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Nearly limitless harvesting of our personal information was always leading to this moment.

In the days since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion, there have been gobs of published material and warnings from privacy advocates about how digital bread crumbs might expose women seeking abortions to potential legal jeopardy.

Whatever your views about abortion, this is a moment to reflect on what we have given up to the hungry maw of America’s unfettered data collection economy.

It is almost impossible to be truly anonymous in modern American life. There is so much digital information out there about who we are, where we go, what we buy and what we’re interested in that we can’t possibly control it all. This data is mostly used for more efficiently marketing shoes or doughnuts, but it rarely stops there.

And now, we’re seeing what happens when 21st-century digital intrusion collides with people who are worried all that information could be used against them in ways they never imagined.

I don’t want to make people unnecessarily afraid. My colleagues have reported that about half of states are expected to allow bans or other limits on abortion to take effect, but even in those states, law enforcement has been focused on medical providers, not ordinary people. My colleagues have also reported that there are no abortion bans that try to prosecute women who cross state lines to seek abortions — although states could try in the future.

But now that access to an abortion is no longer considered a fundamental right, it’s staggering to consider the breadth and depth of the information we spill out into the void.

Credit cards and surveillance video cameras snoop on us. Sure, Google knows what we’ve searched for and where we’ve been, but so do our cellphone providers and home internet companies, as well as many apps on our phones and networks of middlemen that we’ve never dealt with directly. When we use apps to look up the weather forecast or to make sure our shelves are level, information might find its way to a military contractor or a data-for-hire broker.

We can take some steps to minimize the amount of data that we emit, but it is virtually impossible to eliminate it. Few federal laws regulate the collection and sale of all this information about us, although Congress is discussing the latest of many efforts to pass a broad, national digital privacy law.

It’s not just digital information that we share. We speak to friends, family members and strangers. In some cases in which the authorities seek to charge women with inducing an abortion, it may be relatives or medical providers who tip off law enforcement. (Here is a useful rundown from Consumer Reports on when medical privacy laws protect us and when they don’t.)

Some of you reading this newsletter may believe that if abortion is a crime, it is fair game for digital data on people seeking abortions to be used in criminal prosecutions. Several years ago, I was a juror in a trial of a man accused of serially harassing his former girlfriend, and I felt both grateful and unsettled that there was so much digital evidence of his crimes, including his call logs, emails, online posts and other information extracted from his smartphone. (We found the man guilty of most of the charges against him.)

The authorities might use this information in ways that we agree with. But the sheer volume of information in so many hands with so few legal restrictions creates opportunities for misuse.

My colleagues have shown that data spewed by smartphones can follow the president of the United States. Stalkers have tricked cellphone providers into handing over people’s personal information. Churches have mined information on people in a crisis to market to them. Some U.S. schools have bought gear to hack into children’s phones and siphon the data. Automated license-plate scanners have made it difficult to drive anywhere without winding up in a database that law enforcement might be able to access without a warrant.

Since Roe was overturned, most large U.S. tech companies haven’t shared publicly how they might handle potential demands from law enforcement in future abortion-related criminal cases. Companies generally cooperate with legal requests like warrants or subpoenas from the U.S. authorities, although they sometimes push back and try to negotiate how much information they hand over.

In a situation in which one company refuses to cooperate, odds are that similar digital information might be available from another company that will. (There’s been some attention around the potential for period-tracking apps to blab to the authorities, but there are more direct sources of similar information.)

And companies built to grab as much information as possible won’t find it simple to become data-minimizing converts, even if they want to.

Google, Facebook and Verizon are not going to protect the right to an abortion when the Supreme Court says no such right exists. They and a zillion other companies with a limitless appetite for our information have created the conditions in which privacy doesn’t really exist.

Related from my colleagues: Payment data could become evidence of abortion.

Before we go …

Don’t worry about the crypto bros: The cryptocurrency market is cratering, but my colleague David Yaffe-Bellany reported that the pain of losses is far from equal. A small number of industry executives have emerged relatively unscathed, while some amateurs have lost a big chunk of their savings.

Flashback to the human labor involved in A.I. creation: New layoffs at Tesla included staff members who labeled data for driver-assistance software. It’s worth reading my colleague Cade Metz’s article from 2019 about all the humans needed to teach computers, including those who select images of stop signs and pedestrians from car sensors so that software can more easily identify what it “sees.”

Why did anyone have flash drives with so much personal information? A technician with access to data on the entire population of a Japanese city left work with USB sticks containing confidential information of about 460,000 people. He lost the tiny storage devices during a night out drinking, my colleagues Makiko Inoue and Tiffany May reported. (He found them later.)

Hugs to this

Nothing is more adorable than a lemur smushing its face into a flower.

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Amazon moved to restrict items and search results related to L.G.B.T.Q. people and issues on its website in the United Arab Emirates on Monday after receiving pressure from the government there, according to company documents viewed by The New York Times.

The Emirati government gave Amazon until Friday to comply under threat of penalties, the documents show. It was not clear what those penalties would be. Homosexuality is criminalized in the Emirates, punishable by fines and imprisonment, according to the State Department.

