Hi, I'm Rann Levy.

Welcome to Sabirism's malicious life podcast. On May 31st, 2009 at 10 or 3 a.m. 67 year old George Tiller was shot in the

head in the lobby of his local church in Wichita, Kansas.

Tiller was targeted for being one of America's most well-known providers for abortions.

In three and a half decades he'd survived

countless protests, firebombing, and getting shot in both arms. His eventual

murderer was enabled by something called the Tiller Watch, a web page created by the extremist organization Operation Rescue, which actively monitored the doctor's life.

Crazy as that sounds, religious extremists in America

have frequently used surveillance as a tool to fight abortions.

Providers regularly get threats in the mail and of course at their

workplaces.

According to Jezebel, a tabloid website, some groups in Texas have been trained to track doctors and patients of abortion clinics

by their physical features, license plates and tax records. Most famous of all was

the so-called Nuremberg files, a list maintained by Georgia resident

Neil Horsley which contained photographs, phone numbers, home addresses, and other

personal information belonging to roughly 200 doctors.

You can think of this as the historical context for 2015 when John Flynn, a Boston, Massachusetts-based advertising executive, devised a rather unique business.

Flynn had observed a very obvious reality of our world today that advertisers can know everything

useful there is to know about you right down to where you are at any given point in the day

and utilize it in a way that could make even Mark Zuckerberg

cringe, using data mining to trick young women into having babies they didn't want.

A PowerPoint presentation Flynn made for potential investors

...