What Stays in Vegas (20 page)

Ann's story shows that in the Internet era it is possible to piece together clues about one's true identity with just a little information. Her story turned out to be particularly saucy. Ann and Tom had tried to live a secret alternative erotic life on the Internet, a folly that ended up causing her great embarrassment.

* * *

One spring afternoon in 2011, a California high school principal called a secretary into his office. As Ann entered, she saw the school policeman, complete with gun in holster, seated with the principal around a large conference table. “This is kind of weird,” the principal said. “I wanted the deputy here because I wanted someone else with me so that we wouldn't be alone in my office when I told you this.”

The head of the school told her they had found a compromising video in which she appeared. “Well, you're not in trouble or anything. We are mostly concerned about how your son will react,” he said.

The police deputy had a copy of an explicit video on his cell phone.

“Would you like to see what video we are talking about?”

Ann looked around the room. She glanced at a picture of the principal shaking hands with Ronald Reagan and banners showing the school mascot. With horror her eyes fixed upon the wide flat-screen television mounted on the wall. She certainly did not want them replaying her exploits writ large. Her face flushed red, her embarrassment complete.

“No, my husband just called me and told me about it, so I know which video you are talking about.”

It had all started out so innocently. In the early 2000s, Ann and Tom started posting family snapshots on the Internet for family and friends to see. They were slightly ahead of their time, posting on a public site a few years before Mark Zuckerberg talked to his Harvard professor Harry Lewis about building a prototype website for what became Facebook.

At first, the images portrayed tame everyday activities, some including their two children: the chili cook-off, an outing to a lake, a visit to Universal Studios, Father's Day. But in 2003, the images began attracting compliments from strangers on their online guestbook, especially those showing Ann wearing a revealing top or a bikini.

She and her husband decided to post more revealing images on a password-protected site, inviting their fans to take a peek—without family members stumbling upon the photos. Tom got a buzz from the attention Ann was getting (“I have a HOT wife,” he boasted in
one post), and Ann enjoyed the compliments. “We'd both get a little turned on or whatever by what people said. So maybe if we did put racier pictures up it would be hot or it would be sexy,” Ann says.

Ann posing for her husband. Source: Ann, surname withheld at her request
.

It excited her that unknown people far away found her sexy and attractive, and this unseen, remote enthusiasm sparked up their love life. “Sometimes we would read them together on the weekends. We'd sit down and go through them and, of course, it was sexually charging to do that, to see what people were saying,” she says.

Fans would request specific images, and they would comply: “We'd get all excited and if the kids were not home, we would take more pictures here and go somewhere on the weekends and post them and wait to see what people thought, hear their comments.”

Eventually family finances tightened, so Tom and Ann went a step further. Their best friends at the time, another couple, suggested the
plan, but Tom and Ann became enthusiastic accomplices. They set up their own website at midnight, January 1, 2006, and, for the first time, posted self-filmed sex videos of themselves. The other married couple also posted explicit film clips of themselves. They invited fans to join the site for $24.95 per month, or $59.95 for three months. Within hours, $5,000 in subscription payments had poured in. They split the revenue with the other couple and celebrated their overnight financial success.

Eventually shooting video for the site made marital intimacy feel like a chore. They faced constant interruptions to adjust the lighting, make sure they exposed good angles, change positions, or check the camera. On top of that, they realized they could not prevent other people from reposting their images. Ann's popularity on the Internet was spreading too far, too fast. Without asking her permission, a dating site for those over forty used her photo, which annoyed her because she was then in her mid-thirties. One blog posted one of her images, apparently drawing the notice of a relative. “That would be my Aunt . . . kind of weird seeing stuff like this on the net,” her niece wrote.

Ann began to feel self-conscious in public. Did others know about the videos? Did people in stores and on the street smile at her out of friendliness or because they had seen her naked? It was one thing to excite a remote unseen person. She found that arousing. But if neighbors, friends, or school colleagues were watching, that was creepy. Her husband, who worked in a professional services firm, also appeared in the videos but had hidden his face (other parts of his anatomy starred in the productions), so no one could recognize him. “I was naïve, and I thought nobody was going to notice. It became a bigger deal than I thought it would become, and I didn't like it,” she says. “Back then, it still seemed like the Internet was kind of new. I'm a nobody—who thought it would spread?”

Within a few months, Ann and Tom decided to shut down their site. Eventually Ann got a job as a high school secretary, and her brief fling with explicit video faded from memory. Then over a lunch break during the late spring of 2011, a school guard saw an excited group of students huddled around a cell phone under a tree. She went over to
see what was causing the stir and recognized Ann in a sex video. Word arrived first to Tom, and he called his wife.

Tom and Ann had devised a cover story in case their children ever learned about the explicit videos: the couple had sold a computer at a yard sale without erasing the hard drive. Someone had found the images and posted them online. In the principal's office, Ann carefully recited the tale to the two school officials. It was not clear if they were buying the story, but the principal did not take a harsh tone. He paused for a moment and asked her how she was doing.

“I just feel embarrassed, really embarrassed that this came out,” Ann said.

“Don't be embarrassed. I have the utmost respect for you and your husband and your family, there's nothing for you to feel awkward about.”