Amazon’s restrictions on products in the Emirates are indicative of the compromises that tech companies are willing to make to operate in restrictive countries, even when professing to be adamant about free expression in their own country. Netflix has pulled shows in Saudi Arabia and censored scenes in Vietnam, Apple has stored customer data on Chinese servers despite privacy concerns, and Google removed an app for a Russian opposition leader last year after facing a threat of prosecution there.

After hearing from the Emirates, Amazon had its Restricted Products team take steps to remove individual product listings, and a team that manages the company’s search abilities hid the results for more than 150 keywords, the documents show.

The targeted search terms ranged widely. Some were broad, such as “lgbtq,” “pride” and “closeted gay,” while others indicated intentional product searches, including “transgender flag,” “queer brooch,” “chest binder for lesbians” and “lgbtq iphone case.” All of those terms returned “no results” when The Times tried queries on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Several specific book titles were blocked, including “My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness,” by Nagata Kabi; “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” by Maia Kobabe; and Roxane Gay’s “Bad Feminist.” All are available in print and digital formats on Amazon’s website in the United States. (Ms. Gay is a frequent contributor to The Times.)

“As a company, we remain committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, and we believe that the rights of L.G.B.T.Q.+ people must be protected,” Nicole Pampe, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in a statement. “With Amazon stores around the world, we must also comply with the local laws and regulations of the countries in which we operate.”

The Emirati Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Amazon entered the Emirates in 2017 when it spent $580 million to acquire Souq.com, a Dubai-based e-commerce site known as the Amazon of the Middle East. Two years later, it rebranded the site Amazon.ae, adding products offered from Amazon’s U.S. operations. It has announced plans to open a new cluster of cloud computing data centers in the Emirates this year.

Over the weekend, the Pride parade in Amazon’s hometown, Seattle, showed the challenge presented to a global company that is trying to juggle many constituents. While Amazon celebrates Pride in many of its operations, provides benefits to same-sex partners and promotes L.G.B.T.Q. films on its website, the company was no longer a sponsor of Seattle Pride after parade organizers said they had rejected the corporate support in part because of Amazon’s financial donations to politicians who oppose L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

The company has said it will make political donations even if it does not support every position the people or organization may take.

At the parade, transgender employees marched under the banner of No Hate at Amazon, a group that had gotten more than 600 employee signatures on a petition pressuring Amazon to remove books on its U.S. website that the workers said were anti-transgender and violated the company’s prohibition on hate speech.

Amazon has typically avoided removing sensitive or controversial books. “As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word is important, including content that may be considered objectionable,” its policy states.

The company did recently adapt its policies to allow more discretion to remove “offensive” content, and said last year that it would take down books that treated transgender and other sexual identities as a mental illness.

The Emirates is one of several countries where Amazon has had to deal with censorship demands.

Reuters reported last year that under pressure from the Chinese government, Amazon removed all customer ratings and comments for a book of President Xi Jinping’s speeches and writings. The company recently closed its Kindle store in China, though it denied that censorship concerns were the reason. Amazon’s cloud computing division made it harder to evade censors in China and Russia in the past because it prohibited workarounds that customers had been using.

WASHINGTON — Soon after his speech on the Ellipse ended on Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald J. Trump stepped into the back of a black Suburban bearing the presidential seal.

What happened next has become a matter of intense debate after explosive testimony on Tuesday by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who said Mr. Trump became enraged when his security detail refused to take him to the Capitol.

Speaking before the House committee investigating the attack, Ms. Hutchinson said she had been told by Anthony M. Ornato, a deputy White House chief of staff, that Mr. Trump tried to grab the wheel of his vehicle when he was told he could not go to the Capitol to join his supporters. Ms. Hutchinson also said Mr. Ornato told her the president “lunged” at his lead Secret Service agent, Robert Engel.

Ms. Hutchinson made clear in her public testimony that she did not have direct knowledge of the incident, but that Mr. Ornato recounted it to her with Mr. Engel present in the room. It remains unclear what, if anything, the committee did to corroborate it.

Secret Service officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, disputed her account.

But the officials did say Mr. Engel, Mr. Ornato and the driver of the Suburban are prepared to confirm to the committee another damning finding from Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony: that Mr. Trump demanded his agents bring him to the Capitol so he could join his supporters, even after they emphasized the dangerous scene playing out there.

The willingness of the agents to provide potentially critical details about the person they were protecting marks a rare turn for an agency that has historically prioritized the secrecy of presidents, even in the face of investigations.

On Wednesday, Jody Hunt, an attorney for Ms. Hutchinson, said his client “stands by all of the testimony she provided yesterday, under oath” and he challenged others who know of Mr. Trump’s actions during the ride to come forward to the committee.

“Those with knowledge of the episode also should testify under oath,” he said.

In an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, committee member Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida, said Mr. Ornato “did not have as clear of memories from this period of time as I would say Ms. Hutchinson did.”

