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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."
What, was Palmdong taken?
"Hey, what's that whirring sound?"
"It's the founding father this programming language is named after...spinning in his grave..."
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Monitoring communities of interest is no doubt something of interest there..
We are already working on:
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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...
Even more ironic that someone so focused on the rights in the Constitution would mistake it for the Declaration of Independence.
If you haven't done anything wrong, then you have nowhere to hide!
Whoops - I mean nothing. Nothing to hide.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
update Users set Status = 'suspicious' where Username in (SELECT Username, ipAddress, MissleAddress from IncomingCalls ic, OutgoinCalls oc where Volume = 'whispering' and Username not in (select Username from RepublicanDonors));
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
less inflamitory, later it states:
It seems to have been created with slightly better intent (fraud detection, as well as, unfortunately, marketing - your phone company is spyware!).
A tool may not necessarily be bad, but it can have more bad uses than good, and may be been intended for rathern malevolent purposes. The rack comes to mind (although this language certainly isn't in that league).
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
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.
Never has that program name been so fitting.
Jokes aside, is this related to John Hancock?
John Hancock was an American Revolutionary, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He signed it as largely and boldly as possible, much larger than any of the other signatures on that document, so that the King of England would have NO trouble identifying him in the face of his (and his compatriots) clear act of treason. His name is now synonymous with autograph or signature, as in, "Can I have your John Hancock here, please?"
If the AT&T technical staff called their data mining "language" Hancock, it may have been a poetic choice: AT&T is signaling their actions, and/or the actions of the government agents, are akin to treasonous. Yes, the charge of 'treason' is nearly moot in modern US law, but the fact remains that any sensible reading of the Constitution would not indicate any authority for what the government is doing with our communications.
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When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
Gee, can you conspiracy theorists take a break for a second and consider that, just perhaps, this was written for commercial telecom management, marketing and fraud detection purposes? It was written and in the public domain before 9-11.
The US Government uses Linux, so are we to presume that Linus Torvalds is an agent of George Bush and the broad conspiracy to spy on you?
If you look here and research the case a bit, you'll find that a Maryland company may have actually been more responsible for ATT's abilities than ATT would like to admit. That company is now defunct, unfortunately, and so it's now safe for ATT to pretend that they've done work in the area without answering to more law suits.
It was a very technically challenging job. We helped to index records for these guys until mid-2005. We did it in effectively O(n) time - the cool factor was higher than the say-nothing factor.
And yes - I know that academia will claim that it's not possible, that data correlation must be O(n^2). For the decade that we did it, we were sure glad that academia held to that position.
Enough reminiscing.
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!
But bear in mind, this programming language was invented by people who are so insecure that they're willing to shred the Fourth Amendment to try and assuage their fear of terrorists. I think C=> might be more accurate.
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.