Listen to A History of the World in Spy Objects podcast: Trevor Paglen - SKYNET

Journalist Ahmad Zaidan was the bureau chief for Al Jazeera news network in Islamabad, Pakistan up until 2015, a man known mainly for his series of interviews with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Zaidan’s followers weren’t just news junkies though. They included a cadre of NSA and CIA officers who suspected Zaidan himself of belonging to al-Qaeda.

They clocked Zaidan’s communication and travel patterns through his metadata signature - cell phone calls, geolocation pings, and the like. The journalist’s movements were suspicious enough to earn Zaidan a spot on a so-called ‘Kill List’ of suspected terrorists, a list created not by US surveillance teams but by SKYNET, a top-secret program revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. SKYNET's machine-learning algorithm was used to analyze Pakistan’s cellular metadata to pick out potential terrorists.

‍“What that means is that if you have a certain series of data points around you, as far as the NSA and CIA were concerned, you could be eligible for assassination because your electronic fingerprint fit a profile of a generic terror suspect that they posited,” artist Trevor Paglen tells the SPYSCAPE podcast A History of the World in Spy Objects.

Paglen, part artist, part journalist, researched SKYNET thoroughly and his findings appear more relevant today than ever before. As the world stands on the brink of a new era in artificial intelligenceI - self-aware computer programs capable of reasoning and acquiring knowledge through various domains - we are grappling with a force that can reshape our world, not always for the better.
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SKYNET: The Ultimate Judge?

According to The Intercept and journalist Glenn Greenwald, SKYNET used data captured in the years before bin Laden’s 2011 death to track Pakistani cell phone carriers and analyze bulk data. Who made return trips between Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore, Pakistan? Who did that person call at each destination? How often did they swap phone SIM cards? How many airports did they visit? Were the handsets being swapped from person to person? Zaidan’s movements aroused suspicion that he might be a courier for al-Qaeda’s senior leadership. Then again, he might just be a journalist doing his job.

It seems Zaidan may not have been the only journalist on the 'Kill List’, according to the Snowden leaks and court filings. Zaidan and New York-born journalist Bilal Abdul Kareem jointly sued the CIA, Department of Defense, and other US agencies. Kareem claimed he’d been targeted by drones five times while reporting from Syria and the Middle East. His office and vehicles were struck more than once.

Zaidan’s claim was dismissed in 2018 as he’d moved from Pakistan to Qatar and wasn’t thought to be realistically in fear of death. The appeal for New Yorker Bilal Abdul Kareem was heard in 2019. The US government argued state secrets privilege, essentially saying there was a reasonable danger that disclosing information would expose military matters which, in the interest of US national security, should not be divulged. The judge agreed. Case dismissed.

“Ahmad is a regular journalist from Al Jazeera and because he is Syrian these rumors caused him a lot of trouble. But he kept his head down,” his former lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith told SPYSCAPE. “I haven’t brought another assassination case. At least this one stopped the US from trying to kill poor Bilal.”

The NSA did not respond to SPYSCAPE questions about whether it was still using SKYNET or a variation of the machine-learning program. Al Jazeera’s Ahmad Zaidan has previously denied ‘absolutely’ to The Intercept that he was a member of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood.

SKYNET & The Terminator‍

It may or may not be a coincidence that the NSA has (or had) a secret program named SKYNET that happens to share the name of the super-computer featured in the Hollywood movie The Terminator. In the film, SKYNET perceives humans as a threat that must be neutralized. ​​Unlike The Terminator movie’s rogue SKYNET, the NSA’s SKYNET wasn’t bent on wiping out humanity - at least, not according to Snowden’s leaks.

The US government’s SKYNET machine-learning program did have the power, though, to dictate that certain people were monitored, hunted down, and potentially killed without trial. Should the average person be concerned?

“We are looking towards a future that is already very much present, in which everybody’s metadata signatures are going to have an effect on their credit rating, on how much they may pay for car insurance or health insurance, on their ability to get credit, the amount of attention they get from the police,” Paglen told A History of the World in Spy Objects.

“Again, it was a machine-learning program that is very similar to the kinds of machine-learning systems we now find run by the Googles, Amazons, and the Facebooks of the world. We see the same kinds of problems of classification and the same kinds of problems around due process in particular.”
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