My Turn - Achieving the American Dream

by Jonathan Williams

  Chapter 10

  “True Love and the CEO”

  It seems like an eternity now, but when Chris first took the job, he recalls a phase called “Discovery.” It entails identifying systems that the company has in place, the procedures, where the documentation repositories reside, understanding department fundamentals, etc. In essence, when he decided to estake Debbie, he was doing the same thing but at more of a micro level. He’s collecting data and analyzing it, and it’s easy. It’s similar to reading someone’s diary. The only difference is that the diary is electronic and placed in different locations so the person doing it has to piece it all together. Chris has been collecting her web browsing data, personal and corporate email, chat sessions, bank account information, and even her medical records. He’s composing a picture of who she is. His objective is now not only to sleep with her but also to possibly have a relationship. That is, of course, if he doesn’t discover anything negative.

  There’s a different objective in estaking the CEO and that is financial gain. Essentially though, it entails gleaning the same kind of data that he’s been collecting on Debbie. In this case, though, he unfortunately comes across much more than he bargained for.

  He knows that the CEO has a family in a different state and though he doesn’t know them personally, he does know their names. He knows that his wife’s name is not Veronica. Apparently the CEO, Carl, is having an affair with Veronica. There are a couple of heated email exchanges that make this discovery somewhat obvious but just to be sure, he needs something more solid.

  Out of curiosity, Chris decides to follow Carl. He knows where he lives so he plans on staking him from his home. Funny how things escalate in life, Chris goes from estaking to staking, a whole other world.

  And when Chris first lays eyes on Veronica, he can’t blame Carl. She’s very attractive. She’s another one of those girls who just has that look. But again, he’s not here to investigate what the CEO of his company is doing but just to get a few financial tips. Everything he needs can be handled by estaking. But now, with this new information, he’s caught up in the storm. It’s like any other addiction. It’s tough to stop and Chris concludes that he’s lost control. He quickly drives home.

  After dinner, he goes to the local library and logs into Carl’s financial portfolio account to see what stock he’s purchased. He sees that Carl shorted a stock that will expire in about six months. He writes it down and keeps looking. He spots another big purchase and jots the ticker symbol down. He then logs into Carl’s personal email account. Based off what he sees, it looks like there’s a biotech that’s going to fold soon. There appears to be several correspondences with board members from the company BTTS. It certainly warrants further investigation.

  He also comes across an email that Carl received from a friend thanking him for a stock tip. The stock tip was related to Biokinz’s NDA’s rejected application. It turns out that his friends shorted the stock after getting information that the FDA was going to deny the application. Chris presumes they made a fortune. Though the SEC has triggers in place to track this type of transaction, there are several ways around it. It’s also difficult to prove. Even more so, if the odds are against a company getting approval like they were against Biokinz. They already had a poor track record.

  He logs off and glances around to see if anyone saw him log into the account. He sits back in his chair to reflect about BTTS. Why would it require further investigation? You just can’t get better information than what he just looked at. It’s worth the risk. The next day, he shorts the stock. Sure enough, two months later the stock plummets. They were also denied drug approval and had no reserve cash to sustain themselves. Chris adds another half a million dollars to his stockpile.

  He can’t believe how easy this is. He’s making money hand-over-fist and dating good-looking girls, too, as a result. Working this way certainly has its perks.

  Ironically, all of these unethical actions committed by the company are the same ones that the government does in plain sight. Paul is correct in that Senators and Congressmen get insider information all the time. Then they turn around and share this information with their inner circles and make a ton. This came to the public light recently, yet most Americans aren’t aware that this practice has actually been going on for decades. This kind of information also doesn’t last long in the news, which is probably by design. Chris wants to be in the one percentile. He rationalizes it by thinking that if a person is too stupid to be unethical then they can be in the ninety-nine percentile. Chris is done being poor and ethical though. It’s his turn.

