New NSA Autonomous Weapons System Intercepts Threats and Retaliates Automatically

[Bill USA]

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/new-nsa-autonomous-weapons-system-intercepts-threats-and-retaliates-automatically_08132014

“MonsterMind.”

They could just as easily have called it Skynet, the computer network of Terminator franchise fame that eventually led to the destruction of the modern world.

Though not as advanced just yet, MonsterMind is a new autonomous cyber weapons system developed by the National Security Agency and according to Edward Snowden is capable of not only intercepting every single digital communication within the United States, but it can automatically detect and launch retaliatory strikes without any human involvement if a threat has been identified.


[div class="excerpt" style="background:#ffddee;"]During the interview Snowden explained a previously unrevealed NSA cyber weapon called “MonsterMind,” which has the capability to detect incoming cyber attacks and retaliate automatically without any human supervision. Such a program has dangerous global reactionary implications, according to Snowden, who said such cyber-attacks are often routed through computers inside innocent and unsuspecting third-party countries.

“These attacks can be spoofed,” Snowden said. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”

Beyond the possibility of mutually assured cyber-destruction, Snowden explained that for the weapon to work, the signals intelligence agency would have to compromise the privacy of “virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the U.S.”

“The argument is that the only way we can identify these malicious traffic flows and respond to them is if we’re analyzing all traffic flows,” Snowden said. ”And if we’re analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.”

The military is actively working to build robotic soldiers and pilots that, like “MonsterMind,” would be capable of making autonomous decisions.
(more)

[CincyDem]

1. Hellooooo...telephone call for Skynet. Skynet ? Anyone ? Skynet? n/t

[Bill USA]

2. here's the actual Wired article/interview of Snowden by James BAmford - shoulda looked 4 this first!

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/nsa-monstermind-cyberwarfare/

Although details of the program are scant, Snowden tells WIRED in an extensive interview with James Bamford that algorithms would scour massive repositories of metadata and analyze it to differentiate normal network traffic from anomalous or malicious traffic. Armed with this knowledge, the NSA could instantly and autonomously identify, and block, a foreign threat.

Cryptographer Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, says if the NSA knows how a malicious algorithm generates certain attacks, this activity may produce patterns of metadata that can be spotted.

“An individual record of an individual flow only tells you so much, but more revealing might be patterns of flows that are indicative of an attack,” he says. “If you have hundreds or thousand of flows starting up from a particular place and targeted to a particular machine, this might indicate you’re under attack. That’s how intrusion detection and anomaly-detection systems generally work. If you have intelligence about the attack tools of your adversary, you may be able to match specific patterns to specific tools that are being used to attack.”

Think of it as a digital version of the Star Wars initiative President Reagan proposed in the 1980s, which in theory would have shot down any incoming nuclear missiles. In the same way, MonsterMind could identify a distributed denial of service attack lobbed against US banking systems or a malicious worm sent to cripple airline and railway systems and stop—that is, defuse or kill— it before it did any harm.
(more)