Dakota had a new concern that had niggled at him since yesterday’s race. When Iniquus put protocols in place, they were there for good reasons. That Iniquus had worked out the exact stripe configurations and grease paint colors required to thwart AI recognition meant they’d put resources into a threat.
He had his own criteria for keeping himself safe. He’d used it effectively for over a decade.
Technologies were constantly advancing.
Working in the sphere of counterfeit money, he didn’t need a savvy criminal with the ability to print ungodly amounts of money to pay someone to look up their new contact and find Dakota’s smiling, (probably) mud-covered face and his real name and home address.
Things were changing fast.
Dakota would have to ask Reaper what minimum actions he could take to mess up AI recognition. On his cell phone, the security on the facial identification seemed to hold. It didn’t open for Dakota’s cousin, who, according to his grandma, was Dakota’s “spitting image.” It didn’t even recognize Dakota if he contorted his face with laughter or a grimace—the grimace one turned out pretty bad the last time he tried to make an emergency call with a dislocated shoulder.
While Dakota raced under his given name in his triathlon competitions, his face was usually screwed up with exertion or distorted by goggles or sunglasses. Before the hospital charity run, he hadn’t put it together with the danger this posed for him.
Yeah, if Iniquus was taking the precaution of war paint in public, he’d have to up his survival game.
In the field, Dakota worked under pseudonyms. The idea that those aliases could be pulled up on some kind of sheet andthe touch of a bad guy’s finger on the enter key: Here is Dakota Ryan Kayne AKA and his list of work names. Yeah, it wasn’t quite a gun to his head, but it was a pistol wagging in his general direction.
What would cartels do to Dakota if they could figure out his job title?
So far, he hadn’t needed to utilize his SERE—survive, evade, resist, escape—training, and he certainly didn’t want to land in anyone’s cabin far enough away that no one could hear his screams.
Just last week, he and Jasper had been talking about the short-sightedness of Uncle Sam contracting with a privately owned security network to provide a nationwide surveillance system that could track anyone, anywhere in the United States by linking house cams, street cams, toll cams, and phone pings.
Texas police recently tracked a woman seeking a legal abortion in another state using over eighty thousand automated license plate readers as they tracked her state-to-state, even in states where tracking women seeking abortions was illegal.
Interestingly, a young woman disappeared in Texas, and the family filed a missing person’s report. The surveillance systems were not used to find her. They simply asked neighbors to check their doorbell cameras and see if they picked up anything.
Different circumstances, sure, and in that case, the lack of a license plate was probably the missing link.
But that was what Dakota and Jasper debated the other evening: Who decided which cases got the full capacity of the system for good or for bad? Unfortunately, men in law enforcement had a sky-high rate of domestic abuse. And there was also a strong brotherhood that closed ranks to protect their own.
Police officers went largely unpoliced.
How easy would it be for powerful people to make a phone call and abuse the system—politicians with an eye to punishing their enemies, the monied wanting to manipulate the market?
The federal law enforcement now had a contract with two private companies that could digitally lasso an area and track anyone’s phone from home to work to the shop to the gym. The surveillance was conducted without even a nod to Fourth Amendment rights and without a warrant.
It was also predictive.
So, if you got on the wrong side of the wrong guy and they had X amount of money to give to the private business, the bad guy could get a literal roadmap to where the subject would be and when.
And that’s why Dakota used a burner that he changed out monthly and slipped his phone in a Faraday bag as often as possible.
It wasn’t paranoia; it was self-preservation.
And Dakota thought the surveillance state in China was bad.
In China, surveillance was state-owned and used by the government.
In the United States, the fact that a private company ran the system meant that data on every citizen could be bought and sold to the highest bidder and fed into algorithms to manipulate and target.
Would the data centers only sell to other Americans or to American companies? Or was this data available on the international market?
Already, data collection had gotten so bad that grocery stores could predict what a given person would be willing to pay for any item and raise the price for that person. Three different people in the same store at the same time could see three different prices on a carton of eggs.
Dakota was pretty sure that didn’t happen with citizens’ data in China.
He wanted to keep himself out of the engines as much as possible, and it was getting harder and harder. It meant using burner phones for the most part, with only a household and an office number that remained constant. It was a whole lot of hoop-jumping, baseball-cap-wearing, and mirrored aviator glasses that covered much of his facial bone structure.