Asked if the panel had evidence to corroborate Ms. Hutchinson’s claims, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, said on Tuesday that Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony was itself “the evidence” he was aware of. “I’m not aware of anything that contradicts the account that she just gave,” he said.

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said the committee did not contact the agency about Hutchinson’s account of Mr. Trump’s ride from the Ellipse to the White House before her testimony.

Mr. Ornato, who was the head of Mr. Trump’s Secret Service detail before being made deputy chief of staff, and Mr. Engel provided testimony to the committee before Ms. Hutchinson appeared, but they are willing to do so again, a Secret Service official said.

Mr. Trump’s allies are using the dispute over what happened in the presidential vehicle to call into question the credibility of Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony as a whole, which painted a portrait of a president who disregarded threats of violence from his own supporters, sympathized with those who wanted to “hang” the vice president and wanted to join the crowd that went on to attack on the Capitol.

The dispute also highlights Mr. Trump’s relationship with his Secret Service detail, which was unlike that of most previous presidents. Agents were seen as more overtly supportive and admiring of Mr. Trump than they had been under any other modern president, according to people who have spent time in the White House during multiple administrations, and Mr. Trump worked to build loyalty among them.

Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7

Making a case against Trump. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack appears to be laying out evidence that could allow prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump, though the path to a criminal trial is uncertain. Here are the main themes that have emerged so far:

An unsettling narrative. During the first hearing, the committee described in vivid detail what it characterized as an attempted coup orchestrated by the former president that culminated in the assault on the Capitol. At the heart of the gripping story were three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.

Creating election lies. In its second hearing, the panel showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers as he declared victory prematurely and relentlessly pressed claims of fraud he was told were wrong. “He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” William P. Barr, the former attorney general, said of Mr. Trump during a videotaped interview.

Pressuring Pence. Mr. Trump continued pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing. The committee showed how Mr. Trump’s actions led his supporters to storm the Capitol, sending Mr. Pence fleeing for his life.

Fake elector plan. The committee used its fourth hearing to detail how Mr. Trump was personally involved in a scheme to put forward fake electors. The panel also presented fresh details on how the former president leaned on state officials to invalidate his defeat, opening them up to violent threats when they refused.

Strong arming the Justice Department. During the fifth hearing, the panel explored Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging and relentless scheme to misuse the Justice Department to keep himself in power. The panel also presented evidence that at least half a dozen Republican members of Congress sought pre-emptive pardons.

Trump’s rage. Cassidy Hutchinson, ​​a former White House aide, delivered explosive testimony during the panel’s sixth hearing, saying that the president knew the crowd on Jan. 6 was armed, but wanted to loosen security. She also revealed that Mr. Trump, demanding to go to the Capitol, tried to grab his vehicle’s steering wheel from a Secret Service agent.

While other presidents came to favor the head of their detail and sometimes ensured they were promoted within the service, even at times appointing them as director of the agency, Mr. Trump sought to make his lead agent part of his personal political team. In naming Mr. Ornato deputy White House chief of staff, Mr. Trump raised eyebrows among traditionalists who saw that as inappropriate.

For generations, agents generally tried to maintain studious neutrality under Republican and Democratic presidents, determined to be seen as protectors of the office regardless of who occupied it. Agents were known to like certain presidents more than others — George H.W. Bush was often described as a favorite, while many were reportedly not fond of Bill Clinton and especially Hillary Clinton — but they always insisted they were not part of the political team.

The murky nexus between presidents and their protectors was pierced during the Clinton years when Ken Starr, the independent counsel, subpoenaed agents and uniformed officers to testify about the president’s relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky, the former White House intern. The Secret Service fought the subpoenas vigorously all the way up to the Supreme Court, maintaining that disclosure of what agents see and hear while protecting a president would shatter the bond of trust and prompt future chief executives to keep their guardians at an arm’s length, increasing the potential risk. But the justices rejected the argument, finding no law authorizing agents to resist legal orders to testify.

That precedent paved the way for the Jan. 6 committee to compel Mr. Trump’s agents to testify and set a precedent in case they eventually do return to the panel to discuss what happened in the vehicle on the day of the Capitol attack. That puts the service in an exceedingly uncomfortable position, whether the agents effectively come to the political defense of a president they had protected physically or provide information that could be damaging to him.

Peter Baker contributed reporting.

In their relationships with President Donald J. Trump in recent years, Roger J. Stone Jr., his longtime political adviser, and Michael T. Flynn, who was briefly his national security adviser, have followed a similar trajectory.

Both were either convicted of or pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. Both were pardoned by Mr. Trump after the 2020 presidential election. And both supported Mr. Trump in his relentless, multilayered efforts to reverse its outcome and remain in power.

The two were, in a sense, together again on Tuesday, when both were mentioned within an instant of one another at the House select committee hearing by Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff. Ms. Hutchinson told the panel that on Jan. 5, 2021, a day before the Capitol was stormed, Mr. Trump had directed Mr. Meadows to reach out to Mr. Stone and Mr. Flynn.

