PicoBlog

The Hank Show has been widely reviewed, and it is very good, but the reviewers by and large don’t seem to get it. It works as an adventure story, sort of, about the colorful figure of Hank Asher, but the real meat here is how his company fits into the intrigues of the 1990s and 2000s, and the emerging big data economy.

The Miami Vice-style beginning to the story is his brief time running weed and coke to South Florida via the Bahamas, Belize, and Oklahoma, for which he was pursued by the FDLE, and later became a DEA informant. But there are important details from before that. Funk writes that Asher’s parents were close to the Daley machine in Chicago, and he got to meet Queen Elizabeth at one point due to the connection. His parents were Jewish but not observant, and he grew up in Indiana.

The kernel of truth to the LaRouche organization’s allegations about the British Crown being involved in drug trafficking is this: the British watch the Caribbean drug trade, much of it ran through Commonwealth countries, and the Israelis were involved. That’s relevant because the closer you get to the Royal Family, the more Israeli things seem to be—which is, among other things, the best case for either the Labor Party or the Jacobite succession. The case for the British perspective here is that there aren’t loads of young people in the UK dying of fentanyl overdoses, like we’ve gotten from the Israelis and Chinese working with the Mexican cartels. Funk briefly hints at a connection between Asher and Iran-Contra but leaves that unpursued. It’s also probably worth stating that LexisNexis is a British company, the dominant player in this space, which bought one of Asher’s databases.

A leitmotif of Funk’s portrayal of Asher is that his post-drug-running career, eagerly offering his services to law enforcement, was him trying to make good. I have no reason to doubt this as such—Funk knows his subject very well, and Asher himself may have seen it that way, with people’s skepticism of his past weighing on him. But I think there are reasons to consider it a bit more complicated than that. He sold his first Florida business—condo painting—to South Africans, and the details of the deal here are a little sketchy: “He only got the $600,000 down payment before the new owners ran the company into the ground.”

There is a bit of history of the development of high-speed computing, and some key debates involving Danny Hillis and some others, but it’s not clear that this has any real relationship to what Asher is doing. The intelligence agencies in Washington are supposedly interested in what Hillis, Brewster Kahle and some others are up to. Asher’s first company, User Lovable, by contrast, was a sort of copy of what was being built by the Thinking Machines Corporation, which he sells to Urschel Laboratories.

Thereafter, mostly what Asher does is amass huge pools of data and sell them off as companies, one by one, the first being Database Technologies in 1992. The first big tranche of public data they consume is the State of Florida’s Motor Vehicle Records, in about 1992. The use case for this was insurers wanting to cut claims payouts, and both Asher and the data broker helping procure the MVRs had a history in the drug trade, the latter having done time in prison. They were paid directly by some of the insurance companies to procure these records. This is a good example of the double-edged sword of transparency:

The state of Florida had always been a silent protagonist in Asher’s ventures. Its condo towers helped make his first fortune, its cocaine habit its second. Now, with Barnett at his side, he would try to build his their and greatest fortune atop the Sunshine State’s pioneering tradition of open government.

So the second huge volume of data they asked for was from DMVs, and under the open record laws, the state had to hand them over. Asher collected everything, from professional licensing records, to corporate records, to marriage and divorce records, to handicap stickers, with two terabytes’ worth in 1994—quite a lot for the time. He is said to have bought change-of-address records secondhand that originated with the USPS, as well as acquiring credit headers. He was expanding into different states. This tool was AutoTrack, and Boca’s police department was the first customer, and several top-level newspapers subscribed.

There are a few details in here that suggest the involvement of the Israelis and other national security risks, one is a business partner’s observation that he was sitting with “Ross Perot’s boys.” Ross Perot’s presidential runs were always very Israeli, they supported him because George H.W. Bush had more principle on the issue than his son, and they weren’t about to let Pat Buchanan have a hearing. And there’s this:

“You got any idea what that is?” Asher asked. Legette said he didn’t. “That’s every DEA agent in Broward County,” Asher said. The names could well have belonged to undercover agents. The address the agency had used to register the vehicles—the local DEA office—had given them away. Legette didn’t imagine Asher planned to do anything with the information, but it suddenly scared him that Asher had the power to call it up.

This is, in other words, a former drug runner being able to identify DEA assets in the field, while several DEA field offices are subscribing to AutoTrack. Probably not so good! This recursiveness creates a lot of confusion and potential for corruption.

So of course a bunch of crooked people get interested in this. Ken Langone buys in, and it gets pitched to the Trump Taj Mahal’s head of security, and they become the data supplier to US Search, felicitously described as “founded by a reformed car thief whose previous internet venture had faltered after most of his web designers, members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, committed ritual suicide.” Someone higher up in the DEA gets wind of Asher’s past, and he gets kicked out of the company. Thereafter, it’s used by Florida authorities to purge voter rolls, an idea of George Bruder, in what looks like a very sweet deal offered by the state of Florida. Because Florida is run like a strip club pretending to be a state, this goes badly, and there are tons of errors in the data, resulting in the disenfranchisement of thousands. Regardless of where you stand on voting rights for felons, when the management of determining eligibility is done by a company this apparently mobbed-up, it’s not really an ideological question.

