When you factored in time and sequence, the results were startling. “A likely storyline emerges,” Felten wrote, when “a young woman calls her gynecologist; then immediately calls her mother; then a man who, during the past few months, she had repeatedly spoken to on the telephone after 11 pm; followed by a call to a family planning center that also offers abortions.” The government may seldom care, may never abuse that knowledge in a given year. But now, for the first time in history, it had acquired the power to do so.
