Substack

A recent post of mine on Substack.

March 20, 2026

Commercially Available Information

The man was found in the bathtub of a second-floor flat on Mill Road, which is to say he was found in the kind of bathtub you only see in Cambridge: claw-footed, original to the building, recently re-enameled by a landlord who probably raised the rent to cover it. He was wearing a suit. This was the first thing Patricia Okafor noted, because men who drown in bathtubs do not generally dress for board meetings first. The second thing she noted was that his wrists were bound with a cable tie, which suggested he had not climbed in voluntarily for a soak. The third thing, and the one that would eventually make this Marcel Dubidon’s problem rather than strictly hers, was the laminated card pinned to his lapel, the kind you might see at a conference, except this one read: Commercially Available Information.

“Someone has a sense of humor,” Marcel said, when Patricia called him to the scene. He stood in the bathroom doorway, not entering, because he had learned long ago that detectives with PhDs in linguistics do not appreciate amateurs contaminating their evidence. “Or a thesis.”

Patricia did not look up from where she was crouched by the tub. “The card was printed on a standard office printer. Cheap paper. Laminate from a stationery shop. Nothing fancy. The message is the point.”

“The message being that he died for data.”

“The message being that someone wants us to know he died for data. There’s a difference.” She stood, flexing her knees. “His name was Daniel O’Connell. Irish passport in his jacket. Worked for a consultancy called Veritas Strategic. Ever heard of them?”

Marcel had not. But he knew someone who might have.

Eve Kopeles was three hours into a six-hour seminar on structural power asymmetries in post-industrial surveillance economies when her phone buzzed. She ignored it, because she was in the middle of explaining to a room full of graduate students that the word consent had undergone a semantic shift in the past decade, moving from an affirmative agreement between parties to a checkbox buried in terms of service that nobody reads. This was, she argued, not a linguistic accident but a structural necessity: if you can redefine consent as failure to object, you can redefine privacy as failure to conceal.
Her phone buzzed again. Then again.

She glanced at it. Marcel’s code: Come. Mill Road. Interesting.

This was the thing about their marriage. When Marcel said interesting, he meant someone is dead in a way that will require philosophical translation. Eve gathered her notes, assigned two hundred pages of reading, and left the seminar room with the particular velocity of a woman who has learned that power structures do not pause for academic schedules.

By the time she arrived, the body had been removed and Patricia had established a temporary command post in the flat’s kitchen, which was small and white and smelled faintly of cumin. The dead man’s flat mate was sitting at the table, wrapped in a foil blanket despite the fact that the heating was on and the room was warm. He was a PhD student in computer science, which Eve deduced from the stack of papers on the counter before he opened his mouth.

“The thing is,” he said, not to anyone in particular, “he was paranoid. Daniel. He used Signal for everything. Burner phones. He had a Faraday cage in his bedroom.”

“A Faraday cage,” Patricia repeated.

“For blocking signals. He was worried about surveillance. Not the obvious kind — the ambient kind. Data he couldn’t see moving.” The flatmate looked at his hands. “He read a lot. He understood a lot. That was the problem, I think. The more he understood, the less he trusted.”

Eve and Marcel exchanged a glance. This was the Cambridge they knew: knowledge as a source of dread rather than comfort.

“When did you last see him?” Patricia asked.

“Last night. He was working. He was always working. Veritas kept him busy.”

“Doing what?”

The flat mate hesitated. This was the moment Eve had learned to watch for, the micro-pause that precedes either a lie or a truth the speaker does not yet know how to frame.
“He found things. Information. For clients. Like a private investigator, but for data. He called it intelligence gathering. I called it Googling for money, but he said it was more sophisticated. He said he could find anything about anyone, if the price was right.”
“Including location data,” Eve said. It was not a question.

The flat mate looked at her. “That was the easy part. He said you could buy that from brokers for pennies. The hard part was making it legal.”

“Was it?” Marcel asked. “Legal?”

Another hesitation. “He said it was. He said everything he did was commercially available information. That was his phrase. He used it a lot. It’s not surveillance, it’s commerce. He thought that made it okay.”

The phrase hung in the kitchen. The same words that had appeared on the dead man’s lapel, laminated like a business card, pinned like a verdict.

Veritas Strategic occupied the third floor of a building on Sidney Street, above a bubble tea shop and next to a dentist. The office was small: three desks, four computers, a whiteboard covered in names and arrows that meant nothing to Marcel but would mean something to Eve, who was already photographing it with her phone. The receptionist, a young man with a beard that looked engineered rather than grown, had initially refused to let them in without a warrant, but Patricia had shown her badge and explained, in the patient tone she used for undergraduates, that she was not asking.

