The image is the cover of a book titled The Hank Show by McKenzie Funk. The background is dark, with a single spotlight illuminating a man in a suit who stands at the center of the image. He is facing forward and casts a long shadow behind him, emphasizing the dramatic lighting and mysterious tone.

Book cover of "The Hank Show: How a House-Painting, Drug-Running DEA Informant Built the Machine That Rules Our Lives" by M. Funk, 2023, St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Copyright 2023 by St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

McKenzie Funk

Journalist and author of The Hank Show

McKenzie Funk is a journalist and the author of "The Hank Show" (2023) and the PEN Literary Award-winning "Windfall" (2014). In 2023, he joined the staff of ProPublica, where he covers immigration, privacy, and climate change. His writing previously appeared in Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Outside, Harper’s, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books.

Immigration, ICE, data, tracking

The lecture will focus on the surveillance legacy of the odd character at the center of Funk’s 2023 book "The Hank Show," a Florida data broker (and former cocaine smuggler) named Hank Asher. His creations—evolving digital dossiers on each and every one of us—now run inside most of the country's biggest banks, most Fortune 500 companies, and most of our 18,000 law enforcement agencies—including ICE. But one of his most invasive initiatives, the federally funded post-9/11 MATRIX program (Multi-state Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange), became so controversial that his company abandoned it in June 2005. Two decades later, the MATRIX is being reformed under Donald Trump, with immigrants once again bearing the initial brunt.

Mr. Funk is a National Magazine Award finalist and a former MacDowell, Open Society, and Logan Nonfiction fellow. He was a 2012 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he studied economics and systems thinking. He is a founding board member of the arts nonprofit Amplifier. He speaks five languages and is a native of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives with his wife and sons.

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

The School of Architecture and Planning is an AIA CES Approved Provider. This course is AIA CES Registered and approved for 1.5 Learning Unit (LU).