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."

Comments

Hancock.. worst name ever.

[EveryNickIsTaken]

What, was Palmdong taken?

Re:Hancock.. worst name ever.

[ByOhTek]

No, they thought Orwell would be too obvious.

Re:Hancock.. worst name ever.

[djasbestos]

Eh, it looks close enough to C that it can, in the vein of C++ and C#, be referred to as C====>

Variations

[WED Fan]

We are already working on:

• Hancock++ - Because a single + was not enough
• H# - .NET version of the language
• GNU/Hancock - Returns the results as an open source document and publishes it to the freakin' world
• GoogleHancock - Datamines Chinese citizens and returns the results to party headquarters and the People's 9mm Ammunition Billing System
• HancockScript - Great for client side mining

Re:Variations

[morgan_greywolf]

Don't forget JCock - the J2EE version being promoted by IBM and Sun. IBM has also announced a version of WebSphere optimized for JCock and middleware called CockSphere.

Finally, the Mozilla Foundation has announced a datamining extension for it's popular Web browser called Firecock.

!constitution

[The Iso]

Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence.

Ummm....

[Otter]

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.

Re:Ironic Name

[jhsiao]

Even more ironic that someone so focused on the rights in the Constitution would mistake it for the Declaration of Independence.

Don't worry!

[Peter Trepan]

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

Whoops - I mean nothing. Nothing to hide.

Hello world

[$RANDOMLUSER]

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));

not a new language

[roman_mir]

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.

Re:That's the last thing we need!

[ByOhTek]

While normally I'd quite agree with you, straight from the article (and not Zonk), right at the start:

From the company that brought you the C programming language comes Hancock, a C variant developed by AT&T researchers to mine gigabytes of the company's telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes.

less inflamitory, later it states:

The system was built in the late 1990s to develop marketing leads, and as a security tool to see if new customers called the same numbers as previously cut-off fraudsters -- something the paper refers to as "guilt by association."

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).

John Hancock

[Speare]

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.

Re:John Hancock

[IndustrialComplex]

Actually, I would think that by calling it Hancock, they are referring to the fact that people monitored are supplying their own Hancock simply through their actions.

In other words, there would be no doubt as to who was behind the words coming from the machines. An involuntary Hancock as it were.

Did anyone read up on the language?

[Weslee]

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.

Hancock Written Before 2001

[squidguy]

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?

You're almost right

[roystgnr]

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.