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AT&T Invents Surveillance Programming Language

Posted by Zonk on from the code-breathing-on-the-other-end-of-your-phone dept.

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."

4 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. !constitution by The+Iso · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence.

    --
    "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
  2. Ummm.... by Otter · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  3. not a new language by roman_mir · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    You can't handle the truth.
  4. Did anyone read up on the language? by Weslee · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.