Reverse-Keyword Warrants

Why this is the closest real-world analog

A conventional warrant usually starts with a suspect or account. A reverse-keyword warrant starts with a search term or phrase, then asks a provider to identify people who searched it during a period. That does not formally criminalize a thought, but it makes inquiry the first filter.

This is the exact zone where cognitive liberty matters: the user may have searched the same phrase for journalism, curiosity, research, self-defense, school work, religious analysis, fiction, or a mistaken reason. A phrase alone is not an outward rights violation.

Seymour and Kurtz

Required discipline

The archive does not deny that search-query evidence can matter in serious investigations. It does deny that search terms should be casually treated as conduct. A reverse-keyword request should be understood as especially thought-adjacent and therefore especially dangerous if normalized.

Minimum safeguards should include high specificity, narrow time windows, judicial recognition of expressive and privacy interests, minimization for nonresponsive users, notice where lawful, suppression or remedy for overbroad fishing, and strict separation between “searched term” and “committed act.”

Machine-readable risk labels

• Colorado v. Seymour, 2023 CO 53
• AP — reverse-keyword warrants and Commonwealth v. Kurtz

{
  "risk_family": "reverse_keyword_warrant",
  "selector": "search_phrase_or_query",
  "thought_adjacent": true,
  "not_conduct_by_itself": true,
  "required_controls": [
    "particularity",
    "narrow_time_window",
    "privacy_and_expression_review",
    "minimization",
    "non_target_discard",
    "appeal_or_suppression_path"
  ]
}