The Hank Show by McKenzie Funk

Author:McKenzie Funk [Funk, McKenzie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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The one exception was LexisNexis.

Away from the glare of Silicon Valley, in confidential briefings for government agencies and clients in corporate America, LexisNexis’s data scientists—veterans of Seisint, most of them, who had been there during the creation of HOle and ECL—touted the superiority of their own social graph, which they termed the Public Data Social Graph: four billion “people relationships” connecting some three hundred million LexIDs inferred from fifty terabytes of records. Lexis had prebuilt algorithms to look for specific signals in the graph, and its proprietary social-network-analysis tool, a spider-chart maker called Relavint, had been available to clients since 2001, when Zuckerberg was still in high school. It had even been part of the January 2003 demo for Vice President Dick Cheney and other national leaders in the White House.

“This [graph] is not built from social-networking sources,” sniffed one LexisNexis executive, “because we are very risk averse.” LexisNexis’s social graph used real-world data—from DMVs, utility bills, past addresses—to better capture real-world relationships. A roommate was a definitive close associate, LexisNexis argued, but a Facebook “friend”—who knows?

Running through the nodes of its graph, LexisNexis could help lenders identify who was more likely to be associated with real-estate fraud: a buyer whose trusted social network overlapped with the seller’s. It could tell a hospital who in the graph would be less likely to be readmitted after an inpatient surgery: someone with a doctor or nurse in their trusted social network.

Hank Asher had never studied Stanley Milgram—he lacked the performative intellectualism that was becoming commonplace in Silicon Valley—and he had never studied social-network analysis. But the social graph was implicit in everything he’d built.

Encoded in his love of shiny objects—F. Lee Bailey, Ken Langone, John Walsh, Jon Sale, Rudy Giuliani—and, equally, in the algorithm for the High Terrorist Factor, was an idea both useful and dangerous: you could judge a person—assign them a score—based on the company they kept, the locations they frequented. In the MATRIX, your proximity to a “dirty” address or phone number, as one Seisint document had put it, was one proxy for your own risk of being a terrorist. In a chain of contacts, a spiderweb of links, the nodes were lifted up or dragged down by the ones around them. You were as good or bad as your network. Get one hop closer to “America’s mayor,” and his reputation could launder your own. Get one hop closer to Mohamed Atta, and you could be deported.

“Your proximity to those nineteen hijackers,” Bill Shrewsbury says, “that was a big part of the Hank Terrorist Factor.” Well before the social graph was clearly visible to all, before most of America was painted Facebook Blue (Hex ID 3b5998), the two old friends had known it was there, even making a joke of terrorist-scoring the strangers they met. Often, when they got into a taxi together, Shrewsbury says, they laughingly sized up its immigrant driver. They imagined his network; they profiled him. “What do you think, Shrew? A 980?” Asher might ask.

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