Not OP, but here you go.

OP had it slightly wrong though: it's not tavern records but membership lists of colonial Boston organizations, and the author is a sociology professor (Kieran Healy), not from Princeton or Harvard.

He uses basic social network analysis on historical membership data to identify Paul Revere as the key figure among 254 colonists using nothing but "metadata." The whole thing is written as a satirical report by a British intelligence analyst in the 1770s, which makes it a pretty effective commentary on the "it's just metadata" argument from the NSA debates.

Link: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

Isn't he also making the point that's a very effective way to triangulate the leaders of an org? That's just going to reinforce the NSA's inclination to do so.