Chapter 25: Shaftum Corporation.

Since long, its CEO Alain Wahlberg had been a good friend of mine. You know him. And he knew that I was okay with consulting, getting some extra money here and there.

I had been collaborating with them occasionally. One-off jobs, punctual advising on unrelated projects. I knew Shaftum, I knew that they had some high budget defense contracts, as well as some law enforcement clients. I had never been asked to advise in any of those projects before. All I did was related to its regular customers, businesses with no relationship to the government, law enforcement, or the military. My guess, back then, was just that I didn't have the clearance required.

Alain had asked me to attend a meeting. He didn't really say much about it, nor I asked. Usual business.

I headed to their headquarters, to the highest floor, to the fanciest meeting room. Alain met me outside, and pushed the massive guayacan doors —the ones he himself had imported from Colombia months before.

Everything had seemed normal until I entered that room.

Around the cocobolo table in the back, there were three men. I could see that they were already warm: that they had been talking for at least an hour. I had been punctual, and I thought I was going to be present from the beginning. Obviously that wasn't the case.

I hadn't ever met any of them, and the introductions were going to be scarce: only their names. Apparently, they had been already briefed about me. Then, I sat. And Alain, standing by my side, presented the project, aided by a projected presentation.

A dystopia of mass control was presented in front of me. Unravelling slowly, it was evident that many of the technologies exposed had only one imaginable use. And that was to endanger most of the precepts of basic privacy and individual freedom I had assumed as a redline. With no need to persuade for approval, no excuse was given in that room: not fighting crime, no terrorism, nor children abuse.

The moral restrictions that had popped in my head so directly weren't even in the back of their minds.

I didn't know the rest of them, but I couldn't believe that Alain wasn't able to immediately recognize the immorality of it all. At his core, he felt that nothing was wrong about it. His conviction was so strong, his regards towards my concerns so imperceptible, that raised doubts about my initial reaction. Was I just too stern?

Still, I couldn't believe that they would just be so open about those projects. Not only because of my lack of security clearance, but because part of society had been already alarmed by these subjects. Snowden's leaks a few months before had been the zenith of the mountain of disclosures about global surveillance during those last decades.

Yet they, unapologetically, wanted to develop new means of analysis. As if they wanted a piece of the pie, as if the growing social awareness of global surveillance had been the perfect advertisement for these kind of projects. They feared missing out on spying!

He looked at me, expecting feedback. His smile had turned false. My mind rewinded and replayed the last items of his presentation.

“It is quite a complex project.” —I said, a phrase devoid of any real value.

Suddenly I felt I was trying too hard to be diplomatic. Maybe it was the presence of the three men —only one uniformed— that made me tread lightly.

They waited for more feedback. My useless sentence wasn't selling the project. Or, at least, my participation on the project. Was I selling myself there? Or the project?

“Well, it is perfectly achievable. You have the data, and the processing power. For sure, the state-of-the-art in visual computing can satisfy most of the needs. Other aspects would be more challenging... in terms of architecture. And implementation.”

Couldn't believe that Alain had put me in that situation. It had felt like an ambush. Sure, I could put a veil over the morality of it, and my mind would wonder about the design decisions of such a system. I was already doing so, mentally dividing it into subsystems. But why wouldn't he inform me about the project in advance, or at least about the kind of meeting that I was going to be in?

Face recognition was but an aspect of it. The multiple data sources and types were already quite defined, and it was very interesting how many techniques could be helpful when crosslinking all those. It really is interesting to correlate plate numbers, public camera footage, cell phone usage, access logs, geographical coordinates, IP connection statistics, messaging metadata... and even fingerprints! The breadth of the types of data was fascinating, as it was the range of its anonymity: from the supposedly most challenging to deanonymize (e.g. health related through brokers —their sources wouldn't conspicuously break the law, and there wasn't much standardization), to the most straightforward (e.g. data that they directly harvested, without any broker).

Much of the data was acquired at a very low cost, even when inflated. Even back then: data brokers galore. Competition, stiff. Money was always attached, Alain made those calculations with great precision, and incorporated them from the beginning. Budgets and profits always in his mind.

Much of data was likely to be deanonymized after reaching a degree of aggregation. Part of me was trying to guesstimate the ratios, part of me was trying to convince myself that the whole project could be beneficial for society.

So I was going back to struggle about the morality of it, and how close to a tyrant's fantasy could it become, even at the local scale that they wanted. Local, initially.

Because clever methods would spread, while making good money for Shaftum. Clever ways to reduce dimensions of what humans were, before feeding them to the monster... all with the idea of making it feasible to know too much, about too many people.

Alain's conviction kept being a point in favor. I had trusted him before. No need of questioning the morality of it all. On the other hand, neither empathy nor awareness of the consequences of one's actions had ever been part of Alain's strengths.

They realized that my improvised feedback wasn't going to be valuable. They liked some of the ideas. After being in the spotlight, I started to feel anger. My amygdala was reacting to feeling manipulated by Alain. There was a first time for everything. Anger building up. Stop.

The meeting was over. Shook hands with the men.

As I left, Alain walked the corridors beside me.

He started talking.

“You're going to need security clearance. We can arrange that.”

“Wait, Alain. I've gotta tell you...” —I had to interrupt.— “I'm not really interested.”

My decision was firm, although I'm not sure where it came from, after spending so much time trying to convince myself to accept the project.

“Alice, can't you understand the money we're dealing with here? We're talking 9 figures, easily. A couple years in and you'll have everything you want.”

“I'm not sure about that.”

“So are you going to... abandon us now? After all what I have done for you?” —a layer of anger was permeating through his mask of diplomacy.

“I am sorry, I have a lot on my plate.” —my templated response.

I wanted to tell him how pissed I was at how he had got me there. At how I had been surprised by how manipulative all of that had seemed. But his attitude had always been very tempered, and I couldn't avoid mirroring it. I didn't want to be the hysterical one. My decision was made, yet I still needed to think about how mad was I entitled to be.

Alain took a few seconds.

“It's alright, Alice. Tell me if you change your mind.”

We did bid each other farewell.

I remember telling about this event to some colleagues at the university. Maybe it was my inability to keep things to myself, or my need to vent. I had no control over my mouth. Regardless, I gave no specifics. In fact, the implications of secrecy were only assumptions: I didn't have to sign any NDA or equivalent. Nor I was given any warning. And, even if I had seen the tip of the iceberg, I really didn't know many details about their dystopian projects, and how they were going to be developed.

However, my comments about Alain's ventures seemingly affected his reputation. I'm not sure how, or even if he was aware that I talked about him. One thing was clear: soon after that meeting, he totally did stop contacting me.

And I never contacted him. Although that had been my usual: I was socially passive, yet reactive.