AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance

"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'..."

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