Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(50)
“What does that change?”
Charles seemed to ignore the question. “I looked closer at Gunn. He worked on Wall Street for a couple of years, like I said, until they got him on insider trading. He took a plea bargain and traded names, got off with a fine. Gotta love nineties New York, right? As long as you weren’t dealing crack or jumping turnstiles it was hard to get into trouble.”
“So the guy who hired me is a white-collar crook? Sorry to shatter your illusions, Charles, but I’ve worked with worse.”
Charles puffed smoke out of his mouth. “It’s one thing to lead a private company. The Valley tends to be forgiving when money’s at stake. But a publicly traded company is different. If you’re talking about getting money from state pension funds, university endowments, mom-and-pop investors? All kinds of regulation and scrutiny kicks in.”
“Meaning?”
“If you’re the CEO of a publicly traded firm, they look at you funny if you get too many speeding tickets. There’s no way Care4 would issue an IPO with Gregg Gunn at the helm.” Charles stubbed out cigarillo number two and placed the stub next to the first one. “So then I looked much closer at the company itself.”
“The baby monitors.”
“But really, what’s a baby monitor?”
Charles wasn’t prone to redundancy. I thought and answered. “Something to watch with. Make sure the kid is sleeping. Make sure the babysitter doesn’t have the boyfriend over when you’re at the movies.”
“Something to watch with. In other words … surveillance.”
“Surveillance?”
“They make cute little baby cameras and it sounds warm and fuzzy. A website filled with smiling families and a bunch of feel-good stories about how they’re devoted to improving childcare. They even have a nonprofit arm, healthcare, global poverty, all that. That’s all sugarcoating.”
“But he even showed me one of their cameras.” I thought of the sleek white sphere, the pinpoint lens. “I still have the damn thing sitting in my office somewhere until I can find someone to give it to. That’s real enough, right?”
“They make hardware, sure, but that’s unimportant. Anyone can find some cheap Chinese factory to outsource manufacturing to. Cameras are easy. Surveillance software systems are Care4’s real business.”
For one of the first times in my life I found myself wishing I had paid more attention to the omnipresent tech world that I usually tried so hard to ignore. “Isn’t surveillance basically just cameras?” I thought of my own work, aiming the zoom lens at Brenda Johnson’s husband through the apartment window. “It sure is when I do it.”
“You’re old-fashioned, Nikki. Times have changed. Have you heard the term ‘CNNs’? Not the news channel,” he added. “Technology.”
I gave him a look. “Please, Charles. I don’t even date guys who work for Google.”
“CNN stands for convolutional deep neural networks, used in computer vision. Essentially, deep learning models the biological brain’s way of learning new information based on what it already knows. Show a computer a picture of a dog, tell it that it’s looking at a dog, and then the next time the computer sees a dog it can remember and identify it without being told. Just the way a person would.”
I was starting to see where he was going. “So show a computer a picture of a face…”
He nodded. “Exactly. It can be taught to recognize the next face. The technology is filtering down everywhere, from tagging photos on Facebook to autonomous vehicles. But Care4 has developed proprietary algorithms aimed directly at large-scale surveillance, offering its customers massive crowd-scanning capability. Let’s say you’re an NFL team and you want to know if anyone coming to your games isn’t supposed to be there. Anyone from people on no-fly lists to the drunk guy who picks fights in the parking lot. Hook up a Care4 camera system, scan everyone walking in, and input photographs of the people you want to know about. The system flags them instantly and security grabs them. Easy as pie.”
“How’d you learn this?” I wanted to know.
Charles smiled and scratched one of his thick eyebrows. He took pride in his work. “Not all that thrilling. If you want to learn what a company is up to, the first step is to look at who they want working for them. Investigative Journalism 101. I examined hiring ads across a half-dozen of the major job search engines, going back years through cached pages, called some headhunters for good measure.” He was working his way through yet another cigarillo and I wrinkled my nose as the acrid smoke hit me. “A little over three years ago Care4 started aggressively hiring graduate-level computer scientists, Ph.D.s who specialize in AI and neural networks. Which is no different than plenty of the companies around here, except it made less sense for Care4 to want those types, given what they ostensibly do. I found that significant and looked closer.”
“So besides sports teams, who buys that stuff? Airports? Police departments?”
“Sure. Or governments.”
“For what, antiterrorism or something?”
“That was my first thought,” he agreed.
“Okay. I understand why Gunn would lie about that if they’re selling to foreign countries. Public image. But why lie about the IPO?”
Charles leaned forward. “Exactly. What’s significant is not that he lied, but the nature of the lie. Gunn isn’t worried about an employee ruining him by going public, because he has to know that will never happen.”