The Hanged Man's Song

I saw something on TV about Frank Marsh, they said something about Krause.”
    “That’s what I’m talking about,” I said.
    “How are you mixed up in it?”
    “There’s a guy I know only on the Internet. He’s apparently involved in some kind of hassle with Krause. Anyway, he says that Krause has got a rat’s-nest inter-agency intelligence operation going, and one of the things that they’re testing is called Deep Data Correlation. The basic concept was supposed to be that they could look at an ocean of data and figure out from that who might be bad guys. Terrorists.”
    “Is that bad?” The waiter came back with a martini, waited, with me, until Bob nodded. The waiter went away and I continued.
    “Not if that was what was happening. But there are some fundamental problems with that kind of data-mining,” I said. I explained the numbers problem. “So essentially, what they were trying to do is impossible. But —if you come at it from the other end, starting with a name, then going after associated data, you can develop some pretty powerful tools.”
    “Wait a minute,” Bob said. “You’re saying that instead of looking at the data, and finding suspects, they find a suspect, and then mine the data to support the suspicion.”
    “Yeah. Except, of course, that you’ve got to identify a target first. With terrorists, identifying the target is the whole problem. That’s the hard part. If they’d been a private company, say, hired to find techniques that would identify terrorists, they’d have concluded that data-mining was a waste of time. But they’re not in a private company. They’re with the government. So they apparently said to themselves, ‘Well, data-mining won’t work, but we’ve got this great research tool, let’s just check it out on a few targets.’ ”
    “They chose me?” He looked floridly earnest, but not all that surprised.
    “Bob,” I said, “I gotta trust you, I think, but honest to God, we’ve occasionally given each other reason to think that neither one of us might not be . . .”
    I shrugged, and he finished the sentence for me. “. . . as close to God as our mothers might wish.”
    “Exactly,” I said. “So I’m gonna show you something. But if you tie me to it, or mention it to anyone that you heard it from me, I’m gonna shove it up your ass sideways.”
    He smiled. “That’s the kinda deal I understand.” His smilevanished like a turned-off light, and he looked at me over the rim of his martini glass as he finished the drink, his eyes cold as ice. “They won’t hear about you from me; you got my word.”
    I took my laptop off the seat beside me, turned it on, waited until it was up, then called up the file. I turned it toward him and said, “You can page through it with the Page Down key.”
    He started paging through, stopping occasionally to mutter, “Just saw this one on TV . . . Krause is doing this? . . . Jesus, I didn’t know this guy was queer, I was just peeing in the next stall to him . . . Landford Hewes took a half-million out of Mejico Rico? Holy shit, he’s supposed to be Mr. Clean . . . Oh man: Davy Fergusson, he’s a friend of mine and so is Tina, and this says he beats the shit out of her. Look at the mouse on that woman, and the hometown cops bailed him out without a word.”
    He was slack-jawed, fascinated.
    “You gotta think about this,” I said. “This use of their data-mining tool is inevitable. It’s the perfect weapon to use against elected politicians. I mean, I might not care if they find out that I’ve been renting porno videos or getting blow jobs from seventeen-year-old boy hookers in the local park, but a politician would. Imagine what would happen if this capability got into the hands of lobbyists. We’d be at the mercy of any special interest willing to use it.”
    “Umm . . .” he said. He took thirty minutes to work through the file. “If you’re making mental notes, don’t bother,” I said. “I got the whole thing on a CD for you. I’m giving them to you.”
    He looked up. “What for? There’s a lotta horsepower here.”
    “Not for me,” I said. “I’m a painter. Just being around this shit scares me to death. But this DDC stuff scares me, too. I thoughtif you had the information, you could talk to some of the people there . . .” I nodded at the laptop.
    Again, he finished my sentence for me: “. . . and shove it up Krause’s ass sideways?”
    “Something