AT&T Invents Surveillance Programming Language

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @02:45AM 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."

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Re:Hancock.. worst name ever. by ByOhTek · 2007-10-30 02:50 · Score: 5, Insightful

No, they thought Orwell would be too obvious.

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Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Don't worry! by Peter+Trepan · 2007-10-30 03:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

If you haven't done anything wrong, then you have nowhere to hide!

Whoops - I mean nothing. Nothing to hide.

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Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.