In addition to bills looking to regulate data centers and AI, this session the Colorado legislature is also taking on bills related to digital surveillance, raising concerns from unlikely allies: pro-gun groups and abortion advocates. This week, the Colorado House Judiciary Committee voted to indefinitely postpone House Bill 1108, which would have authorized the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to access the FBI’s fingerprint search service, allowing authorized agencies to receive notification of activity on individuals who have submitted to a background check.
The bill was sponsored by a bipartisan quartet of legislators: Rep. Meghan Lukens (D-Steamboat Springs), Rep. Anthony Hartsook (R-Parker) and Sens. Janice Rich (R-Grand Junction) and Dafna Michaelson-Jenet (D-Commerce City). It faced immediate pushback from advocacy group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners — which described it as “the bill to give away clean record gun owner fingerprints to the FBI for permanent surveillance” — as well as other Republicans.
“I am not for CBI having any more authorization of anyone’s rights, information, or anything for the people of Colorado,” said Rep. Brandi Bradley (R-Littleton) during a Feb. 17 appearance on Ryan Schuling Live. “Our constituents have been very vocal about that. We don’t want anything else listed as far as our personal information. [Hartsook is] going to have a very hard time. If I was him, I would remove my name off of that [bill]. I think that even if it’s a line that goes against our rights, it is a line that is very relevant to the people in the Second Amendment community in the state of Colorado.”
The bill would have authorized CBI to participate in the FBI’s Rap Back service, which allows authorized agencies to receive notification of activity on individuals who have submitted to a fingerprint-based criminal history record check. Rap Back provides authorized agencies with real-time, automated notifications of criminal history updates for individuals in positions of trust. It replaces one-time, periodic background checks by continuously searching submitted fingerprints for new arrests or convictions.
Hartsook also appeared later in the program to defend his bill. “We want to make sure that if you commit a crime outside of this state, that it is reported and you’re tracked inside the state,” he said. “These are only for these people in trusted positions. I believe that parents want to know, if they have a kid that’s in a class, and there’s a teacher that’s arrested outside of the state for a crime, and that parent has the right to know and make the decision, what do they want to do with their child in that class. And that’s a parent’s decision. This gives the control back to the local law enforcement, the local community, parents and health care. I mean, we’ve seen the news where — I mean here recently we’ve had law enforcement personnel that were arrested for DUIs. We’ve seen grooming and endangerment in both Douglas County, Jefferson County and other counties in the state. We have seen sexual assault with massage therapists down in El Paso County. We’ve seen human trafficking across the state. If these people are participating in this outside of the state, then we need to know about that.”
The bill didn’t just raise concerns for gun rights groups like RMGO, but also abortion advocacy groups like COLOR, which also lobbied against the bill, and Cobalt, which lobbied to amend it. Cobalt’s Political Director Kiera Hatton Sena noted that due to the variations in abortion laws across the country abortion providers could be flagged under HB 1108.
“Fingerprints are used for things like medical licensing, they are used for any type of licensure board,” said Hatton Sena. “This particular bill does not include any form of due process. If somebody is arrested in another state, their board and their employer automatically get flagged. In reproductive rights land, that means that somebody might have sent mifepristone to Tennessee or Kentucky or Louisiana or Texas. And so for providers, doing what they do legally here in Colorado is something that they can be arrested for in other states.”
In 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New York for providing medication abortion to Texas residents in violation of state law. Last year, a Louisiana grand jury indicted Carpenter on similar charges. In both cases, Carpenter did not violate New York law.
“Our abortion and reproductive rights providers, whether it’s for trans care, whether it is for abortion, all of these providers are facing incredible scrutiny already,” said Hatton Sena. “They don’t need to be facing scrutiny from laws that aren’t effective in their states.”
While pro-abortion groups opposed CBI’s sharing of data with federal agencies, they are supporting Senate Bill 70, which would prohibit a government entity from accessing a database that stores historical location information. Hatton Sena said allowing outside law enforcement agencies to access data from license plate readers, for example, could violate Colorado’s abortion shield laws, which protect abortion patients and providers from out-of-state prosecution.
“Right now, automated license plate reader data can be used by most members of law enforcement for any purpose,” said Hatton Sena. “It is really not limited to why they can use it, and this actually opens up a problem with our shield legislation that we’ve passed both in 2023 and 2025 for providers and patients. It just opens that wide open — because the data is shared frequently across state lines. We see the same problem that we saw with the finger print bill. Somebody in Texas could look up an abortion provider, an abortion seeker, and try and track them across space and time by their license plate. That poses a risk, a physical and legal risk, to those people.”
Abortion advocates aren’t the only ones concerned about digital surveillance. Sen. Lynda Zamora Wilson (R-CO Springs) has introduced Senate Bill 71, which would regulate law enforcement’s use of surveillance technologies, limiting them to only lawful purposes directly related to public safety or for an active investigation.
“How many times have you gone through an intersection and all of a sudden you look up and you see a new camera and you’re like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know, I never had a say in that camera, I don’t feel comfortable with that camera and now they’re popping up all over the place,’” she said yesterday during an appearance on 850 KOA’s Ross Kaminsky show. “My constituents have expressed that we feel like we’re becoming a surveillance state, and that their privacy is starting to be invaded. There’s a problem and many people will argue that it is a violation of their Fourth Amendment as we see these [cameras] populating and covering a great percentage of the area in our city.”
For pro-abortion groups like Cobalt, digital privacy and surveillance is a new frontier. “When I started doing this work in 2018, for reproductive rights, I never expected that I would have to be an AI and surveillance technology subject matter expert,” said Hatton Sena. “That is what this is becoming. So we will likely, as Cobalt, continue to run shield legislation to both proactively prevent concerns, as we learn what they could potentially be, as well as patch them up with some shield laws when we find them. We think that there’s a balance between invading people’s privacy and also using the technology at hand for good, and I think we have to be really cognizant of what that is.”
