The Broken Window

“Well, innerCircle knows you bought condoms and KY this afternoon and your husband was on the six-fifteen E train home. It knows you’ve got the evening free because your son’s at the Mets game and your daughter’s buying clothes at The Gap in the Village. It knows you put on cable-TV porn at seven-eighteen. And that you order some nice tasty postcoital take-out Chinese at quarter to ten. That information is all there.

“Oh, SSD knows if your children are maladjusted in school and when to send you direct-mail flyers about tutors and child-counseling services. If your husband is having trouble in the bedroom and when to send him discreet flyers about erectile dysfunction cures. When your family history, buying patterns and absences from work put you in a presuicidal profile-”

“But that’s good. So a counselor can help you.”

Geddes gave a cold laugh. “Wrong. Because counseling potential suicide victims isn’t profitable. SSD sends the name to local funeral homes and grief counselors-who could snag all of the family as customers, not just a single depressed person after he shoots himself. And, by the way, that was a very lucrative venture.”

Sachs was shocked.

“Did you hear about ‘tethering’?”

“No.”

“SSD has defined a network based just on you. Call it ‘Detective Sachs World.’ You’re the hub and the spokes go to your partners, spouses, parents, neighbors, coworkers, anybody it might help SSD to know about and profit from that knowledge. Everybody who has any connection is ‘tethered’ to you. And each one of them is his or her own hub, and there are dozens of people tethered to them.”

Another thought and his eyes flashed. “You know about metadata?”

“What’s that?”

“Data about data. Every document that’s created by or stored on a computer-letters, files, reports, legal briefs, spreadsheets, Websites, emails, grocery lists-is loaded with hidden data. Who created it, where it’s been sent, all the changes that have been made to it and who made them and when-all recorded there, second by second. You write a memo to your boss and for a joke you start out with ‘Dear Stupid Prick,’ then delete it and write it correctly. Well, the ‘stupid prick’ part is still in there.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh, yes. The disk size of a typical word-processing report is much larger than the text in the document itself. What’s the rest? Metadata. The Watchtower database-management program has special bots-software robots-that do nothing but find and store metadata from every document it collects. We called it the Shadow Department, because metadata’s like a shadow of the main data-and it’s usually much more revealing.”

Shadow, sixteens, pens, closets…This was a whole new world to Amelia Sachs.

Geddes enjoyed having a receptive audience. He leaned forward. “You know that SSD has an education division?”

She thought back to the chart in the brochure that Mel Cooper had downloaded. “Yes. EduServe.”

“But Sterling didn’t tell you about it, did he?”

“No.”

“Because he doesn’t like to let on that its main function is to collect everything it possibly can about children. Starting with kindergarten. What they buy, what they watch, what computer sites they go to, what their grades are, medical records from school…And that’s very, very valuable information for retailers. But you ask me, what’s scarier about EduServe is that school boards can come to SSD and run predictive software on their students and then gear educational programs to them-in terms of what’s best for the community-or society, if you want to be Orwellian about it. Given Billy’s background, we think he should go into skilled labor. Suzy should be a doctor but only in public health… Control the children and you control the future. Another element of Adolf Hitler’s philosophy, by the way.” He laughed. “Okay, no more lecturing…But you see why I couldn’t stomach it anymore?”

But then Geddes frowned. “Just thinking about your situation-we had an incident once at SSD. Years ago. Before the company came to New York. There was a death. Probably just a coincidence. But…”

“No, tell me.”

“In the early days we farmed out a lot of the actual data-collection part of the business to scroungers.”

“To what?”

“Companies or individuals who procure data. A strange breed. They’re sort of like old-time wildcatters-prospectors, you could say. See, data have this weird allure. You can get addicted to the hunt. You can never find enough. However much they collect, they want more. And these guys are always looking for new ways to collect it. They’re competitive, ruthless. That’s how Sean Cassel started in the business. He was a data scrounger.