Here's a recent collection of data-mining articles, discussing the extraction of relevant information from vast quantities of data.

• US News discusses the application of the Cyc knowledge base no military purposes; Cyc-ing out the Terrorists.
• The IEEE has an interesting article about big brother, but under water - Listening In. The detection of submarine communication and cracking the code is a tough problem, reminiscent of the cold war.
• In the same IEEE Spectrum, there's another similar article about Getting The Message, discussing mining information from a more general perspective.
• Wired explains one of the most topical data-mining problems around, in How Antispam Software Works. 5 killer ways to eradicate junk mail!
• Business Week discusses the application of data-mining to industry and commerce, in domains ranging from health care to finance and retailing; Smart Tools
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• BBC News presents a BSc project that can use collaborative filtering to suggest preferences to music listeners -- Website Offers New View of Music. Find the Audioscrobbler site here.
• Discover.com has a great article about mapping social interactions using data-mining and pattern recognition; Who Loves Ya, Baby?
• US News again has an article about Digging Through Data for Omens. It discusses security screening in airports, and ways AI can speed this up by guessing the safe people.
• Generation 5 has a tutorial about a common tool used in data-mining: Decision Trees in Prolog.
• NY Times has a paying article about privacy and data-mining & storage -- Data Expert Is Cautious About Misuse Of Information.
• The Post Gazette reports that this same topic is an important issue for academics; Privacy in age of Data Mining Topic of Workshop at CMU

That should keep you busy for at least a few minutes.