Ms. Hutchinson acknowledged that she did not know what her boss may have said to the men. But her testimony was the first time it was revealed that Mr. Trump, on the eve of the Capitol attack, had opened a channel of communication with a pair of allies who had not only worked on his behalf for weeks challenging the results of the election, but who also had extensive ties to extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who were soon to be at the forefront of the violence.

The question of whether there was communication or coordination between the far-right groups that helped storm the Capitol and Mr. Trump and his aides and allies is among the most important facing the Jan. 6 investigators.

Barring a criminal prosecution — or something else that could force the details of the calls into the public sphere — it could be tough to be figure out exactly what Mr. Meadows discussed with Mr. Stone and Mr. Flynn.

Since late last year, Mr. Meadows has refused to comply with a committee subpoena that seeks his testimony about the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 — a move that risked his indictment on contempt of Congress charges. As for Mr. Stone and Mr. Flynn, both repeatedly exercised their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination during their own interviews with the committee.

Mr. Flynn’s interview was especially remarkable, according to a recording of it played at the hearing on Tuesday. A former three-star general who still collects a military pension, Mr. Flynn pleaded the Fifth Amendment even when he was asked if he believed the violence at the Capitol was wrong, and whether he supported the lawful transfer of presidential power.

Ms. Hutchinson also told the panel that she recalled hearing about the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers while the planning was taking place for Mr. Trump’s public event near the White House on Jan. 6 — a time, she explained, when the former president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, had been around.

It is possible that Mr. Stone and Mr. Flynn will receive more attention when the panel reconvenes for its next public hearing in July. That is when Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, has said he intends to lead a presentation that will focus on the roles far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the 1st Amendment Praetorian played in the Capitol attack. Mr. Raskin has also promised to explore the connections between those groups and the people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.

Both Mr. Stone and Mr. Flynn fit that description, having maintained extensive ties to far-right groups in the postelection period. Much of the contact came at pro-Trump rallies in Washington when the men were guarded by members of the groups, who served as their bodyguards.

For over a year, Mr. Stone has repeatedly denied that he had any role in the violence that erupted at the Capitol. Shortly after Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony, he denied in a post on social media that Mr. Meadows had called him on the day before the attack.

Mr. Flynn’s lawyer has failed to respond to numerous requests for comments about the role his client played in the events of Jan. 6 and the weeks leading up to it.

As early as Dec. 12, 2020, the 1st Amendment Praetorian protected Mr. Flynn when he appeared as a speaker at a pro-Trump march in Washington. Joining the group as security at the event were members of the Oath Keepers, including the organization’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, who has since been charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol attack.

The 1st Amendment Praetorian also helped Mr. Flynn’s onetime lawyer, Sidney Powell, gather open source intelligence about allegations of election fraud that was ultimately funneled into a series of conspiracy-laden lawsuits she filed challenging the voting results, according to the group’s leader, Robert Patrick Lewis.

Mr. Lewis, by his own account, played a minor role in another, even more brazen, attempt to overturn the election. He has claimed that, on Dec. 18, 2020, he drove Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell to the White House for an Oval Office meeting at which they sought to persuade Mr. Trump to use his national security apparatus to seize voting machines around the country in his bid to stay in power.

On Jan. 6 itself, according to audio recordings obtained by The New York Times, a few members of the 1st Amendment Praetorian protected Mr. Flynn again. Around the same time, according to court papers filed in a recent defamation case, a member of the group, Philip Luelsdorff, was briefly present in the so-called war room at the Willard Hotel where pro-Trump lawyers, including Mr. Giuliani and John Eastman, had set up shop to plan the objections to the certification of the Electoral College vote count.

Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7

Making a case against Trump. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack appears to be laying out evidence that could allow prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump, though the path to a criminal trial is uncertain. Here are the main themes that have emerged so far:

An unsettling narrative. During the first hearing, the committee described in vivid detail what it characterized as an attempted coup orchestrated by the former president that culminated in the assault on the Capitol. At the heart of the gripping story were three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.

Creating election lies. In its second hearing, the panel showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers as he declared victory prematurely and relentlessly pressed claims of fraud he was told were wrong. “He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” William P. Barr, the former attorney general, said of Mr. Trump during a videotaped interview.

Pressuring Pence. Mr. Trump continued pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing. The committee showed how Mr. Trump’s actions led his supporters to storm the Capitol, sending Mr. Pence fleeing for his life.

Fake elector plan. The committee used its fourth hearing to detail how Mr. Trump was personally involved in a scheme to put forward fake electors. The panel also presented fresh details on how the former president leaned on state officials to invalidate his defeat, opening them up to violent threats when they refused.

Strong arming the Justice Department. During the fifth hearing, the panel explored Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging and relentless scheme to misuse the Justice Department to keep himself in power. The panel also presented evidence that at least half a dozen Republican members of Congress sought pre-emptive pardons.