The second company Asher founded is Seisint, in 1999, working closely with Accenture, and gets heavily used by DHS agencies after 9/11, before being sold to Reed-Elsevier, the parent company of LexisNexis. As soon as the planes hit the towers, Asher is on the phone offering his services for free to law enforcement agencies. Its search product went live two months earlier, on July 25. He hires the former FDLE agent “who’d once hid in the bushes outside the smugglers’ ranch in Okeechobee County, waiting for Asher and his Aerostar’s barrel rolls—the man who could have sent him to prison but didn’t.” Our erstwhile coke runner invents a “High Terrorist Factor” quotient for tracking terrorists. A crucial point here: “Asher admitted that his terrorist algorithm wasn’t just inspired by how companies profiled their customers—it was itself a rewrite of a consumer algorithm.” This product used Radio Shack’s customer lists, UPS tracking data, Blockbuster records, AOL forum data, and credit card data, which Asher was apparently able to purchase. His product delivered, three days after 9/11, a list of 1,200 individuals with high terrorist scores, almost all of which were false positives, or already under investigation.

But Asher had the right friends. He hired a friend of Rudy Giuliani, and cut Giuliani’s firm in on the new company, which served as a kind of social proof. They started working closely with the new DHS, an agency whose longtime head was the noted Israeli dual loyalist Michael Chertoff, who now sells Israeli tech to the feds.

Funk is clear that there’s an inside-outside aspect to some of this tech. The outside ring is a lot of these highly Israeli data broker firms working with the punisher-tattoo agencies, and then there are the more sophisticated, classified systems at CIA and NSA. This dynamic is why you should never trust a pro-Israel influencer’s opinion about either of those agencies. What they’re trying to do is reverse the insider-outsider thing, so that the Israelis take over the U.S. government. The Israelis tend to sell tech to networks of states via DHS, in a dynamic quite similar to their influence over the Republican Attorneys General Association, and that’s what Asher’s MATRIX project was. There is apparently a moment in here in which future CIA director John Brennan sits down to dinner with Asher.

Asher is invited to the White House along with Jeb Bush and Tim Moore, and has a meeting with Robert Mueller and Dick Cheney. And, of course, “Giuliani still fielded phone calls from the media on Asher’s behalf. ‘America’s mayor’ neglected to mention his firm’s multimillion-dollar contract with Seisint.”

This is more or less the interesting detail about the governmental relationships of Asher’s companies. The rest of the book is devoted to looking at how they relate to competitors and other ways this kind of data mining, management and sale works. Much of Seisint’s business was taken over by Palantir, which is more elegant than Asher’s products: all platform, no database, Funk calls it the “kayak.com of counterterrorism.”

There have been lots of books written about the relationship between the history of banking and the history of information management and intelligence. There’s nothing inherently new about the concept. The Knights Templar functioned as a banking institution and intelligence network, for instance, and there are many equivalents from Jewish history too. What’s new is the amount of data available on individuals and how widely it’s spread. The modern version of this is credit bureaus, which are involved in this space in a big way, the oldest and biggest being Equifax—which was, for a time, involved in the direct marketing business. So they didn’t just collect data on individuals, they sold it.

It’s common to imagine the tech economy as being characterized by a kind of artfulness, that design, elegance, and so forth are important. But these are actually businesses of volume—quantity over quality. By nature these sorts of databases blur the lines between a lot of things: actuarial science, risk management, law enforcement, and marketing. “The logic of consumer analytics was the logic of social determinants was the logic of predictive policing was the logic of now much of America for most of two decades, the logic of almost everything Hank Asher ever built: people couldn’t be trusted to tell you who they were or what they wanted—but computers could be,” is how Funk puts it. COVID contact-tracing, your credit score, your health insurance premiums, and your likeliness to be targeted by DHS law enforcement agencies are determined largely by the same large data brokers and data-processing firms.

It’s more or less the fault of big tech that they have access to most of it. The role of Facebook opening up its APIs can’t really be overstated. One of my rules, which has served me well, is never to take an online personality quiz. These are how Cambridge Analytica gained so much information on voters. The reason you should never do an online personality quiz is you are, without a doubt, giving information about yourself to the most annoying people on planet Earth: behavioral scientists.

So many devious companies were built with Facebook APIs or by ripping off Facebook data, including Spokeo, which Hank Asher wanted his final company to take over. The Geofeedia debacle is covered in here, which was using Facebook data to target activists on behalf of law enforcement. There’s a weird recursive aspect here too: Facebook’s own security was a Geofeedia customer when they cut off its API access.

This has reduced much DHS law enforcement activity to the functional equivalent of Internet stalking. An incident of ICE agents “catfishing young moms on Facebook” is mentioned. Some of the dishonesties of Democratic governors, like Jay Inslee, sharing public data with ICE while claiming to be a sanctuary state, are covered as well. ICE developed, in its “Extreme Vetting Initiative,” a version of Asher’s “High Terrorist Factor reborn.” Again, most of the Trump people planning these initiatives were highly Israeli and not very smart, so they just hand this shit over. These exact same means and exact same data brokers were being used for COVID contact-tracing as well. These are not fundamentally different issues, in other words, they have to do with the political economy of information.

This is a fabulous book, highly recommended, but I’ll close with a few reflections that don’t touch directly on the material.

I think these are all fairly defensible propositions and I’d be willing to argue them with anyone.

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