  He keeps a spreadsheet on each person that he’s estaking. It contains websites that they visit along with any required passwords. It also has some notes. The only issue that he comes across is when someone changes their password. Because then he has to retrieve the log file from the keyboard-logger, or if he had removed it, Chris would then have to reinstall it. Sometimes, though, he can retrieve the file remotely. Luckily for Chris, though, most of these websites don’t enforce a password lifetime in their policies, so passwords aren’t changed very often. Moreover, after seeing a user change a password, they usually keep the same theme, such as having months in them. So the person doing the estaking can usually just guess it.

  Information is power. It’s easy to see who someone is based off the information Chris is collecting. For instance, going through a person’s bank transactions is one way to learn a lot. Not only do you see income but one can also get a taste of what they spend their money on. A good example of this is while Chris is browsing through Debbie’s account and sees that she ordered something from Matthew’s. He has no idea what type of store it is, so he finds the company and sees that they sell sex toys. He locates her electronic order and matches up the invoice numbers to the toys she ordered. Chris has never really been into them but if his girl wants to add a little more spice to her life, he’s more than fine with it. Browsing through the site, he never actually knew how big some of these toys could get. He wasn’t sure if the time came when they would be together intimately if he would be able to stand up to some of the ones that she’s purchased. But he’ll certainly give it his best. Overall though, he knows it’s safer to play with toys then to sleep around.

  Continuing to pry through her inbox, he comes across an email to a doctor. Debbie had some questions regarding her test results. It appears that she had a case of crabs. But he’s not that concerned about it. He doesn’t think crabs are that bad. There are worse STD’s to have. He then logs into her medical account and begins to dig deeper.

  Her medical history doesn’t date that far back. However, it turns out that she did have scabies and crabs during this year alone—and it’s only the third quarter; so two in one year is a little extreme. He doesn’t focus on it though. He has had his share of STD’s.

  When people are having medical issues, they can be quite vulnerable and those who know can take advantage of them. For instance, Tim recently told Chris that he found out that Stacey was having an abortion. Tim never directly brought it up to her but played it in such a way that she brought it up on her own. Though it wasn’t true, he expanded on it by saying that his sister was going through the same thing. He believes that Stacey will never meet his sister so being dishonest with her is fine with him. They were sleeping together about three weeks later.

  There are multiple ways of getting the data they are collecting, too many ways to list. But even from the outside, a person can get someone’s password without installing a keyboard-logger. It’s just the way it’s handled at Biokinz and though it doesn’t leave a footprint, they can wipe it clean if required. Plus, in this environment, it’s easy as half the tools are already in place per the company’s directives. In essence, a hacker’s approach depends on the environment.

  During his fourth date with Debbie, Chris casually brings up the topic of sex toys and STD’s. Now depending on one’s personality, these can be delicate topics to bring up. But knowing what he
knows, Chris feels that he can broach the topic without much resistance.

  “So are you dating anyone?”

  “No, just been hanging out with friends.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “So are you interested in dating anyone?”

  “Sure, if the right guy comes along,” she replies.

  “So, in the meantime, you’ll just sleep with friends?” Chris directly asks.

  “No! I don’t sleep around,” she says with a slight smile, or he thinks it’s a smile anyway.

  Here we go again, Chris thinks to himself. He just doesn’t understand the logic and never will. Maybe he always lands in that grey area. She is currently not dating anyone, and she doesn’t sleep with friends. Yet Chris thinks he has a chance with her and they’re just friends. So where does that put him?

  “There’s nothing wrong with having friends with benefits,” Chris says.

  “I know, but that’s not what I am looking for. I want something more.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Later that evening, they go back to her place and surprisingly have sex. He can’t get the toys she purchased out of his mind. The first round lasts a whopping forty-five seconds. It’s intoxicating knowing what he knows about her. He just wants to please her and that first round probably didn’t make much of an impression. But he makes up for it the third time around.

  Chris isn’t too concerned about the STD issue during sex, and they do use a condom. He’s too caught up in the moment to worry about it. But he brings it up afterwards. She denies ever having an STD. As far as the sex toys, he doesn’t mention it.

