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AT&T Invents Surveillance Programming Language
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Oct 30, 2007 10:45 AM
from the code-breathing-on-the-other-end-of-your-phone dept.
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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Firehose:AT&T Invents Surveillance Programming Language by Anonymous Coward
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Hancock.. worst name ever. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hancock.. worst name ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hancock.. worst name ever. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You're almost right (Score:5, Funny)
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John Hancock (Score:4, Interesting)
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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Re:John Hancock (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Heard near Massachusetts... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Hey, what's that whirring sound?"
"It's the founding father [wikipedia.org] this programming language is named after...spinning in his grave..."
Variations (Score:5, Funny)
We are already working on:
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Finally, the Mozilla Foundation has announced a datamining extension for it's popular Web browser called Firecock.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't forget:
Ummm.... (Score:5, Informative)
Hancock source code (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.research.att.com/~kfisher/hancock/ [att.com]
Conspiracy!
Don't worry! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you haven't done anything wrong, then you have nowhere to hide!
Whoops - I mean nothing. Nothing to hide.
Hello world (Score:5, Funny)
not a new language (Score:5, Informative)
*AFTER* 9-11? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Hello World in Surveillance Language (Score:3, Insightful)
Never has that program name been so fitting.
Did anyone read up on the language? (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
AT&T may not have invented it entirely.... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you look here [findlaw.com] 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 [lexisnexis.com] 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.
!constitution (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Ironic Name (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That's the last thing we need! (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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