the price of freedom is eternal vigilance

– Thomas Jefferson


                              What we know about her is what she gives us

                              freely of her own will, one click wrap privacy

                              policy at a time, swiping across the slate of her life.
No red flags.  Some search terms did generate

a first filter identification, but typing ‘terrorism’

is now as statistically common as ‘Trump’.
                              Her occluded and overshadowed earth is

                              portaled by the parabolic sweep of satellites

                              and anything done in secret soon enters the light.
She has two children, shops mainly locally,

pings the same cell towers every commute

predictably enough.  We have adjusted our advertising.
                              The great collateral databases of the heart,

                              strung pin numbers, secret questions, blind

                              maiden names and first pets tangle the net.
A stable job, though debts exceed

income trending south, and her bank records

spot their charts with zeros.  Bills gush red.
                              She has transited through the sift

                              and wringer of Tom Bradley, LAX, losing

                              an electron slice of cornea imprint, thumb whirl.
Her blood type is on record: a cancer scare,

a spilled pool of vital statistics, medication frothing

in the loose file of her body, a brief miscarriage.
                              She is the gestalt of her words.

                              She is the hologram of her actions.

                              We know her as a mother knows her child.
Behavioural stochastics approximate

her next decisions to within a

reasonable margin of error.
                              We are building her schematic by the day

                              and daily we are focussed on learning her.

                              What we know is more than she can know.
That she was up all night with a fevered child

is a matter of publically recorded metadata.

Phone logs. Helplines. Invisible departures of information.
                              We are her god of a thousand eyes

                              peering at her from every camera and device.

                              She has nothing to fear from us.
That her husband left her, was a surprise

equally to us, as it was to her, but

we will continue to refine the algorithms.
                              The inner life is essentially irrelevant.

                              The circuitry of motive and emotion.

                              By her actions we will judge her.