She asked the school to minimize the publicity. But it was already too late. Word about the videos spread like wildfire. She typically dressed fairly conservatively, but once students heard about her wild side, they wanted a second look. Boys, ignited by the fantasy of the sexually adventurous school secretary, peeked into her office, stared at her, turned, and left.

Ann felt so uncomfortable that she quit after the semester ended and transferred to another job. She became paranoid. It seemed that everyone knew about her past effort to lead a double life. Eventually she quit working entirely. “Back before, ten years ago, when you put pictures up on the Internet, there was total anonymity. But it's not like that anymore,” Tom says. “You can see now you put a picture up on the Internet and you get a guy from Harvard calling you up on your cell phone.”

More than a year after I first called them, Ann and Tom separated after twenty-four years together. She said their flirtation with an Internet double life was one of the reasons for the split.

Also many months after finding Tom and Ann, I received a telephone call from a Las Vegas–area number. The woman introduced herself as a former Instant Checkmate call center worker in Las Vegas. We had spoken months before when I called to ask the company to
comment on my research. She had said nothing at the time. But she had kept my number and could speak openly now that she had been dismissed. She said call center workers routinely do not give their real last names.
⁴
“Any emails you've ever received from them, they are from employees, of course, but it's not their actual names,” she said. “That's just the way they have it designed, it's always that way.”

What about the name I had spent so much time hunting down? “There is no Kristen Bright,” she confirmed.
⁵

Kris Kibak, the founder of Instant Checkmate, later admitted the same. He said a third-party contractor helping his company with search engine optimization created the identities for Kristen Bright and Michael Smith, who was also quoted as speaking on behalf of the company. And he said call center workers did not give their real surnames. “As you can appreciate, some people aren't keen on having information about them—for example, an arrest record—available online and can get upset,” Kibak says. “Because of this, I understand that the contractor used pseudonyms rather than actual employee names for reasons related to employee safety.”

He said his company did not create or instruct anyone to create the Yelp page, and he said he had not known about Ann's photo being used without her permission.
⁶

The hunt for the woman who was not Kristen Bright highlighted that in the Internet age, we all leave clues about ourselves—even when attempting to hide our real identities. You may not post photos of yourself in the buff as Ann did, but we all reveal details about ourselves by leaving naked data on the Internet and in public records. It took a while to find her using a mix of old-style detective work and technology. In the future, identifying people through photos or video images will be easier and faster. Casinos will be among the businesses pushing for more intelligent “eyes in the sky,” and a lot of money is at stake.

11

Thousands of Eyes

Inside the Surveillance Room

It's a typical Friday evening inside the surveillance room of the ARIA Resort and Casino. The nerve center of an $18 million security system at a five-star facility, the room evokes a high-tech, sophisticated look. As at all casinos, the cameras record vast amounts of activity every day, but actually spotting suspicious activity falls to human surveillance and security officers. At a big casino hotel, three to six people per shift watch what is happening across the thousands of cameras.

They look for certain patterns of behavior suggesting a thief or a con, and rely on internal and external databases about people. They see all the joy, the foibles, the antics of hundreds of thousands of people coming through a typical large casino on the Las Vegas Strip every week. The overwhelming majority of these people are law-abiding, but a few regularly try to cheat or steal from the casino and its patrons. At the ARIA's surveillance room, two rows of large-screen televisions line a long back wall, and a third row continues along a bank of desks where three officials monitor the screens. A supervisor watches from a central desk at the back of the room.

A burly surveillance officer with a shaved head starts studying an incident brought to his attention by a casino staffer. A slot machine player sitting next to his wife asked a cocktail waitress to bring him a bottle of mineral water. The refreshment came free of charge, a regular perk for gamblers. He handed the waitress a bill and asked for change to give her a tip. When she returned with $20 in smaller bills,
he complained that he had given her $100. The officer skips back the digital video. He follows the path of the waitress from the moment the gambler hands her the money. He sees her walk to the side of the room and place the bill into a change machine. It turns out the client is not always right. The surveillance officer could make out that the waitress had put a $20 bill into the machine. The staff tell the gambler what they had seen. He responds that he must have made a mistake. They take him at his word. They have captured his name from his loyalty card in the slot machine and they log the incident, in case he makes trouble in the future.

Another incident unfolds on a different bank of surveillance monitors. Again, it is not the fast action Hollywood viewers might expect from a movie such as
Ocean's Eleven
. It shows the day-to-day reality of what happens in a casino. A young man without a shirt or shoes reclines on the floor next to one of the slot machines near the lobby entrance. A slot attendant approaches; the man stumbles to his feet. The shirtless dude had clearly been taking advantage of Vegas's reputation for indulgence of alcohol. Several security guards try to escort him off the property. But the disoriented man does not comply. He throws up in front of one of the slot machines. Eventually, guards sit him in a wheelchair and roll him out the door. As a cleaning woman arrives to erase the unfortunate mess, the surveillance officer retraces the man's steps to see where he had come from. He suspects the man had been at the hotel's pool. The video shows he had wandered in shirtless from the street on a day when the temperature was above ninety degrees. The staff also logs the incident, cognizant that sometimes criminals plan such episodes as diversions for crimes elsewhere in the casino.