00:00:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Welcome everybody. It’s the 23rd of October 2023, but you’re listening to this episode of Citizen D podcast on the 15th of November same year.

With us today is Mackenzie Funk, an award-winning investigative journalist whose second book, and it’s a mouthful, “The Hank Show how a house painting drug running DEA informant built the machine that rules our lives”, tells a story about, well, I’m just going to say it, it basically describes the birth of surveillance capitalism.

Hello, Mack. Welcome to the show. Would you say the description is accurate?

00:00:44 Mackenzie Funk

Yes, you’re right. That is a mouthful. I never had an easy way to explain what the book was about except that it was… Yes, it was the person who we’ve all never heard of, who started so much of this world we now live in.

00:01:01 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And before we start with the book, so the first question I’d like to ask is before this… You were so you’re an award-winning investigative journalist and you focused mostly, or you focused mostly on environmental stories, global warming and stuff like that. What made you pick the the Hank Asher story?

00:01:21 Mackenzie Funk

I think, as crazy as it sounds, that surveillance and climate change are very similar in some ways, especially to an audience that doesn’t know very much about either one.

They can seem very dense and very boring at first and so you need to find a way to tell a story that is not just about the facts of it. So, in the case of climate change, it was just about here’s the science. And so, for many years before, I was working on my climate change.

You would have these arguments in the United States between the people who believed in the science and the people who did not, and it was not a very good way to win the argument, just to be right, just to just to have the scientists have the right facts.

And so, I was trying to find a way with the climate change book to tell a story that would maybe show the stakes show why people should care.

When it came to surveillance, that was my same technique as I focused on a person because I figured even if you’re not interested in privacy or surveillance, you might be interested in this person. But the second thing is that they’re both these big systems and the reason they that some people find them hard to… they find them boring or hard to understand is because they’re it’s so complex.

But there are these big systems that seem to fall the heaviest on the people who are poorest among us and the most vulnerable. It’s becoming more obvious with both climate change and privacy that the poorest people in the world, the poorest people in each of our countries, those are the people who are bearing the brunt of this and that there can even be winners in these new economies from climate change and from surveillance capitalism.

And those winners are not the poorest, they’re the usual winners in our societies, and I find both of these both climate change and our lack of privacy to be accelerating some of the worst inequities in society.

00:03:25 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Before we jump into that, I saved this part the last part of the show. But first let’s talk about the book.  So how did you find this guy? Hank Asher, the guy who… I’ll let you tell the story or a brief recap, but this was…

Reading your book this was the first time I heard about it and I am working in the field of, you know, digital privacy and digital activism for the last fifteen to twenty years

00:03:56 Mackenzie Funk

Yeah, I would not say that I was by any means a privacy expert when I started this, but I certainly paid attention from reporting abroad, especially in in places like China and Russia, I was very careful about… I tried to understand where my information is going and who will see it and even after the Snowden revelations in the United States, I became a little careful about even what my own government was looking at.

And I had never heard of Hank Asher. His name first came up when my… it’s a complex story, but a magazine approached me. An editor I knew, and he said I have a story for you.

And the story was about this group of people who were trying to stop child predators as they called them, and they were using this software built by a person named Hank Asher, who they described on their website as the father of data fusion. So, I was looking at this group, and I saw that note on their website. And I said, who, what?

And that is that is what it began my journey, and I then googled the name and then I saw that he had been a cocaine smuggler, that he made a fortune multiple times and then lost it in Florida in the 80s, I saw that he had this crazy story that he was involved in the security build up after 9/11 in the United States.

That his technology undergirded some of the biggest surveillance companies in the world and certainly in this country, and that it was just this character nobody had ever heard of. And I found that amazing.

But what really did it for me was when I stumbled upon his obituary page because he had died by the time I heard his name and the things that people wrote about this man.

Just on his online obituary website that his company set up for him and then another one that the Funeral Home put up are just not the kinds of things you see written about most dead people you know.

You read obituaries, you read the comments people make, and they say nice things about people. But the ones that they said about Asher was like, he changed my life. He paid for my kids’ college. He fixed my broken teeth, or he yelled at me. He swore at me. He was the craziest person I ever met. He changed… He changed this country forever. He changed my life forever, and he just seemed to have this outsized impact not only on privacy, but also on the people around him.

00:06:39 Domen Savič / Citizen D

The book is full of these anecdotes or happenings in in his life when you, I mean, the title sort of tells a pretty good story. So, you have a guy who’s been drug running for, for the DEA, or who was an informant for the DEA, but at the same time, he was saving lives helping people, you know chase down, child molesters and stuff.

But what was in your view the thing that surprised you the most? Like when you were doing, when you were doing the research for the book?

00:07:16 Mackenzie Funk

Of course, everything about I got perhaps a little too obsessed with understanding what exactly he was doing in the 1980s when in the United States, the center of all drug smuggling was Florida because of its proximity to Latin America, to Colombia, to Jamaica, to the Caribbean, and I became obsessed with that. But that was interesting, but not surprising.

The biggest surprise was how these open records laws in Florida were a good thing in this country. We wanted transparency and the States, especially after some scandals, Watergate and others. They decided to make sure that the public could know what the government was doing in their name and so many states opened up their records, opened up their books so that citizens could see what the government was doing and people like Hank Asher, in states like Florida, which had very open public records, exploited this.

They were able, using this state law, they were able to go in and get all of the driver’s license records and all of the vehicle registration records, marriage records, birth records, divorce records, all the housing record. Everything, everything you can imagine that the government, local government would use to sort of have a citizen move through their life.

This was a public record and because the governments wanted this to be they, they wanted citizens to know what they were doing. They opened it up to a new species of person, which is these data, data aggregators.

And the technology, by the time Asher came along in the late 80s and 1990s, you were suddenly able to scoop all this up and make sense of it in a way that I don’t think you could have when these laws were written.

So that was the big surprise that this, this very progressive policy was became something very different and would… say if we compare the Hank Asher’s period where he was buying up or gathering all of these data points and putting them in a in a database in a searchable databa