dot-connecting

— Because of the movie’s focus on the digging and dot-connecting that go into investigative reporting, it has invited comparisons to “All the President’s Men.”

— The Pentagon's infamous Total Information Awareness program, which came to light in 2002, was intended to scoop up information on citizens from a variety of sources – commercial purchase databases, government records – and mine it for suggestive terrorism connections. But to many Americans, this sort of dot-connecting activity seemed like an outrageous violation of privacy, and soon after it was exposed, the program was killed.