It's the collaboration of the state and private contractors in documenting everything to computers. The process started around the 1970s - mostly with police departments using crimes of the past to, er, "predict" where future crimes will happen (ie, they put the number of incidents in a calculator and did an extrapolation).

Half a century latter, there's a lot of documentation. So much. In private databases, federal databases -- plus everything that's accessible online. It's impossible for a person to actually sort through, so we automate the sorting. It's like extrapolating from incidents, but also adding in keyword sorting and evolutionary trial-&-error algorithms.