"Go find your place in the world, boy," he directed me. "I'll be fine by myself right here. Besides there'll be another green kid coming along any day now and I'll have my hands full again."
He was right. It was time for me to move on.
Detective training wasn't at all what I expected. I figured they would bring in some bad guys and we would shake 'em down. Then after a tough day of shaking down bad guys, we would go out with dames and avoid saying anything indicating civility or commitment. But the truth was that good detective work is often boring and tedious. I spent a whole day in the courthouse once just looking through index cards trying to find a criminal history on a subject that we were investigating. I had to check the past twenty years using all possible spellings and misspellings of his name and know aliases. After nine hours of leafing through index cards, I didn't manage to find a thing on him. I was bleary eyed, in need of a shave and generally unfit for civilized company. No wonder detectives are such loners.
Another time I was tailing a guy whose wife hired us to watch him. Apparently he would go out every night for a couple of hours and not tell his wife where he had been. She though he might be seeing another woman. I followed him for two weeks and landed up sitting in ten of the cheapest adult movie houses in the city. I couldn't wait to get home each night and get a shower.
I spent endless hours in malls, theatres, hotel lobbies, and rented cars waiting to witness things that rarely occurred. When I wasn't staking somebody out, I was sitting in some damp government building going through old records to put together a background picture for a client who wouldn't even read the report nine times out of ten. But boring or not my detective work carried me through college and let me live out my fantasy of being a gumshoe.
Since my major was computer science, I transferred, upon graduation, to Intercontinental's electronic data division. Instead of leafing through index cards at the county courthouse, I would search electronic databases piecing together background histories and profiles of people under investigation. I seemed to have a flair for computers and eventually I landed up working for the computer fraud division and working on my Ph.D., which Intercontinental generously paid for. My specialty, and the topic of my dissertation, was amplifying algorithms. Most cases of computer fraud are difficult to detect. For example, if a programmer for a bank rounds an interest transaction to the nearest penny, several hundredths of a penny might be lost. Instead of loosing it, the programmer can simply deposit those hundredths of a cent into his own account. While it doesn't sound like much, if the programmer receives one hundredth of a cent on each of a hundred million interest calculations done in one year the accumulated value of his account could reach several hundred thousand dollars. Electronic embezzlements that are steady, very small amounts over a long time are extremely difficult to catch. Amplifying algorithms magnify small perturbations in electronic data and make computer fraud a little easier to spot.
In the days of mainframes, it was usually an insider who committed computer fraud. Somebody had to have access to the computer and its software in order to commit the fraud. With today's electronic communication, the whole nature of computer fraud has changed.
The basis for most business transactions in the real world is some form of identity. When a company hires an employee, or a customer is granted credit, the company usually verifies the identity of the person. Once that person's identity is verified it is checked again on each transaction. If the transaction is face to face the person is usually just recognized. If the transaction is on paper their signature is recognized. If one person signs another person's name they are, in essence, fraudulently assuming that person's identity. We take that very seriously and have severe penalties for forgery.
The verification of identity works the other way too. Company's develop a corporate identity and spend large amounts of money on brand name recognition. They are saying, in essence, we are who we say we are and we are good. A company's identity is compromised when bootleggers offer products that appear to made by the company but are not. Companies take this as seriously as individuals take forgery.
Identity is important because it is the basis for reliable and predictable behavior, which is the basis for commerce as well as many other social interactions. Identity is frequently, although not always, based on some sort of sensory data, usually visual or auditory. The problem with electronic commerce is that it has become very easy to produce false identities. When Smith and Jones meet in person they develop a sense of each other that becomes the basis of their interactions. Unless Smith or Jones is a con man, that sense is fairly reliable. Being a good con man is difficult because the sense is developed based on a wide variety of cues from facial expressions to body language that are difficult to fake and must be consistent with all other cues if they are to gain the trust of another.
As I dug into the issue of establishing identity I found that the concept of identity was one of the central problems in metaphysics and hence much deeper than I had ever imagined. Understanding this problem became a mission for me, eventually causing me to leave Intercontinental and join the ranks of academia so I could explore the concept of identity in a richer intellectual environment. I left Intercontinental to come to grips with the concept of identity. Little did I know that it was my own identity that I was in search of.