Security: AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance; dynamic data mining

AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance
Wired News (10/29/07) Singel, Ryan

AT&T researchers have developed Hancock, a C language-based programming language designed to mine the company's telephone and internet records for surveillance data. A recently discovered AT&T research paper published in 2001 shows how the phone company uses Hancock-based software to process tens of millions of long distance phone records to create "communities of interest," or calling circles that show who people are talking to. Hancock was developed in the late 1990s to develop marketing leads and as a security tool to see if new customers called the same numbers as previously disconnected fraudsters, which the research paper called "guilt by association." Hancock-based programs work by analyzing data as it enters a data warehouse, a significant difference from traditional data-mining tools that tend to look for patterns in static databases. A 2004 paper published in ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems demonstrates how Hancock can sort through calling card records, long distance calls, IP addresses and Internet traffic dumps, and even track the movement of a cell phone as it switches between signal towers.
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