Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

In order to understand AT&Ts complicity in the recent surveillance with out warrants scandal you might look to ‘The Hacker Crackdown, Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier’.

AT&T was an early victim of crackers and one of the first companies building defenses. AT&T being a very old school company was a little unclear on the concept and has certainly gone above and beyond the call of duty in fighting crackers. One of the methods developed to deal with phone crackers was a large scale program to track crackers and their associates and to look for people calling the same circle of friends a someone previously banned from the AT&T network.

A brilliant idea, Hancock is implemented in C. Not only does is provide for building the graph of connections but it allows you to see how the graph changes over time. It sounds promising yet I could find no published case studies showing its effectiveness. Instead of worrying about handling the large volume of data you can concentrate on what you wish to pull out of the data.

Then of course there are the legal and social aspects of all this data mining. Was AT&T legally collecting data for the government? What is the government doing with the data and with people it finds closely connected to terrorists? Does the software work? Are we ruining innocent people’s lives or are we saving innocents from terrorists? There is much yet that needs to come to light about this program. The government is using it as a ‘guilt by association’ program.

More information:
FBI data mining reached beyond initial targets
AT&T Invents Surveillance Programming Language ( Slashdot )
AT&T Invents Surveillance Programming Language ( Wired )
Communities of Interest, (pdf)
Hancock: A Language for Processing Very Large Scale Data
Method of inferring behavioral characteristics based on a large volume of data
Source Code and binaries for Hancock
Manual for Hancock( pdf )
The Hacker Crackdown, Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

See also:
Software recognizes short and long term anxiety in people
Big brother arrives via Comcast 24 years late