AT&T’s programming language for mass surveillance

While data-mining techniques used for marketing should be viewed with a skewed eye, the fact that AT&T has developed a C language variant called Hancock to mine gigabytes of telephone and Internet records should raise red flags automatically. “…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.” [...] recent revelations that the FBI has been requesting “communities of interest” records from phone companies under the USA PATRIOT Act without a warrant. Where the bureau got the idea that phone companies collect such data has, until now, been a mystery. According to a letter from Verizon to a congressional committee earlier this month, the FBI has been asking Verizon for “community of interest” records on some of its customers out to two generations — i.e., not just the people that communicated with an FBI target, but also those who talked to people who talked to an FBI target.” Yep, let’s spread that net far and wide…here’s hoping AT&T is held accountable in it’s current federal court trial on its secret internet spying rooms in its domestic internet switching facilities for the NSA.