The Man Who Fused the Data.

"The Hank Show

By McKenzie Funk

(St. Martin's, 304 pages, $30)

The past is never past, William Faulkner observed. McKenzie Funk is here to tell us that Faulkner didn't know the half of it. Not only is the past overtaking the present; it's helping rig the future -- thanks to the ever increasing reach of data collection and algorithm forecasts.

How did we reach this point? "The Hank Show" is an engaging, cautiously admiring, portrait of Hank Asher (1951-2013), the "father of data fusion," someone most of us have never heard of. His genius for collecting and crunching even the smallest facts of our lives went a long way toward shaping our current data-driven -- and data-haunted -- world.

Mr. Funk, a veteran magazine writer, begins by taking a personal inventory of the ways in which Asher's handiwork has affected his life. He notes that algorithms, some of which were created by Asher, have collected and filed under a personal ID number "tens of thousands" of his own data points, including how he spends his time and money, what he likes and doesn't like, whom he sees and where he goes -- all of it regularly updated and easily retrieved in milliseconds.

The fusion of previously disparate information -- Asher's great feat -- allows computers to track "the trajectory of my life," Mr. Funk writes, affecting the kind of medical care he receives, the cost of his car insurance, even how long he waits on hold on a customer-service line. Insurance companies, corporations and government agencies plug into the universe of digitized data to target their goods and services, maximize their efficiencies, and see into the future, including the possibility of divorce or bankruptcy.

Asher, we learn, was not your typical nerd. He grew up in Valparaiso, Ind., hunting squirrels, dropping out of high school and going to Woodstock. By 1975 -- through a mix of brains, ambition and the occasional low bid -- he owned the biggest painting-service company in Florida. After a detour into drug smuggling -- which transitioned into a stint as an informant -- he became infatuated with computers and entered the data business in 1992.

Readers whose tech savvy is limited to turning off their laptop during a thunderstorm will appreciate Mr. Funk's ability to explain complex technology in accessible terms, including Asher's idea of linking individual computers together to speed up data retrieval. The idea may have been inspired by his earlier practice of hiring scores of painters for a single condominium project.

Asher's data dragnet started small -- DMV records -- and metastasized. Soon a file might include documentation on legal history and lifestyle habits, information on in-laws, even tidbits on the in-laws of in-laws. When a visitor in 2001 asked to have his name run through Asher's Matrix system, he was rewarded with 13 pages of data.

There was gold in those tidbits. The 2004 sale of Asher's Seisint system brought in $775 million (Asher's share: $250 million), making the deal "the world's largest purchase of a private company that year," Mr. Funk writes. By some estimates, Asher made a half-billion dollars in his lifetime, though excessive spending, such as gifting dinner companions with Cartier watches, whittled down his fortune.

Mr. Funk includes several examples of computer fusion's glory, including the case of a serial rapist who terrorized Philadelphia in the late 1990s and Fort Collins, Colo., a few years later. A search for names of people who lived in both places when the crimes took place resulted in an arrest and conviction. Asher was especially proud when his Seisint system quickly identified five of the 9/11 terrorists, whose names had been included on a list of 1,200 suspects.

But as Mr. Funk points out, the algorithm also had a high false-positive rate, a problem on display in the 2000 presidential election, when a list created by an Asher-affiliated company to identify and purge felons from Florida's rolls kept at least 1,100 eligible voters, mostly Democrats, from voting. George W. Bush won that contest by 537 votes.

Asher had his own flaws. Though he was one of the first responders to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, ferrying in 19 planeloads of doctors and supplies on his private jet, he showed perhaps excessive zeal, promising his pilot that he would "blow [his] brains out" if he refused to land at the then-closed Port-au-Prince airport. Asher often drank like a condemned pirate, got into rage-induced fist fights, and lambasted employees at high volume. In a quieter moment, business associates had the pleasure of watching him "remove his own rotten tooth with a ballpoint pen."

Asher died a decade ago of a pulmonary embolism, at 61, but he still casts a long shadow. "His creations are built into nearly 80 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500," Mr. Funk reports, "seven of the world's biggest banks, and nearly 100 percent of America's eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies." His spirit lives on in systems that can predict obesity by what kind of car you drive and your chances of surviving a pandemic. One wonders if a magical algorithm might accurately predict the winner in an Elon Musk/Mark Zuckerberg cage match.

Mr. Funk winds up with a visit to Asher's two daughters, who run the Child Protection System (bought by Asher in 2009). It has helped collar 13,000 sexual predators and rescue 3,000 abused children. Yet he closes on a darker note: While, say, a misdemeanor may eventually be erased from your official record, your data file is permanent. "Your past, in a perfectly algorithmic world, unjustly consumes your future," Mr. Funk writes. In the world Hank Asher helped create, there's no such thing as canceling your past, which means your past can always cancel you. So thanks, Hank, wherever you are." [1]

1. The Man Who Fused the Data. Shiflett, Dave.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 29 Sep 2023: A.15.