Most of our previous espionage missions focused on bulk data collection and processing. HQ doesn't always want details. Sometimes it needs summaries and assessments. This means calculating central tendencies, summaries, trends, and correlations, which means we need to write more sophisticated algorithms.

We will skirt the borders of some very heavy-duty statistical algorithms. Once we cross the frontier, we will need more powerful tools. For additional tools to support sophisticated numeric processing, check http://www.numpy.org. For some analyses, we may be more successful using the SciPy package (http://www.scipy.org). A good book to refer is Learning SciPy for Numerical and Scientific Computing, Francisco J. Blanco-Silva, Packt Publishing (http://www.packtpub.com/learning-scipy-for-numerical-and-scientific-computing/book).

Another direction we could be pulled in includes the analysis of natural language documents. Reports, speeches, books...