Trump’s rage. Cassidy Hutchinson, ​​a former White House aide, delivered explosive testimony during the panel’s sixth hearing, saying that the president knew the crowd on Jan. 6 was armed, but wanted to loosen security. She also revealed that Mr. Trump, demanding to go to the Capitol, tried to grab his vehicle’s steering wheel from a Secret Service agent.

Ms. Hutchinson told the House committee that Mr. Stone and Mr. Flynn were also at the Willard on Jan. 6. She further testified that her boss, Mr. Meadows, wanted to make plans to visit the war room, a decision that she felt was “inappropriate.” She testified that Mr. Meadows ultimately decided not to go to the hotel and “said that he would dial in instead.”

Mr. Stone, a Florida resident, had ties to the Proud Boys well before Mr. Trump lost the election, especially to Enrique Tarrio, the group’s former chairman, who lived in Miami before his arrest on sedition charges connected to the Capitol attack.

In 2019, after Mr. Stone was indicted by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on charges related to investigation into Russian efforts to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential race, Mr. Tarrio responded by wearing a T-shirt reading “Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong” at one of Mr. Trump’s political rallies. At one point, Mr. Tarrio’s personal cellphone had a voice mail message recorded by Mr. Stone.

On Jan. 6, when he was staying at the Willard, Mr. Stone was in close contact with members of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. A Proud Boy from Florida named Jacob Engels accompanied him to Washington and served as something like an aide-de-camp for him on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6.

At that same time, a small detail of Oath Keepers was also assigned to provide Mr. Stone with personal protection. At least four members of the detail are facing charges in connection with the Capitol attack.

Even if the House committee does not provide new insights about Mr. Stone at its next hearing, it is possible that the Justice Department’s inquiry into the Capitol attack could unearth something fresh about his ties to the Oath Keepers in particular.

One of the men on Mr. Stone’s security detail was Joshua James, an Oath Keeper from Alabama. In March, Mr. James pleaded guilty to sedition charges.

As part of his deal with prosecutors, Mr. James has agreed to cooperate with the government’s sprawling investigation of the Capitol attack.

OAK GROVE, Ky. — Go out Gate 5 at Fort Campbell and Jenna’s Adult Superstore is right across the street. On either side are easy ways to lose your shirt.

Turn left and there’s a casino. Turn right and there are miles of businesses catering to — or preying on — financially inexperienced soldiers with money in their pockets for the first time.

The wide boulevard along Fort Campbell’s front wall is lined with places to get into debt or worse. There are used car lots galore and Cash America Pawn. Then, Omni Military Loans, various check-cashers and a storefront that invites soldiers to sell their plasma. On it goes along the main thoroughfare named for the Army post — the center of an ecosystem that thrives on government paychecks and not knowing how to manage them.

For soldiers sometimes still in their teens, the dozens of financial services operators that surround Fort Campbell and other military outposts are a gantlet to run every time they step off government property. The results are alarming: The post’s own newspaper reported that in recent years, 40 percent of its soldiers had at least one predatory loan. Often, they owe the loans to business owners who were once in the military themselves.

The Department of Defense, regulators and elected officials are well aware of the perils. Financially troubled soldiers may not be at their best, and money problems can cost them security clearances that are crucial to their jobs. So for decades, the government has fought to fend off cheaters, charlatans and others who wish to get their claws into military paychecks.

And while there have been victories, many continue to thrive.

Watchdogs are deeply concerned. This month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a warning about so-called allotments, a system that allows lenders to siphon money directly from soldiers’ paychecks. It also published a report noting that service member complaints rose 19 percent from 2019 to 2021, the majority of them related to debt collection and the credit reporting that tracks those debts.

With prices rising for almost everything, including cars and food and gas, the opportunities for lenders to profit from military personnel have only grown. And such customers are becoming even more enticing as branches of the armed forces increase sign-up bonuses to better attract recruits.

Attempts to address the problem run into one unavoidable obstacle: Young and financially inexperienced members of the military are ideal clients. They are not highly paid, but their jobs are all but guaranteed — so their paychecks arrive like clockwork.

The driver’s seat and the road to ruin

Fort Campbell straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee border near Oak Grove, Ky., and is home to the 101st Airborne Division, a unit renowned for its service from the beaches of Normandy to the streets of Falluja. Just under 30,000 soldiers are stationed there.

It’s not just the businesses lining Fort Campbell Boulevard that can imperil a soldier’s finances, it’s using the road at all. Just under half of U.S. soldiers are 25 or younger, and many are at outposts like Fort Campbell, where having a life requires having a car — a major purchase that they often pursue without much guidance.

“I was like, ‘Man, I don’t need my parents,’” said Jhett Florip, who joined the Army right out of high school about an hour north of Chicago. “I was out on my own, doing my own thing.”

He found a dealer who sold him a used Ford Escape — and set him up with a loan that had an extremely high interest rate. Between the payment and insurance costs associated with being a young male driver, Mr. Florip was soon spending a significant portion of his take-home pay on the vehicle alone.

He eventually found his way to Navy Federal Credit Union, the country’s largest credit union. The deal wasn’t much better there; he refinanced the loan for a few percentage points of savings.

