Window of Fear

About four years ago, best-selling author Jeffrey Deaver was the victim of identity theft. The thieves bought around $3,000 worth of goods in his name, but they gave Deaver something much more valuable – the idea for a uniquely modern and sinister baddie. The result is The Broken Window, the latest book in his best-selling Lincoln Rhyme series.

“I never write about personal experiences,” says Deaver, “But I thought if I could extrapolate what had happened to me, so that the villain was not simply stealing money but was killing people and blaming innocent individuals for the crime, what a great villain that would be.”
Deaver’s research on identity theft lead him into the somewhat unnerving world of data mining – the companies that collect and collate personal information. In the novel, SSD, a data mining corporation that knows everything about you – how much wine you drank last week, how often you cheat on your partner and how much those new shoes really cost – becomes the second villain, allowing Deaver to create an immediate sense of peril as the killer targets various unsuspecting victims, but also a more diffuse, perhaps scarier, threat that there is nothing private about your private life anymore.
"I liked the idea of an over-arching sense of threat that would reach into everybody’s life, and I think what makes the killer scary is his modus operandi – the data that’s available on all of us.”
Reports of lost, stolen or misdirected data are common enough here, in the UK and the States. Most of the time the victims of lost data suffer no ill-effects, other than inconvenience, such as having to change their credit cards, but as Deaver points out, mined data has been used to commit violent crimes.
“Children have been kidnapped and people have been stalked. In the States, there was a woman who had a restraining order against her former partner. She changed her identity and moved, but her ex tracked her down through data mined information and she was killed. Thankfully, instances of these things happening are quite rare.”
Throughout the novel various characters hide or obscure their pasts and personal information. Ironically, The Broken Window is Deaver’s eighth Lincoln Rhyme thriller – but it’s the first book where the readers learn about Rhyme’s past. Given the subject matter of the novel, was this Deaver’s little joke? He laughs. “You know, I wish I could take credit for that, but no.”
An extreme case of how data can be subjected to abuse is hinted at with the Nazi references that litter the book, such as the sixteen-digit data tag used to track people and the corporation name SSD, which is a nod to the Nazi SS. The Nazis used early computers to keep track of the Jewish and Roma populations – an event Deaver has written about before in his historical thriller Garden Of Beasts. Is Deaver worried the American government might do the same?
“I’m not sure it isn’t being used right now, but in the United States and in Ireland we still are democratic, we have freedom of the press and we have some controls on the abuse of power.”
It has been argued that only the guilty need fear the erosion of privacy and civil liberties under the laws such as the Patriot Act and that using data mined information to predict behaviour could prevent another terrorist atrocity like 9/11. While Deaver is concerned about privacy issues, he isn’t totally suspicious of the federal government’s intrusiveness into the lives of ordinary people – whether citizens or immigrants.
“To some extent it’s warranted. Had we been keeping track using fingerprinting or iris scans before 9/11 we would have know that at least sixteen of the terrorists had overstayed their visas. They probably could have gone underground but they were using their real names, so it’s likely they could have been found.”
While the judiciary and public opinion means that a shadowy Big Brother government conspiracy is unlikely, what concerns Deaver much more is the commercial compilation and exploitation of data.
“Corporations aren’t nearly as well regulated as the government and information can be available to whoever wants to buy it.”
In The Broken Window, Deaver’s criminalist Lincoln Rhyme is up against a killer who uses the kind of personal information not generally regarded as sensitive, such as shopping habits and preferences to get close to his victims and frame a fall guy. It’s this seemingly harmless information gathered from store loyalty cards that worries Deaver. “Do you really want someone knowing if you suffer from sexual dysfunction, or how much alcohol you drink, or the style of underwear your children buy?”
So he’s not a fan of loyalty cards then? No. But instead of refusing them, Deaver and his friends go one better and give the data collectors incorrect information.
“We trade loyalty cards, to get the discounts but also to confuse them.”
Given all the research Deaver’s done, how concerned does he think we should be?
“My book is data mining and identity theft on steroids, but everything that happens in the book has happened to somebody – maybe not quite so extreme, but it could easily happen. Could my villain actually exist? Probably not, but in terms of general identity theft, we should be worried, very worried indeed.”