It’s one of those cybernetic things — pattern recognition is about programming computers to classify random data according to statistical or hypothetical patterns. Why? So they’ll know, that’s why. Know what? So they’ll know if you’re a terrorist or not, if you’re pregnant or not, if you like chocolate or not, or if you have any clue that your actions are being monitored at this very moment or not. If it sounds extreme, don’t forget all those little spyware cookies accumulating information about your behavior every time you get on the Internet and reporting back to them, whoever they are. But this is just a rather new ripple in a very old story. History is all about patterns, after all.
D. Eric Bookhardt, The Gambit Weekly (February 6, 2007) (New Orleans, LA) p. 77