“They explained to me: You’re a new person to our company buying a car with a big loan. You don’t have credit history,” he said. “So we’re going to jack it up.”

Mr. Florip’s mother ultimately set him straight: You can refinance without changing lenders, she told him. He eventually went back to Navy Federal and qualified for a much better rate.

Now Mr. Florip sees many soldiers doing exactly what he did when they see a vehicle that catches their eye.

“I’d call it a rite of passage, and I’d also just call it being naïve,” he said. “The first offer they get for the car they want is the best offer, and they just want to get it done.”

Buy now, and pay for it later

Whether their tastes skew toward hulking trucks, sleek imports or American muscle, soldiers at Fort Campbell don’t want for choice. And their buying experience can vary just as widely.

There are at least three ways to finance a car around these parts, from most desperate to least desperate: a buy-here-pay-here loan, in which the dealer takes all the risk (and does the repossessions); a sort of dealer-run installment plan; and a third-party loan obtained through the dealership.

At Nash Auto Sales, there’s no credit check — not that many of its customers would pass one — and high interest rates reflect its highly risky clientele. At BW’s Preowned Autos, across the boulevard from the post, cars come with two prices, one for cash and a higher one for a 12- to 18-month payment plan.

Adopt an Auto is the third kind, where soldiers’ information is plugged into a computer that spits out offers from willing lenders.

BW’s and Nash are both owned by military veterans, and until recently Vicky Salesky, who runs Adopt an Auto, had a partner who was a veteran.

Ms. Salesky said she tried to be one of the good guys, talking sense into younger soldiers who might qualify — just barely — for a loan with a double-digit interest rate. Many of the soldiers who come in are only a little older than her three teenagers.

“I hope they’re listening to me,” she said.

The veteran voice of experience

Terrence Jones hopes they’re listening, too.

An Army veteran himself, Mr. Jones once had to reassemble his own finances. Now he’s one of a group of financial counselors at Fort Campbell, doing standard-issue training, plus frequent one-on-one sessions that are both preventive and restorative.

His colleague Loreta Guzman said many of the soldiers who came in for advice were teenage novices. But other new enlistees are in their 30s.

“Maybe they couldn’t make it outside of the military, or they needed health care or housing,” she said. “They’re clueless. They don’t know where to start.”

Mr. Jones can tell the soldiers that he has been in their shoes.

“I got comfortable going to loan companies,” he said. “I was in a hole so deep, the daytime was dark. They say you cannot borrow your way to success, but I felt like I could prove them wrong.”

Now a kindly grandfather with a necktie and hair twists, he preaches a mantra: Financial literacy is not a skill, it’s a lifestyle.

Soldiers had best recite it daily. Mr. Jones once counted 31 storefronts nearby where inopportune financial choices were available to all.

A dynamic that breeds secrecy

Too often, those poor choices can fester in silence, thanks to a culture of self-sufficiency and the threat they pose to military career prospects.

Navy Federal, despite its name, is open to all branches of the military. Plenty of veterans and spouses of active service members work there — and its intimacy with the armed forces has been used for good and ill.

Navy Federal’s employees understand how its customers live and work — and some knew the frightening forms of leverage that exist in the military.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2016 accused Navy Federal employees of falsely threatening to alert service members’ commanders about past-due debts. That year, Navy Federal paid $23 million in compensation to consumers in addition to a $5.5 million civil penalty. (A Navy Federal spokeswoman said the lender had made “necessary changes” in response to the regulatory action.)

The credit union’s threats were not empty: Security clearances are often required for work that even relatively young soldiers do.

“In the military, there is very strong pressure to say, ‘Yes, I’m OK, don’t worry about me,’” said Clay Stackhouse, regional outreach manager at Navy Federal who was a Marine Corps aviator and rose to the rank of colonel. “I thought, ‘I got this.’ Lord knows I wasn’t going to tell anyone about my finances.”

That can make it easy for scams of all sorts to proliferate. In 2020, the Tennessee attorney general blew the whistle on a move that a national chain, Harris Jewelers, was pulling repeatedly at the local mall.

According to the attorney general’s office, Harris’s stores were “strategically located near military installations” and urged members of the military to borrow for its high-priced baubles. A bonus, according to the jeweler’s pitch, was that customers would be building or repairing their credit with the new debt, an arrangement that the state called “unlawful.”

“There’s money to be made,” Mr. Stackhouse said. “And we’re dealing with young people who have money for the first time.”

Fortunately, certain kinds of businesses don’t bother trying to pitch their wares to soldiers now. The federal Military Lending Act caps the interest that a lender can charge an active-duty soldier at 36 percent annually.

To civilians paying 6 percent on a mortgage and 18 on a credit card, that’s shocking. But payday lenders and others say even 36 percent is essentially uneconomical, given the risk profile of their customers.

As a result, payday, pawn and car title lenders that line Fort Campbell Boulevard have a policy of steering clear of military families.

Stay humble and hustle hard

But that doesn’t mean those families don’t seek these businesses out anyhow.

