1. United States
2. Iowa
3. Letter

Why Should Police Be Able to Search Everyone Who Typed a Word Into Google? I am writing to ask you to take action against one of the most sweeping and least understood surveillance tools in American law enforcement today: the reverse keyword warrant. I am asking you to introduce or cosponsor legislation that shuts this tool down in our state, the way Delaware just did, and to push for oversight hearings into how often it is already being used here. A reverse keyword warrant does not start with a suspect. It starts with a word or phrase — "how to rob a bank," "Planned Parenthood," "protest route," an address — and orders a tech company to hand over the identity of every single person who typed it into a search engine or app during a given window of time. No probable cause tied to an individual is required. Everyone who searched that term, guilty or innocent, gets swept into a police database. We know this tool is not rare or hypothetical. Court records and Google's own transparency disclosures show the company processes roughly 400 reverse-keyword warrant requests a year, and its close cousin, the reverse-location or "geofence" warrant, exploded from 982 requests in 2018 to 11,554 in 2020 — a more than tenfold increase in two years. In 2020, Minneapolis police used a geofence warrant to identify people who had simply been present near protests following the murder of George Floyd. And the case that finally forced the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in, Chatrie v. United States, began with a 2019 Virginia bank robbery investigation in which a geofence warrant swept up the location data of everyone near the scene, only for the Court to rule on June 29, 2026, in a 6-3 decision, that this kind of dragnet search does implicate the Fourth Amendment. The very next day, Delaware's legislature passed House Substitute 1 for House Bill 145, and on September 9, 2026, Governor Matt Meyer signed it into law, making Delaware the first state in the nation to nearly ban reverse keyword warrants outright — limiting their use to the most serious felonies, capping results at five people, and requiring any unrelated data to be sealed and destroyed. This is not a fringe concern. The ruling in Chatrie came from a Court that includes both liberal and conservative justices finding common ground on Fourth Amendment protections, with even Justice Gorsuch reaching the same conclusion through his own originalist reasoning. Delaware's bill passed with Democratic sponsors but drew support from civil liberties groups across the spectrum, and lawmakers in Minnesota have introduced a bipartisan bill to ban reverse location warrants there too. New York's Reverse Location Search Prohibition Act has been reintroduced for the same reason. Even law enforcement groups that opposed a full ban in Delaware didn't dispute that the tool is spreading nationwide — they disputed how tightly to restrict it, not whether restriction was warranted. This is a rare moment where privacy advocates, gun-rights conservatives, reproductive-rights advocates, and Fourth Amendment originalists are all pointing at the same problem. What makes this personal for me is not abstract. It's the idea that a word I typed into a search bar — researching a medical symptom, looking up an address for a friend, checking on a news story, planning where to meet someone — could end up in a police file without my ever having done anything wrong. It's the thought that a scared teenager searching how to help a friend who mentioned self-harm, or someone quietly researching reproductive health care, or a person looking up immigration resources for a neighbor, could be flagged simply for asking the internet a question. That's not how a presumption of innocence is supposed to work. I don't want to live with the same hesitation my grandparents might have felt about a phone line they suspected was tapped, except now it follows me into every search I run, every day, for the rest of my life. I am asking you to: 1 Introduce or cosponsor legislation modeled on Delaware's House Bill 145 that bans or sharply restricts reverse keyword and reverse location warrants in our state, including hard limits on how many people a single warrant can identify and mandatory destruction of data unrelated to the investigation. 2 Call for or support public hearings on how often reverse warrants are already being used by law enforcement agencies here, since Delaware's own debate showed that even lawmakers didn't have clear answers until they asked directly. 3 Support and push for Senate passage of the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which already passed the U.S. House 219-199 in 2024 with bipartisan support before stalling, and which would close the related loophole that lets agencies simply buy Americans' location and search data from brokers instead of getting a warrant at all. Why should police be able to search everyone who typed a word into Google? They shouldn't — not without the kind of individualized suspicion the Fourth Amendment has always required. Delaware just proved a state legislature can act on this before Congress does, and the Supreme Court just confirmed that our search and location data deserve constitutional protection. I am asking you to make sure our state doesn't wait for the next scandal, the next wrongly flagged protester, or the next person punished for a search they had every right to make, before doing the same. Thank you for taking the time to consider this.