*****
Over at the NSA at Ft Mead, Fluffy and Ingrid were grinding away at their endless task of scanning phone calls, emails, and internet traffic that literally spanned the globe every second or so. Between them, they were beginning to notice an increasing number of connections to the phone calls recorded from somewhere on the Northern Saudi border a day or two earlier, even though the specific line they were supposed to be tracking in this instance had not been used again since that time. They were "noticing" this in the way that software "notices" of course: each had started a table that counted and catalogued the connections to that call. The tables only existed internal to their software, and would only provide a high-level alert to anyone or anything else once a threshold number of hits was recorded. This had not yet occurred. Ingrid had calculated that at the current rate the threshold in her software might be exceeded sometime on Monday afternoon, but the probability of this happening was only at 50% at present. Fluffy had amassed something a little closer to her threshold for this contact and had sent one automatic email to a CIA address provided earlier Saturday morning by an NSA analyst. Still, Fluffy predicted that her high alert threshold might be reached at about 3 a.m. on Monday morning. She was just over 70% confident that this would occur. Because of this, Fluffy was now running a special subroutine against this particular table, an innovation designed to speed up the alert process in cases where intuition might think something was significant before it was statistically significant. Thus, the arrival of each new bit of data was compared to the table, looking for connections of any kind to at least 5 existing table entries. The instant such a new contact might be found the subroutine would automatically set the high-alert warning to "True", which would start all kinds of external notifications regardless of whether Fluffy's threshold had been met or not.
Until that happened, Fluffy was not programmed to send any further alerts for this contact.