Look, I’m not for 4th Amendment overreach but this PRISM thing. Let’s be honest…. I’m pretty proud of Americans for developing this ingenious piece of engineering. If it does what it claims to do (and not what the hype says it does), it’s nothing short of one of the major wonders of the modern world.

Think about it.

You, me, everyone… we live in patterns. We go to work, sit at the same desk, talk to the same people, have friends that we see regularly, talk to the roughly same set of people… every day.

But the patterns are not so simple. We may talk to all kinds of different people, go to all kinds of different places, drive all kinds of cars, use all kinds of sites, stay in all kinds of hotels, travel to all kinds of places… and that all seems random but there are patterns like job requirements, hobbies, personal enjoyment and other seemingly abstract glue that makes patterns out of all that too.

Somehow, NSA has found a way to see patterns. Patterns, patterns everywhere. Organized chaos. And seeing patterns helps them see when something is out of pattern. Dissonance. Unusual variety.

The fact that chaos theory can be analyzed in such a way… is truly a feat of engineering.