Daniel O’Connell’s desk was the one by the window. His computer was password-protected, but the receptionist, whose name was Tom, provided the code after approximately ninety seconds of moral discomfort.

“His clients,” Patricia said, scrolling through emails. “Mostly corporate. Due diligence, background checks, that sort of thing. But here…” She stopped. “Here’s something. A man named Michael Tierney. American. He hired Daniel three months ago to investigate someone.”

“Investigate who?”

“An immigration officer. Name redacted in the emails, but the payments are large. Twenty thousand pounds, then another twenty. That’s not due diligence. That’s opposition research.”

Eve had moved to the whiteboard. “These names. Look at the connections.” She traced a line with her finger. “Tierney. There’s a Tierney in here. And here. And here.” She turned to face them. “Michael Tierney is a fixer. He works for people who need things done quietly. I’ve seen his name in documents from a dozen different investigations, always on the periphery, always just out of frame.”

“What kind of things?” Marcel asked.

“The kind that involve data. Location data, mostly. He buys it from brokers and sells it to clients who need to know where people are. Immigration enforcement. Private security. The occasional divorce lawyer. He’s a middleman. A data laundromat.”

Patricia was still reading the emails. “Daniel found something. Something about the immigration officer. He emailed Tierney three days ago, said he needed to meet in person. Tierney agreed. They met at a pub near the station. The day after that, Daniel is dead in his bathtub with a cable tie around his wrists and a card on his lapel.”

“The card,” Marcel said. “The phrase. Commercially available information. That’s not just a message. It’s a signature.”

“It’s a mockery,” Eve said. “Someone is saying: this is what happens to people who trade in information. They become information themselves.”

The immigration officer’s name was Amina Diallo. She worked for UK Visas and Immigration, which meant she spent her days deciding who could enter the country and who could not. She was based in Croydon, but she had grown up in Cambridge, and she still came back on weekends to visit her mother, who lived in a terraced house on Ainsworth Street.

Patricia found her there, two days after Daniel O’Connell’s body was discovered. Amina was in the garden, pruning roses, wearing gardening gloves and an expression of deep suspicion.

“I’ve been expecting someone,” she said, not looking up from the roses. “Not you specifically. But someone.”

“Why?”

Amina snipped a dead branch. “Because I made a decision. Three months ago. I denied a visa application. Routine stuff, on the surface. A young man from Ghana wanted to come study at Anglia Ruskin. His paperwork was in order, his finances were adequate, his English was fine. But something felt wrong. I checked a little deeper. Turned out he was connected to a group that the Home Office has been watching. Nothing concrete, just whispers. But I denied it anyway. That’s my job.”

“And?”

“And two weeks later, someone from Veritas called my supervisor, asking questions about me. Background check, they said. Standard procedure for a consultancy doing work with the Home Office. But it wasn’t standard. They wanted to know where I lived, where I went, who I saw. They wanted to know about my mother.”

Eve, who had accompanied Patricia because Marcel was following a different thread, leaned forward. “Did they get the information?”

“I don’t know. My supervisor said he didn’t tell them anything. But he’s not…” She paused, choosing her words carefully. “He’s not the kind of man who understands data. He probably thought he was being helpful. He probably told them more than he realized.”

“The young man from Ghana,” Eve said. “The one you denied. What happened to him?”

Amina finally looked up. “He’s still in Ghana, as far as I know. But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that someone wanted to know about me. Someone wanted to know if I could be pressured, or threatened, or… I don’t know what. But they were gathering information. They were building a file.”

“A file that Daniel O’Connell was paid to compile,” Patricia said.

“Daniel O’Connell?” The name meant nothing to Amina.

“He’s dead. Someone killed him on Monday.”

Amina’s hand tightened on the pruning shears. For a long moment, she said nothing. Then: “Was it because of me?”

“We don’t know yet. But we think it was because of something he found. Something about the person who hired him.”

“The American. Tierney.”

“You know about Tierney?”

“I know his type. He’s the kind of man who thinks information is a weapon. He’s the kind of man who thinks privacy is something other people don’t deserve.” She looked down at the roses. “My mother taught me about people like that. She said they’re the most dangerous ones, because they never think they’re doing anything wrong. They always have a justification. They always have a phrase that makes it sound clean.”

“Like commercially available information,” Eve said.

