The Hindu Business Line : You're being watched!

This book might appear a spy thriller, but is all fact, no fiction. It's about how a company tracks individuals and data relating to them, and passes it on, as part of a surveillance society.

ACXIOM. Not a household name, but a billion-dollar player in the data industry, informs Robert O'Harrow, Jr in No Place to Hide, from Free Press (www.simonsays.com) .

"You may not know about Acxiom, but it knows a lot about you," he adds, before describing the company's computer centre with miles of cables beneath the floors transmitting information about Americans to and from Acxiom's data powerhouse holding "one of the richest collections of personal and confidential information in the world."

Machines there hold not just names, ages, addresses, and telephone numbers, but also "billions of records about marital status and families and the ages of children," informs O'Harrow.

The company also tracks "individuals' estimated incomes, the value of their homes, the make and price of their cars." Plus, "unlisted phone numbers and details about people's occupations, religions, and ethnicities... what they read, what they order over the phone and online, and where they go on vacation," all making up "purchase behaviour and lifestyle data." Perhaps also that you're currently reading this!

In sum, it may add up to a petabyte of information, or a thousand trillion bytes, estimates the author. But what does the company do? It helps retailers focus their sales pitch, banks know their customers, drug companies to target those with certain ailments, employers screen candidates, creditors track debtors, and insurers to be selective.

Not surreally but really, since 9/11, Acxiom has made its services available to "some of the largest surveillance and screening systems ever devised by the US Government."

Technology is now being turned on American citizens and foreigners alike, notes the introduction. "It is being deployed at every level of law enforcement and intelligence." As a result, we're rushing toward a `surveillance society' with few rules to guide and protect us, cautions the author. "In this new world of high-tech domestic intelligence, there is literally no place to hide."

A chapter that's titled philosophically `who am I' traces the reason for the surge in identity theft to the inundation of information, with different entities knowing more about us than we know ourselves.

"They often resell or share information about us," writes O'Harrow. "At the same time, the institutions responsible for safeguarding all this data often do a poor job of it."

The dangerous part is that identity theft is "almost laughably easy to commit, and terribly difficult to prevent."

The chapter `The Matrix' introduces you to the Multi-state Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange. "At the core of Matrix was a lightning-fast computer system called HOLe (pronounced `Holy'), short for the first names of its inventors, Hank Asher and Ole Poulson," explains the author. The backbone of Matrix is Accurint, and it can answer `deeply layered questions' - such as "brown-haired, Caucasian people driving red pickup trucks in a particular Zip code, with a licence place that has an `S' and a `7' in it."

A book worth hiding for exclusive reading, if only there were a place to do so!

Encryption, trapdoor, and elusive fox

GRAY Files is a chapter in Tom Clancy's The Teeth of the Tiger, from Penguin (www.penguin.com) . It begins with the `secure microwave links' between two principal intelligence agencies of the US, viz. CIA and NSA. "The bandwidth on the microwave channel was immense, due to compression algorithms... These links were always up and running, most of the time swapping nonsense and random characters in order to befuddle anyone who might try to crack the encryption - but since this system was Tapdance encrypted, it was totally secure. Or so the wizards at NSA claimed."

You'd learn that the system depended on CD-ROMs stamped with `totally random transpositions'. Every week, encryption disks "were inserted in the jukebox attached to the cipher machine, and when each was ejected after use, it was hand-carried to a microwave oven to be destroyed, under the eyes of three guards, all of them trained by years of service not to ask questions."

If you're not asking questions, let me take you to Infosec, short for Information Systems Security Company, into encryption stuff. "The company's domiciled outside of Seattle. They have the best information security program there is," says Rick Bell, before elaborating that NSA may not be able to crack it, "short of brute-forcing with their new Sun Workstations".

And there's more about the company: "Just about every bank in the world uses it, especially the ones in Liechtenstein and the rest of Europe. But there's a trapdoor in the program." The author informs that buyers of computer programs have outside experts to go over such programs line by line, "as a defence against playful software engineers, of which there were far too many."

Elsewhere, there's an offbeat analogy. "Punching numbers into a keypad was about as much fun as running naked in a garden of cactus. Jack was the sort to need intellectual stimulation, and while some men might find that in investigative accounting, he was not one of them." Then, some insight from Tony Wills on the reality of gathering and processing intelligence information: "Even when it's exciting, it's pretty dull - well, unless you're really on the scent of a particularly elusive fox."

Pacy read to pack in for the weekend.

Books courtesy: Landmark (www.landmarkonthenet.com)

Tailpiece

"At last they found why the boss's computer got locked out!"

"Why?"

"Because he had given a casteist remark as his new password!"

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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