Wired – “A new report lays out existing US policing capabilities that can easily be repurposed to monitor pregnant people. In the three weeks since a draft opinion leaked from the United States Supreme Court promising to roll back the federal constitutional right to abortion in the United States, reproductive rights activists and privacy advocates have been working to understand the reality of how such a shift will impact Americans. 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…

…The research also points out that pro-choice states will need to reexamine local, inter-state, and federal data-sharing initiatives—including participation in “fusion centers” that allow multiple law enforcement groups to share information. These and other controversial policing initiatives to combat terrorism and track undocumented Americans could quickly be expanded to investigate pregnant people, reproductive healthcare workers, and others. 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.”…