Imagine, several months from now, a pregnant woman in Texas traveling to New York to obtain an abortion. When she's about to fly back, a friend phones to warn her there's an arrest warrant waiting for her, because police in her home state used a "keyword warrant" to monitor everyone in their area who'd searched a particular term online — say, "abortion clinics in New York" — and then obtained a "geofence warrant" to track her to a Planned Parenthood facility in Manhattan. The woman becomes part of a population the U.S. hasn't seen in recent history: an internally-displaced person, unable to travel home under threat of arrest and prosecution.
Or imagine a woman in the Deep South, who in her last weeks of pregnancy, delivers a stillborn fetus at home, and, when she's taken to the hospital, encounters a nurse who suspects she'd tried to end the pregnancy herself and calls the police. When prosecutors take on the case, they obtain not just her medical records — evidence of the outcome — but her online search history as well: what they cast as evidence of "intent." Thanks to information handed over by internet providers — that the woman once searched for information about abortion medication and miscarriages — she is charged with second-degree murder, and faces 20 years to life in prison if convicted.