When Ashley Larson arrived in town, she was neither a soldier nor a spouse — but she was young and financially vulnerable.

Ms. Larson moved to the area to be with her boyfriend, an enlisted soldier she has since married. She was the victim of financial abuse when, she said, someone wrote bad checks against her bank account, which blacklisted her from many banking services.

That meant turning to a check-cashing operation not long after arriving in town, which took a chunk of money in return for doing business with her. “I’m still trying to navigate the process of not looking like I robbed a bank,” she said.

True to the “Stay Humble, Hustle Hard” tattoo on her forearm, she filled many hours when she first arrived with part-time micro businesses like selling baked goods to other military families. She had relatives in Florida ship her guava for her tres leches cake.

“My husband is working 70 hours a week, and I’m basically doing a bake sale,” she said.

Only recently did she find a reasonably well-paying job. It’s out of state, so her mother-in-law comes to watch the children during the week. Local help, she said, is expensive.

‘Soldiers helping soldiers,’ if they ask

Army pay doesn’t go very far. Military compensation starts at $1,695 per month in basic pay, before any other allowances.

So on a flier that all the new arrivals receive — the Fort Campbell Help Flow Chart — food assistance and financial assistance are two of the 11 categories, alongside abuse and addiction.

The seven entries under financial assistance include Army Emergency Relief, a nonprofit closely affiliated with the military that bills itself as “soldiers helping soldiers.” It’s a lifeline: The fund helped nearly 26,000 soldiers last year, handing out $44.8 million in loans and grants.

At Fort Campbell, officials there said, soldiers often sought assistance with getting a new place — first and last month’s rent — or with car repairs.

Although a commander need not be involved when military personnel initiate an application, several soldiers who asked not to be identified had convinced themselves that even inquiring about a loan could lead to a superior’s finding out about their problem — and any errors in judgment that led up to it.

That makes it tempting to head away from the post for extra money.

A few miles south of Fort Campbell’s gates, Nicole Allen was working the front desk at Grifols Biomat USA Plasma Center, which had a “Welcome Home Troops” sign over the entry. About 20 percent of the people who come in to sell that part of their blood are enlisted men and women, she said. New donors can earn up to $1,100 in their first month.

A donor referral program can yield even more. “That’s how we see the military,” Ms. Allen said. “They tell the whole company.”

But what if you need more than that?

The lender at the front of the line

The founding mythos of Omni Military Loans begins with Staff Sgt. Fred Nives. After World War II, he wanted a car but couldn’t get a loan.

The firm that he started decades ago has a branch near Fort Campbell, a prime corner spot in a well-kept strip mall. Accolades cover the walls, including a years-old Better Business Bureau “torch” award: Omni had been a local semifinalist for ethics.

The company offers a simple product — installment loans of $500 to $10,000 that last up to 36 months. The term length is no accident. Most people stay in the Army for at least that long but often go delinquent on consumer debts when they leave the service.

Omni makes it very easy to pay, with a set-it-and-forget-it system that other lenders can only dream of. Decades before automatic payments from checking accounts were common, the Department of Defense gave soldiers the ability to pay bills through its allotment system. Soldiers divvy up their paychecks before they hit their bank accounts, sending some back home or, in the case of Omni, to pay off a loan.

The system effectively puts Omni ahead of any other creditor. Nearly all Omni borrowers sign up for allotment, though for years they had no choice, according to the federal consumer bureau. The agency said in a 2020 consent order that Omni illegally mandated that customers pay via allotment.

Sheryl Smith, its chief risk and compliance officer, maintained in an interview that the company had never required paying by allotment and added that the consumer bureau had not asked the company to pay restitution. When it complied with the agency’s instructions to remind all borrowers that using allotments was optional, she added, there was “very, very little” response from people who wanted to pay some other way.

Those borrowers can take comfort that they’re not being cheated, according to Omni. The company’s site boasts that people with good credit “may receive a very competitive rate,” while adding that its loans top out at 35.95 percent. That’s just under the cap that the federal government imposes.

A battle that never ends

The continuing tussle — military counselors, the Department of Defense and regulators on one side, local lenders charging 20- or 30-some percent on the other, military-focused credit unions trying to wear the white hat — doesn’t have a winner yet. There may never be one.

Holly Petraeus saw the back and forth up and down Fort Campbell Boulevard up close. She lived at Fort Campbell twice while her husband, retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, rose up the Army ranks.

And eventually, off-property temptations were no longer only by the side of the road.

“I remember talking to a very frustrated platoon sergeant,” said Ms. Petraeus, who worked for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in a senior role protecting soldiers and veterans before she retired in 2017. “He said, ‘I can hang over that guy 23 hours per day, but in the 24th hour, he’s on the computer and taking out a loan on the shady website that he found.’”

Ms. Petraeus expressed the highest admiration for people like Ms. Guzman and Mr. Jones, the Fort Campbell counselors. They are, in their defense of our defenders, soldiers of a sort. But theirs is also a job that will probably never end.

