A case being brought in the Colorado district court of Denver County is challenging the constitutionality of a controversial keyword search warrant and potentially curbing a law enforcement practice that has implications for the criminalization of abortion.<\/p>\n

A reverse keyword search warrant is a surveillance technique that lets police start with a search term of interest and identify users who have searched it within a particular period. In concrete terms, that could mean identifying all the users who search for a specific name or address \u2014 or, in a scenario that has caused anxiety recently, everyone who searches for \u201cabortion drugs.\u201d Proponents of the technique say they\u2019re an important tool for identifying criminals, but civil liberties groups see the warrants as a new and chilling threat to privacy.<\/p>\n