Crowdsourcing paranoia

Gaius Publius has posted at America Blog asking readers to share their most imaginative speculations as to what might be inside the black box that Gaius refers to as “data trafficking” (and Julian Assange refers to as “data laundering”). Being a speculator is of course not the same thing as being a conspiracy theorist. I hope the comment thread there will be long (both in number of comments and time-span), and intelligent, and demonstrable-in-principle. An expository statement on what inferences are possible given what data inputs. On what business models can be built around what information asymmetries. On what the implications are of the particular combinations of data collections known to be available to the US government, and to other entities.