Hank Asher was a drug smuggler with a head for numbers — until he figured out how to turn Americans’ private information into a big business.
One of Asher’s innovations — or more precisely one of his companies’ innovations — was what is now known as the LexID. My LexID, I learned, is 000874529875. This unique string of digits is a kind of shadow Social Security number, one of many such “persistent identifiers,” as they are called, that have been issued not by the government but by data companies like Acxiom, Oracle, Thomson Reuters, TransUnion — or, in this case, LexisNexis.
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It took a certain kind of mind to envision the systems Asher now wanted to build, but it also took a certain mentality. What would separate his databases from most of their contemporaries would be not just the records they held or the technology they employed but their focus on what is today blandly known in the industry as “risk.” They would be designed to manage risk for insurers, and eventually for society writ large, by uncovering what a person might intentionally or unintentionally be hiding: an asset, an associate, an address, a conspiracy, a conviction and so on.
Such risk analytics are predicated on mistrust, so it was no surprise that Asher, with his own big secret to hide and difficulty trusting anyone, would become a pioneer in the space. Contrast his creations with, say, a marketing database from the same era, focused on what brand of shampoo or model of car a person has bought in the past or might be swayed to buy in the future, and the questions asked and answered were very different. Instead of asking, “What will this person like, and what will he buy?” it asked, “What isn’t he telling us, and what will he do wrong?” Asher, in taking on LeGette’s database project, had started encoding a certain paranoia — his own — into American life.