  Though it sounds hypocritical to Chris’s own actions, one of the indirect benefits of being an estaker is that you can gauge the level of honesty of the person you’re spying on. He doesn’t expect people to disclose STD’s on the first date or other personal issues but, in other matters, there are some things you can see as the relationship develops.

  For example, one weekend Frank, the CFO, mentions that the CEO went out of town. Chris isn’t sure who is lying to whom but he knows that the CEO didn’t go anywhere. In fact he took Victoria out that weekend. He knows for sure because it’s the same weekend that Chris staked out his place and followed him.

  Estaking has turned into a kind of game for him—on the one hand, he’s been determining levels of honesty and, on the other, gauging degrees of dishonesty at the company. The questions are endless. Who are people lying to? Why are they lying? What are they lying about? To what extent would they lie? How were they lying? He can see that the degrees of dishonesty ricochet from one end of the spectrum to the other.

  There is a whole psychology behind peoples issue’s just like there’s a whole psychology behind the reasons why people do it. At this phase, he has developed many theories on the subject. He also develops a scorecard to keep track of the behavior and is beginning to feel like a psychological analyst.

  Tracking everyone’s lies at Biokinz can be quite a big task, but Chris is capable of doing it. But the only person he’s really interested in keeping a dishonesty matrix on is Debbie. He has more at stake with her than the other people he’s estaking. So far, though, she’s definitely elusive and scores relatively low on the dishonesty scale. With the data he’s been collecting on her, he has developed a good picture of who she is overall.

  He admits to himself that he’s addicted to estaking. It’s a type of drug for him. If he gets caught, he wonders if he can even claim it as a disease. With the right attorney he probably can. Of course, he doesn’t want to be caught but if he is, Chris doesn’t think he’d be prosecuted anyway as he has too much information on the suits. If he went down, they’d all go with him.

  Meanwhile, Tom is working on a girl named Blanca. Similar to Chris’s approach, he happens to show up at a bar that she frequents. However Tom is more shy than Chris so when he recants his story to him, he mentions walking by her a couple of times hoping she noticed him. Even though he planned it, he’s still surprised when she called his name. He says they talked for a while but feels he didn’t contribute much. In fact, he doesn’t think he made much progress at all. Because he’s not a drinker and rarely goes out, had he not acted unethically, this brief interaction would have never occurred at all.

  Tom performs one of the steps required to breaking a “mark,” which is the name for the person being spied on. To break it, one needs to encounter the mark outside of the workplace. It’s one thing having conversations in the break room or after a meeting, but it’s something entirely different when encountering a co-worker outside the work place. One of the best places is running into them is at the gym or on a hike. But Tom and Chris picked a bar. With Chris, he had already decided that his first encounter with Debbie would be at a bar. He knows she does yoga but it might seem too obvious if he showed up for one of her classes.

  It’s common for the team to discuss estaking in the Helpdesk room and to gossip about their findings. After sharing their accomplishments and failures, Chris always leaves the meetings in awe knowing that they can pick up just about any woman they want through estaking. They can also befriend anyone they want or take them down. Sometimes he thinks that they know people more than they know themselves.

  The mass public thinks that they know so much about computers. But in the grand scheme of things, computers know much more about people. Each time someone logs in, writes a love letter, makes a payment, performs a search, or types a text, it’s tracked. People feed the computer information about themselves, essentially creating an online diary, with someone behind the scenes disseminating the information. The computer owns everyone. Putting all the pieces of data together provides a clear snapshot of who the person really is and this type of information is worth money.

  Everyone has their secrets, and there’s dirt on just about everyone. Everybody has skeletons in their closets and Chris has access to them. Now he’s talking with Debbie’s skeletons and fortunately, for Chris’s bank account, he’s also talking with the CEO’s, which not only makes him a lot of money but also gives him leverage. So if something goes wrong at Biokinz or with the CEO, he’s able to end things and come out on top, and there’s no better feeling than that.