They really don’t like women
In her May interview with The Telegraph, psychologist Mary Trump (the estranged niece of His Strongly Lordship), remarked that even the women in the Trump family were misogynists. So are Christian nationalists of Trump’s MAGA movement. Their combined efforts to make women little more than birthing vessels now has technology for tracking down those who would escape to free states.
404 Media has the story:
Earlier this month authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras while looking for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois, according to multiple datasets obtained by 404 Media.
The news shows in stark terms how police in one state are able to take the ALPR technology, made by a company called Flock and usually marketed to individual communities to stop carjackings or find missing people, and turn it into a tool for finding people who have had abortions. In this case, the sheriff told 404 Media the family was worried for the woman’s safety and so authorities used Flock in an attempt to locate her. But health surveillance experts said they still had issues with the nationwide search.
“You have this extraterritorial reach into other states, and Flock has decided to create a technology that breaks through the barriers, where police in one state can investigate what is a human right in another state because it is a crime in another,” Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund, who researches both ALPR systems and abortion surveillance, told 404 Media.
Flock users are required to state the reason for such searches. In this case, it was “had an abortion, search for female” per data sets reviewed by 404 Media.
Cops are able to search cameras acquired in their own district, those in their state, or those in a nationwide network of Flock cameras. That single search for the woman spread across 6,809 different Flock networks, with a total of 83,345 cameras, according to the data. The officer looked for hits over a month long period, it shows.
And immigrants think they’re the only ones being watched.
The local sheriff told 404 Media in a phone call that the woman had self-administered an abortion “and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.” The search, he said, “was about her safety.”
They located her two days later, but not via Flock. She was fine.
Ashley Emery, senior policy analyst in reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women & Families, told 404 Media “The risks of this intrusive government monitoring cannot be overstated: law enforcement could deploy this surveillance technology to target and try to build cases against pregnant people who travel for abortion care and those who help them. This incident is undeniably a harbinger of more AI-enabled reproductive surveillance and investigations to come. Especially for women of color who are already over-surveilled and over-policed, the stakes couldn’t be higher.”
Or for anyone else the Trump DOJ brands an enemy of the state.
Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) worried he was being pursued by government helicopters in Goodfellas (1990). Today it would be traffic cams and drones. Something for women to look forward to once Project 2025 makes pregnant women its project. It won’t top there.
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