The Surveillance State Is Primed for Criminalized Abortion

And a new report from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, published on Tuesday, lays out the ways in which police, prosecutors, and private litigants will be able to lean on existing data-access mechanisms and tracking tools to enforce state abortion bans.The research underscores what privacy advocates have been warning about for decades: A surveillance state built to track certain types of behavior can easily, and inevitably, be adapted to other ends.“None of the tactics we will see used to target pregnant people will be new,” says Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. A recent investigation by Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology showed just how far the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has been able to expand its surveillance powers by partnering with local and state agencies and combining numerous data sources into what the researchers dubbed the “American Dragnet.”STOP also warns that the law enforcement tactic of creating fake social media accounts to trick people into revealing their interests or intentions will slot into abortion investigations easily.