Amina nodded. “Exactly like that.”

Marcel found Michael Tierney at the University Arms Hotel, having afternoon tea in the lounge. He was a compact man in an expensive suit, with the particular stillness of someone who is accustomed to being watched and has learned not to react. When Marcel sat down across from him, he did not look surprised.

“You’re the private detective,” Tierney said. “The one who’s been asking questions.”

“I prefer inquiry agent. It sounds less like I carry a magnifying glass.”

Tierney smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. “What do you want?”

“To understand. Daniel O’Connell is dead. You were his last client. You met him the day before he died. I want to know what he told you.”

“He told me he had found something interesting. He wouldn’t say what over the phone.

He wanted to meet in person. So we met.” Tierney picked up his cup, held it without drinking. “He told me the information I had asked for was more complicated than he expected.”

“What information?”

“The immigration officer. Diallo. I wanted to know if she had any vulnerabilities. Anyone she cared about, anyone who could be persuaded. Standard work.”

“Standard,” Marcel said. He let the word sit there.

Tierney set down the cup. “It’s what I do. People hire me to find things out. I hire people like O’Connell to dig deeper. It’s a chain. Everyone in the chain gets paid.”

“Except Daniel O’Connell.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“He’s dead in his bathtub, and you’re the last person he met.”

“I said it wasn’t me.” A muscle tightened along Tierney’s jaw. “I buy information. I move it. That’s all. I don’t send people to do that.”

Marcel studied him. “Tell me about the card on his chest. Commercially available information. That phrase — that’s yours, isn’t it. That’s how your world talks about data. That’s the justification.”

Something shifted in Tierney’s expression. Not guilt, Marcel thought. Something closer to discomfort. Being identified rather than accused.

“There are people who don’t like this trade,” Tierney said, quieter now. “People who think it should be shut down. Regulated. Some of them have strong views about it.”
“Strong enough to kill?”

“I don’t know who killed him. I genuinely don’t. He found something. Whatever it was, it was enough.” Tierney looked at the table. “But it wasn’t me. I lose money when my researchers die.”

“What did he find?” Marcel asked. “The thing that was more complicated than he expected.”

Tierney was silent long enough that Marcel began to think he wouldn’t answer. Then: “He said it was about the young man. The one from Ghana. The one Diallo denied. He said there was a connection — something running back to the States. Something bigger than a visa application. He said he needed one more day to verify it. He’d call when he had it.”

He looked up. His eyes were flat, and in them Marcel could see not grief exactly, but the particular blankness of a man who has just understood the dimensions of what he is connected to.

“He never called,” Tierney said.

The connection to the States was Eve’s domain. She spent two days on the phone, calling colleagues, contacts she had made during her years studying power structures and how they metastasize. By the third day, she had a name.

Burgess Philips.

He was a Washington operator — former government, now private, with a long record of arguing that commercially available data was simply a market good, no different from any other. His position, refined over years, was this: if a data broker could sell your location to an advertiser, the government could buy it too. No warrant required. No search in the constitutional sense. Just a transaction. The Fourth Amendment, in his framing, was not a protection. It was a pricing problem.

“He’s been pushing this for years,” Eve said. “He’s built a practice around it. Consulting, lobbying, litigation support. The commercially available information loophole is essentially his architecture.”

“And Daniel O’Connell?”

“Found a link. Between whoever hired Tierney to investigate Diallo, and someone in Philips’s orbit. Someone who wanted to know about immigration officers who deny visas to certain people. Someone who wanted to build files on them, pressure them.” She paused. “O’Connell wasn’t just a researcher. He was paranoid, remember? The Faraday cage. The burner phones. He kept records. He kept copies of everything he found. And when he understood what he had stumbled into, he made a choice. He didn’t give it to Tierney. He held onto it. He wanted to decide what to do with it.”

“Which is why he was killed.”

“Which is why he was killed. Someone found out what he had. Someone came to his flat, restrained him, and drowned him. And then pinned a card to his chest, mocking him with the phrase he had used to justify his own work.”

Patricia, who had been listening, spoke. “The card. The laminate. We traced it. A print shop on King Street. Paid for in cash. But the shop has cameras.”

She pulled out her phone, showed them the image. A man, middle-aged, nondescript. But Eve recognized him.

“That’s one of Tierney’s people. A fixer. He handles physical work.”

“Then Tierney lied,” Marcel said.

“He keeps his hands clean. Intermediaries, cash, distance. He’s very practiced at it.”

Marcel looked at the image. Then at Eve. Then at Patricia.

