Credit: Suzanne Kreiter / The Boston Globe / Getty
A report published Tuesday details how digital surveillance can be used by police and prosecutors to criminalize patients seeking abortion and gender-affirming healthcare outside their home states.
The report—entitledRoadblock to Care: Barriers to Out-of-State Travel for Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care—was authored by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a New York-based privacy and civil rights group. The publication comes as Republican-controlled state legislatures pass a wave of abortion and gender-affirming healthcare bans, forcing people seeking such care to travel out of state.
“Surveillance doesn’t stop at the state line,” STOP executive director Albert Fox Cahn said in a statement. “Even as progressive states seek to protect abortion and gender-affirming care within our borders, anti-choice states are continuing to expand the threat that they will prosecute residents who leave the state to find evidence-based medical treatment.”
“It’s crucial for patients to understand the ways that their movements can be tracked by […]
Surveillance State?
The amazing surveillance information age did not happen in just the red states, in the last few years or for patriarchy and suppression of women; it is there for all of us.
Imagine what this data paired with AI and large computers could do to predict your behavior.
Ultimately, the only way for Red State AGs to prosecute, and this is still a long shot, is to access the medical records of the individuals involved. This has profound implications regarding National Medical records and who controls the information. In addition to medical privacy, addictions treatment records become a battleground between the states. These trends are coming to a crisis inflection point, and the United states has one of the least developed privacy policies the the Western world. We live in interesting times.
hear, hear! Liking that you factored in ‘interesting times.’ That’s when revolutions are seeded. This story made me think of Charles Dickens’ words. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
And so it goes..
I believe we can source this back to its roots.. when one million women marched to DC. A moment in history that must have scared a lot of men, We haven’t seen the end of this. I suspect the underground movement to help women will become stronger. And I don’t believe that every cop is anti abortion. My response to this kind thing is ‘oh, really?!…Change is the only constant in life.. Set ’em up.. we women will knock ’em down.