people in Pakistan to rate each citizen's likelihood of being a terrorist.
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