“So, we have a dead man who found something he shouldn’t have. A fixer who works for a data broker. A data broker with connections to a Washington architect of the commercially available information loophole. And an immigration officer who denied a visa to a young man with connections nobody has explained.”

“Connections to what?” Patricia asked.

Eve smiled. It was not a happy smile. “That’s the question, isn’t it.”

The answer came from Daniel O’Connell’s own files. Patricia found them on the Veritas server during a second pass through the evidence — a folder, password-protected, labelled GH. She had the force’s technical unit crack it, and inside was a single document.

The document was a report. It detailed the young man from Ghana. His name was Kwame Asare. His student visa application had been flawless. But Daniel had dug deeper and found that Kwame Asare was not a student. He was an intelligence asset, recruited by a private firm in the States that did contract work for government-adjacent clients. His assignment was to enter the UK, establish himself, and begin gathering information on British immigration enforcement — specifically, on officers who denied visas to people from certain countries. The firm wanted to know who was blocking their people. They wanted to know how to pressure them, discredit them, or remove them.

The firm’s name was not in the report. But there was a reference, buried in a footnote: Funding traceable to entities associated with M. Tierney, ultimately deriving from US-based interests connected to B. Philips.

Marcel read it three times. “He wasn’t just researching immigration officers. He was researching the people who wanted to research them. He found the whole chain. And then he died for it.”

“He died for commercially available information,” Eve said. “Which is to say, he died because information is never just available. It’s always someone’s. It’s always for something. It’s always a weapon, if you know how to use it.”

Patricia was already on the phone. But they both knew where this would end. Tierney would deny everything. The fixer would disappear. The connection to Philips was too indirect, too layered with intermediaries and laundered money and plausible deniability. The report was evidence, but not proof. Not the kind that would stand up in court.

“What do we do?” Marcel asked.

Eve considered the question. It was, she thought, the wrong one. The right question was not what we do but what does the information do. Information, once released, had its own velocity. It moved in ways you could not predict.

“We give it to Amina Diallo. She’s the one who denied the visa. She’s the one who was targeted. She should know why. And then we let her decide.”

“And if she does nothing?”

“She won’t do nothing. She’s her mother’s daughter. She understands that information is only a weapon if you keep it secret. Once it’s public, it becomes something else. It becomes a shield.”

Marcel nodded. It was not justice. It was not even closure. But it was something.

In the end, Amina Diallo did not go public. She did not call a press conference or leak the report to the Guardian. Instead, she used it quietly, internally. She sent it to the Home Office’s security team, with a note explaining what she had found. She suggested that someone might want to investigate whether other immigration officers had been targeted, whether other visa decisions had been influenced, whether there was a pattern.

The security team investigated. They found nothing conclusive. But they noted the report. They filed it. They flagged the names.

Six months later, Michael Tierney was denied entry to the United Kingdom at Heathrow Airport. No reason was given. He was simply turned around and put on the next flight back to New York. His fixer, the man from the print shop camera, was arrested trying to leave the country on a false passport. He was charged with immigration offences. The charge had nothing to do with Daniel O’Connell, but he would spend two years in a British prison anyway.

Burgess Philips continued to argue his case in Washington. He continued to invoke market logic and constitutional precision. He continued to insist that the Fourth Amendment was alive and well, provided you understood it correctly — not as a protection, but as a boundary condition on commerce.

But somewhere in the files of the Home Office, there was a report. It mentioned his name. It connected him to a dead researcher in Cambridge, a young man from Ghana who was not who he seemed, and an immigration officer who pruned roses on weekends and thought about her mother’s warnings.

The report changed nothing. But it existed. And existence, as Eve often said, was the first requirement of accountability.

Marcel Dubidon went back to walking the streets of Cambridge, noticing things. Patricia Okafor went back to solving crimes that could be solved. Eve Kopeles went back to her seminar on structural power asymmetries, where she told her graduate students about a dead man in a bathtub, a card pinned to his lapel, and the phrase that killed him.

Commercially available information, she said, is not a description. It is an ideology. It is the belief that everything can be priced, that nothing is sacred, that privacy is just another product in the great marketplace of modern life. And ideologies, she told them, have consequences. They get people killed.

The students took notes. The afternoon light slanted through the windows. Somewhere, data moved through wires, bought and sold and traded, and somewhere a report sat in a file, and the file sat in a drawer, and the drawer was locked, but it existed.

That was enough. Or it was all there was. In this work, the two were often the same thing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​