

AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance (2007) - leokote
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/10/att-invents-pro/

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ComputerGuru
I managed to track down version 2.0.2 of Hancock, circa Nov. 2010. Haven't a
chance to even quickly glance through it, but here's a GitHub mirror for those
so inclined:
[https://github.com/mqudsi/hancock](https://github.com/mqudsi/hancock)

I'm more interested in why it's vanished from the web.

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mjn
> I'm more interested in why it's vanished from the web.

Looks like it might just be corporate bitrot. It was hosted under user
webspace at
[http://www2.research.att.com/~kfisher/hancock/](http://www2.research.att.com/~kfisher/hancock/)
rather than somewhere more durable. When kfisher left AT&T in 2011, her
account & webspace probably got wiped.

She's now a DARPA program manager:
[http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Personnel/Dr__Kathleen_Fis...](http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Personnel/Dr__Kathleen_Fisher.aspx)

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ihsw
> Programs written in Hancock work by analyzing data as it flows into a data
> warehouse. That differentiates the language from traditional data-mining
> applications which tend to look for patterns in static databases.

Seems like Clojure and Storm:

[http://pseudofish.com/storm-a-real-time-hadoop-like-
system-i...](http://pseudofish.com/storm-a-real-time-hadoop-like-system-in-
clojure.html)

[http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-
twitterstorm/](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-twitterstorm/)

[http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Zolodeck](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Zolodeck)

[https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm/wiki/Rationale](https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm/wiki/Rationale)

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HoochTHX
Was not this how Thin-thread was supposed to work?

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mjn
From the manual, a brief explanation of how AT&T uses it (or at least, did
some years ago):

 _Hancock’s stream construct models data that can be viewed as a sequence of
values in a fixed format. Typical examples include records of telephone calls
on a long-distance network, session logs from an Internet service provider,
and billing records from a credit card company. Hancock constructs make it
easy to filter streams to remove unwanted records, to sort streams to improve
access locality and hence performance, to detect user-defined events in
streams, and to execute user-specified code in response to those events._

 _[...]_

 _At AT &T Labs we have a suite of Hancock programs that run daily to
calculate signatures or profiles of AT&T’s long-distance customers. These
signatures are used for fraud detection and marketing. The programs process
roughly nine gigabytes of stream data daily. The most complex application
produces a Hancock map that stores values of 120 bytes for over 300 million
active keys (from a space of 10 billion possible keys). These maps require
roughly seven gigabytes of space on disk._

~~~
superuser2
This sounds like the sort of tool your credit card company would use to freeze
your card if it shows up at POS in different states at too short an interval,
buys gas 10 times in an hour, etc.

Real-time data analysis is useful for surveillance, but there are legitimate
uses as well, credit card fraud being one of them.

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adulau
It seems that the original software
[http://www2.research.att.com/~kfisher/hancock/](http://www2.research.att.com/~kfisher/hancock/)
is no more available. Any recent mirror?

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tachim
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080228035943/http://www.researc...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080228035943/http://www.research.att.com/~kfisher/hancock/)

~~~
eliasmacpherson
Thanks for that link, I was able to download the 1.5MB .ps format of the
manual using it. I was unable to download the 420k .pdf format, it crapped out
after 128k.

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jlgaddis
> ... the FBI has been asking Verizon for "community of interest" records ...
> Verizon, though, doesn’t create those records and couldn’t comply.

Ahem.

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aalvarado
Isn't the programming language C and this; just a tool written in that
language?

~~~
Vivtek
It looks like there are some syntactic extensions, particularly in iteration.

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billwilliams
Seems fun that AT&T took this down

