A lot of people out there may think that a programming language is a programming language and that they all have the capabilities of doing the same things.  While that is true to an extent, AT&T decided to really change this paradigm by creating a programming language strictly for mass surveillance.  You’ll probably not want to assume that this is a flawed language as well, since it was developed from the same group that developed C.  As I think more and more about it, with the robustness of C and the idea of mass surveillance, something like this does strike some concerns…

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.

An AT&T research paper published in 2001 and unearthed today by Andrew Appel at Freedom to Tinker shows how the phone company uses Hancock-coded software to crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls “communities of interest” — i.e., calling circles that show who is talking to whom.

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.”[more]

Tags: Privacy