In William Gibson's novel _Idoru_, one character has a gift for discerning "nodal points," the emergent patterns in nested aggregates of data, clearly enough to make predictions. The key to the pattern is the person whose personality gives coherence to the data.

A friend who does "cybersleuthing" tells me it is nearly impossible to eradicate the pattern created by our choices. She has helped to create identities from whole cloth for people in the witness protection program, but says there is nearly always some leakage.

She once tracked a man who had changed identities three times as he moved across the country. He could not erase his preference for petite brunettes, and that factor led her to him.

In a world in which the patterns of our behavior are updated daily in massive databanks, what does it mean to be free?

I flash back on sixteen years of counselling experience. I built up a massive internal database of patterns of behavior. When someone started talking, it was often only a matter of minutes before I could guess what was happening in the family and even what the pattern had been for several generations. With one piece of a jigsaw puzzle, we can pretty much build the puzzle, piece by piece.

I learned, however, that seeing and saying what I saw was the booby prize. In order to be helpful, I had to say what I saw at the right time, after our relationship had evolved.

To discern a pattern is easy. But to what end do we choose to use our knowledge? That's where freedom comes in. Freedom is a function of intentionality.

The "chaos factor" at the heart of real hacking is the ability to make choices with such a high degree of intentionality that the pattern is unpredictable.

for DA