Some call Edward Snowden a hero, others a traitor, but in his biggest revelation to date we find out that the last straw, the one that broke the camel's back, so to speak, which made him go public with sensitive classified information obtained from NSA databases, then flee the country as a fugitive from the United States, was a project called "MonsterMind."
MonsterMind is an automated cyber weapon, which would monitor everything on the internet and decide, without a human brain behind it, to wage war. This cyber weapon, referred to as a "creature" by Popular Science, is housed in Utah "perched atop the data flows into the National Security Agency's Mission Data Repository."
According to Snowden, MonsterMind is not only dangerous, tremendously powerful, but is easily fooled.
The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology.
Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That's a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “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?”
We have seen people replaced with robotic creations, jobs lost to automation, the mixing of man with machine, automated systems going haywire over a short circuit, AI systems with the ability to "learn," and much more in this world where the rise of the machines is considered technological advancements, but do we really want a machine, with no human decision making process, no human brain behind it, no emotion or ethics, deciding to start a war, perhaps with countries that are nuclear powers themselves?
One has to ask themselves.... what could go wrong? The answer to that should terrify every human being on the planet."