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AT&T Invents Surveillance Programming Language
An anonymous reader writes "AT&T has long been associated with advances in the programming arts as well as communications. They've recently brought those disciplines together to create a powerful datamining language called Hancock. Hancock is a C variant developed to mine gigabytes of the company's telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes. 'The manual for the language includes a Hello World variant that shows you how to write a program that will parse logs of IP addresses and record them into permanent hashes. The program for parsing millions of records as they flow into permanent data farms sounds oddly close to the data mining the NSA performed after 9/11 to find targets for its warrantless spying on American citizens calls and emails."
Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
This is at least a decade old, was published in 2000 (I like the breathless "unearthed today", like it was some sort of secret -- the original Hancock paper is listed as having 29 cites) and has rather obvious applications for marketing, billing and security. The "oddly close to the data mining the NSA performed after 9/11" seems a bit excessive.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
this is a collection of libraries and some domain specific keywords/structures, but to say that this is a new language is a stretch of imagination.
You can't handle the truth.
I think we've been seeing a trickling of stories and evidence showing that Bush/Cheney/Addington were ALREADY doing many 'questionable' things prior to 9-11. At the speed of government, doesn't it make you ask how they were able to cobble together the DHS?! And if I recall, some of the surveillance activities declined by Qwest were requested prior to 9-11.
Bottom line? 9-11 is irrelevant to their intent... 9-11 helped provide some justification in the eyes of some, but the evidence shows that this stuff has been planned WELL in advance of 9-11 and this is not a reaction or over-reaction.
Its basically just C with some generic structures thrown on top of it.
Also, it was created in 2000.
Its intent, as some have mentioned, was marketing.
Basically it does what Google Analytics or WebTrends does for the web.
It actually seems like a nice language, for those who want to quickly run through gigs of data.
I see nothing evil about the language itself.
It, like C, perl, PHP, or any other language you chose to use - Can be used for whatever purpose the programmer chooses.
Its intent was marketing, and almost every company in existence wants to know more about their customers.
"oddly close to the data mining the NSA performed BEFORE 9/11"
Additionally, one can easily download the Hancock source code (for non-commercial use), manuals, and various research papers here:
http://www.research.att.com/~kfisher/hancock/
Conspiracy!
Oh, good god.
./.
Either you must be new to this whole inter-tubes thing, or you're a right-wing apologist who's been assigned to
How about you go through the huge mass of stories reference here on Slashdot alone before whining about what everyone else is up to speed on, that you personally have been ignoring all this time. That link points to a large number of articles that touch on the subject (and several more showing that sadly, the US isn't the only government attempting to bloom into full-blown fascism using any possible excuse).
Or, if you just want a very simple primer to get you started, how about these three, related to the original exposure of the ILLEGAL NSA wiretap program, additional evidence supporting the allegations, and the federal circuit ruling clearly declaring it to be ILLEGAL:
The AT&T Whistleblower's Evidence
Wired Releases Full Text of AT&T NSA Document
Judge Rules NSA Wiretapping Unconstitutional
This isn't FUD. This is the real deal smoking gun. The only conspiracy here is the one this administration is engaged in to circumvent any and all legal protections intended to, for very good reason, explicitly limit the power of the executive to do exactly what they're doing.