“What exactly did you do in this office?”
“We did three things for our clients: mobile advertising campaigns, location measurement — which is analyzing GPS location data of a client’s customers through their smartphones — and business intelligence, which is a fancy name for statistical analysis.”
“Sounds like a good business model,” Daniels said. “What happened?”
“Google happened,” he said. “They offered the same services for less money, and wiped us off the map. The company shrank down to six employees, with just me and Wendy in Tampa. One day the owner called me, and said he was having cash flow problems. He asked me to start paying the office bills on my credit cards.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. He promised to pay me back once things got worked out.”
Something dropped in the pit of Lancaster’s stomach, and he pointed at the letters on the desk. “Is that where those came from?”
“Afraid so,” Gar said.
“Why did you go along with this?” Daniels asked him.
“Maybe this sounds naive, but I believed him when he said he’d get things worked out. This is the best job I’ve ever had, and I didn’t want it to end.”
“When did the Outlaws enter the picture?” Daniels asked.
“Three months ago. The owner said he had a new backer, and he’d be coming by with a check. That was music to my ears, because I was about to get thrown out of my apartment. That afternoon, a biker appeared in the lobby. The guard refused to let him in, and called me. I called the owner, and was told this was our new partner.”
“So you let him upstairs,” Daniels said.
“I didn’t have much choice,” Gar said.
“Describe him,” Lancaster said.
“He was a mean hombre, and wore all black,” Gar said. “He said his name was Dexter. I never got his last name.”
“What happened then?” Daniels asked.
“Dexter gave me a money order for five grand, which he called an installment,” Gar said. “He had a job for me, and said that he’d give me five grand every two weeks until it was done. I was fifty grand in debt, so I couldn’t say no.”
“So you had reservations about working for him,” Lancaster said.
“You bet. He made my skin crawl.”
“What was the job?” Daniels asked.
Gar took a swallow of his soda and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. A guilty look spread across his face, and he spent a moment gathering his thoughts.
“He wanted me to track people,” the programmer confessed.
“On their cell phones?” Lancaster said.
“That’s right. You know about this?”
“We don’t know how it works. Explain it to us,” Daniels said.
“In mobile advertising, there’s a metric called location measurement, which lets retailers track cross-channel advertising campaigns to see if the ads are influencing foot traffic in stores. All the major brands do this.”
“What’s a cross-channel campaign?” Daniels asked.
“It’s a campaign that runs on three channels,” he said. “Personal computer is the first channel. The second channel is tablets, like iPads. The third channel is mobile phones. That’s cross-channel.”
“Got it. How does location measurement work?”
“Okay. Let’s say you’re Nike, and you want to promote a new line of sneakers. Your goal is to drive customers into your stores, which are located inside shopping malls. So you run a cross-channel video campaign that is targeted against consumers who meet your profile and live in zip codes that are located within a ten-mile radius of your stores.”
“You can do that?” Daniels asked.
“Piece of cake. Nikes sends us a video, and we wrap it with a tag. When a viewer watches the video, the tag recognizes the viewer’s IP address, and stores it. We then use a software program to find the mobile phone tied to your IP address.”
“Let me be sure I’ve got this straight,” Daniels said. “If I watch a Nike video on my laptop, your company can determine where my mobile phone is?”
“That’s right. The software program is called a device graph, and it lets us determine the mobile phones tied to the IP address the campaign is delivered to. We then partner with hundreds of apps that track your location, which lets us know where your mobile phone is. It’s fairly easy to find you, once we’ve served you an ad.”
“That can’t be legal.”
“It’s perfectly legal. Have you downloaded an app recently? Before it becomes functional, you’re asked to accept the terms of use. No one reads what those terms are. If they did, they’d see that they’re permitting the app’s designer to track their location, and sell that information. The industry has a name for this. We call it terms of abuse.”
“How long does it take your technology to do this?”
“Nanoseconds.”
He shook his head. Corporations were monitoring his movements every day, and he hadn’t known it. He glanced at Daniels, hoping she’d take over.
“Okay, so Dexter paid you a visit, and said he had a job for you,” she said. “What exactly did he want you to do?”
“Dexter wanted me to track a specific person using location measurement,” Gar said. “The idea was that we’d bombard this person with a tagged video ad, and start monitoring her location when she went shopping.”
“Can you track specific people?”
“I didn’t think we could,” Gar admitted. “But Dexter said that the Miami and Orlando offices had done it, so I was wrong.”
“Your other offices tracked people for Dexter,” Daniels said.
“Yeah. Tracking is supposed to be anonymous, meaning we don’t know the identities of the people we’re tracking. But it isn’t hard to attach a name to an IP address, and track a specific person.”
“And you did this for him.”
“Yes, regrettably.”
“You knew it was wrong.”
“I did. But I also knew that if I didn’t go along, I’d be living out of my car. So I agreed to do what Dexter wanted.”
Something wasn’t adding up, and Lancaster jumped in. “Dexter’s full name is Dexter Hudson, and he spent the last fifteen years in prison. How did he suddenly get tech savvy, and know about location measurement?”
“That bothered me too,” Gar said. “How does a guy who rides in a biker gang know about mobile device tracking? The second time Dexter visited my office, I asked him. He said that one of his biker buddies was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and got run down and arrested. His buddy’s lawyer made the prosecutor reveal how his client was found. There’s some legal name for this.”
“Discovery,” Daniels said.
“That’s it, discovery. So the FBI had to reveal how they found Dexter’s buddy. It turned out that they used location measurement.”
Lancaster shook his head in disbelief. If a criminal defense attorney had asked him how he’d tracked down a client, he would have invented an answer and not tipped his hand, knowing that criminal attorneys were sometimes in cahoots with their clients. But the FBI did things by the book, and had given the Outlaws a valuable tool.
“So you tracked specific people for Dexter, and sent their whereabouts to him,” Lancaster said.
“Not exactly,” Gar said. “The Miami office created video ads, which they emailed to me. I wrapped the ads in tags, and bombarded the people Dexter wanted to find. Then I let Dexter do the tracking. I wanted no part of that.”
“How did Dexter track them?”
“He used an app on his mobile phone that I gave him,” Gar said. “I told him that wasn’t the app’s purpose, but he didn’t care. I told him that it was wrong, but he didn’t care.”
Daniels started to ask a question, but was drowned out by a roar of motorcycles coming from outside. Gar said, “That doesn’t sound good.” They rose from their chairs and went to the window. Down in the parking lot, four leather-clad bikers had parked by the entrance. They were banged up, leading Lancaster to believe they’d been part of the gang at Echo’s complex the night before. Dexter Hudson was not among them, which was a shame, because he was looking forward to confronting him.