The Hank show How a house-painting, drug-running DEA informant built the machine that rules our lives

Human memory may be finite but the networks, algorithms, and data fusion that keep all of our records online and searchable are infinite. Every bad decision, mistake, problem, and unfortunate circumstance is forever remembered by machinery built largely by a manic but gifted programmer named Hank Asher. Funk presents the history of data gathering, digital surveillance, and supercomputers largely through Asher's life story, which included stints running drugs and working with the CIA. Asher purportedly built his programming machine to catch bad guys, but its development was never really up for debate, nor open to a vote by the people it so easily tracks and categorizes. This is an account of how the lives of everyday Americans became transparent to the government, insurance companies, banks, fraudsters, and others. Funk pulls back the curtain on the opaque process of digital tracking, which most people do not want, but is nonetheless our reality. Excellent storytelling and impeccable research temper the paranoia that knowledge of Asher's machines might provoke.

Award-winning journalist Funk's (Windfall) latest book is part biography and part "big data" history told through the adult life of Hank Asher (1951--2013). Big data is defined as large sets of information that can be computationally searched and analyzed to reveal patterns, trends, and associations. Law enforcement, governments, and private businesses use it to make policy decisions, which has raised privacy concerns. In the 1970s, Asher was a house painter and drug runner, who, after run-ins with law enforcement, became an informant for the DEA. By the 1980s, Asher rethought his career path and became interested in how he could make money using computers to analyze data. The author does not make judgments about Asher or the use of big data, but he does describe how it has evolved and become profitable for many. Funk has obviously done his research; there are 249 endnotes, grouped by chapter, at the end of the book. VERDICT A timely book that reads like a Hunter S. Thompson adventure. A recommended purchase for libraries with computer science, public policy, or current events collections.--John Napp

A biography of the influential yet largely unknown "father of data fusion." Journalist Funk, author of Windfall, diligently exposes the legacy of Hank Asher (1951-2013), an entrepreneur who built an advanced data-processing empire from the ground up. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with colleagues, friends, and family members, the author reveals Asher's origin story. Funk describes his "profane but charming" demeanor as similar to that of Donald Trump, and he chronicles Asher's drug-running operation in the Caribbean. For the people who interacted with him, there was "little middle ground"--he was either loved or hated. Funk ably tracks the inception and rise of Asher's "identity machines" from the 1980s, as he built military-grade supercomputers from consumer PCs. In the 1990s, one of Asher's companies, Database Technologies, was involved in the creation of an exclusionary database that purged voter registration rolls and skewed the 2000 presidential election. Asher capitalized on the exploding amounts of digital data during the great internet boom; after 9/11, he retooled his company, Seisint, to identify possible violent extremists living in the U.S. From his massive mansion in Boca Raton, Florida, he promoted his database, known as the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX), which represented the beginning of an ominous new era of analytics targeting a citizen's propensity for criminality. Federal and state agencies, newly invigorated by the war on terrorism, latched on to the potential of the MATRIX technology, regardless of its real-world likelihood to be exploited as "predictive policing." Asher, who died at 61 after dwindling many of his assets, survives today through the legacy of his tech wizardry, which echoes through our current systems of investigative policing and numerous other data networks. Readers concerned with the modern dismantling of personal privacy and rampant data-gathering will be riveted by this meticulous report. A deeply unsettling exposé of an exploitative tech genius. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.