“You get a whole new crop of recruits in every year,” she said. “And every year, you have to push that rock up the hill one more time.”

Audra Melton contributed reporting.

In May 1972, the Chicago police raided a high-rise apartment where a group called the Jane Collective was providing abortions. It was the year before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision gave women the constitutional right to decide whether to give birth, and abortion was a criminal offense in Illinois.

Seven women were arrested, including two who had the names and addresses of patients on index cards in their purses. According to a history written by a member of the collective, “The Story of Jane,” the women destroyed the cards in the police van on the way to the station, tearing them into small pieces and eating some of them. They didn’t know what the police might do with the information, so they got rid of it.

Fifty years later, the Supreme Court has overturned the Roe decision. Abortions will be banned or seriously limited in much of the country. But now, thanks to the digital trails left behind in the modern technological age, it will be far harder to hide incriminating data about a decision to end a pregnancy.

When a draft of the court’s decision was first leaked in May, and then when the ruling became official last week, people focused on these digital trails, specifically the information that millions of women share about their menstrual cycles on period tracker apps. The knee-jerk advice was simple and direct: Delete them all. Immediately.

“Delete those fertility apps now,” tweeted Gina Neff, a sociologist and director of the Minderoo Center for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. In an interview over Zoom, Dr. Neff said the apps contained “powerful information about reproductive choices that’s now a threat.”

These apps allow users to record the dates of their menstrual cycles and get predictions about when they are ovulating and most fertile. The apps can also serve as digital diaries for sexual activity, birth control methods and conception attempts. Some women use the apps when they are trying to get pregnant, others to avoid it and many just to know when their next period is coming.

The exhortations to get rid of them seem to have had the opposite effect. According to Data.ai, which monitors app store activity, the downloads of period tracking apps doubled in the days since Roe was overturned, compared with average weekly downloads in the three previous months.

The biggest gainers were Clue and a little-known astronomy-based period tracker, Stardust, both of which made public commitments to data protection after the Supreme Court’s decision. A spokeswoman for Clue said the company, which is based in Europe, would not comply with requests for users’ health information from U.S. law enforcement.

While period trackers seem like an obvious source of information about reproductive health decisions, experts say other digital information is more likely to put women at risk. Cynthia Conti-Cook, a civil rights lawyer and technology fellow at the Ford Foundation, researched prosecutions of pregnant people accused of feticide or endangering their fetuses, cataloging the digital evidence used against them in an academic paper she published in 2020.

“We should start with the types of data that have already been used to criminalize people,” said Ms. Conti-Cook, who previously worked in a public defenders’ office in New York. “The text to your sister that says, ‘Expletive, I’m pregnant.’ The search history for abortion pills or the visitation of websites that have information about abortion.”

One of the cases Ms. Conti-Cook highlighted was that of Latice Fisher, a Mississippi woman who was charged with second-degree murder after a stillbirth at home in 2017. According to a local report, investigators downloaded the contents of her phone, including her internet search history, and she “admitted to conducting internet searches, including how to induce a miscarriage” and how to buy pregnancy-terminating medicine like mifepristone and misoprostol online. After significant public attention, the case against Ms. Fisher was dropped.

In another case, in Indiana, text messages to a friend about taking abortion pills late in a pregnancy were used to convict Purvi Patel, who successfully appealed and reduced a 20-year-sentence for feticide and neglect of a dependent.

“Those text messages, those websites visited, those Google searches are the exact type of intent evidence that prosecutors want to fill their bag of evidence,” Ms. Conti-Cook said.

Investigators could also potentially use smartphone location data if states pass laws forbidding women to travel to areas where abortion is legal. Information about people’s movements, collected via apps on their phones, is regularly sold by data brokers.

When The New York Times investigated the supposedly anonymized data on the market in 2018, it was able to identify a woman who had spent an hour at a Planned Parenthood in Newark. In May, a journalist at Vice was able to buy information from a data broker about phones that had been carried to Planned Parenthoods over the course of a week for just $160. (After Vice’s report, the data broker said it planned to cease selling data about visits to the health provider.)

In the past, anti-abortion activists have “geofenced” Planned Parenthoods, creating a digital border around them and targeting phones that enter the area with ads directing owners to a website meant to dissuade women from ending their pregnancies.

There are similar attempts to capture the attention of people who go online to seek help with abortions. “Pregnancy crisis centers” aim to be at the top of Google search results when people seek information about how to end a pregnancy. When someone clicks through to such a website, it will sometimes try to collect information about the person.

Given the many ways in which people’s movements, communications and internet searches are digitally tracked, the bigger question may be just how zealous law enforcement will be in states with abortion bans. Those advising against the use of period trackers appear to fear the worst: dragnet-style searches for anyone who was pregnant and then ceased to be.

“It’s hard to say what will happen where and how and when, but the possibilities are pretty perilous,” Ms. Conti-Cook said. “It can be very easy to be overwhelmed by all the possibilities, which is why I try to emphasize focusing on what we have seen used against people.”

She added: “Google searches, websites visited, email receipts. That’s what we’ve seen.”