shut in the nuthouse

A Texas sheriff’s office ran a nationwide search across more than 83,000 automated license plate reader cameras from Flock Safety to track a woman who’d self-managed an abortion. The officer’s own search log said the reason: “had an abortion, search for female.” Those cameras included networks in states where abortion is legal, like Washington and Illinois, turning “local public safety tech” into a cross-country dragnet for punishing health care decisions.

Illinois officials later found that Flock’s cameras were being used and shared in ways that violated state law meant to protect people seeking abortion care and immigrants from being tracked, and launched audits and enforcement that forced the company to cut off broad access and supposedly flag “abortion” searches. In other words: they built the machine first, and only started pretending to add guardrails after it was caught doing exactly what privacy advocates warned about.

This is what our tax dollars are funding: an ever-expanding web of “public safety” cameras that quietly becomes a tool to enforce abortion bans and immigration crackdowns, not to protect our communities. These systems record billions of plate scans a month and hand local cops the power to run nationwide dragnets with a couple keystrokes, based on someone’s most intimate medical choices.

I’m old enough to remember when we pointed at China and called it a surveillance state, warning about the dangers of a government that tracks people’s movements to control their lives. Now American police can sit at a desk in Texas and sweep through tens of thousands of cameras across the country to hunt down a woman for having an abortion her own state made illegal. Every accusation is an admission: we exported the rhetoric, then quietly imported the architecture.

If you can be tracked across state lines for getting health care, does “state where abortion is legal” even mean anything?