Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges
3 years ago by Jure Repinc to c/technology
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
yeah, the difference is pretty stark:
- lemmy: we'll give you a way to dm anyone on site, but please don't use that, if you set up an app on this other open source service we're not affiliated with (which is basically an encrypted discord) we'll do our best to make it as seamless for you as possible. we'll keep warning you for your own privacy.
- meta/facebook: aggressively keeps you on-platform for spying purposes; literally killed xmpp a decade ago and they'll fuckin do it again (if we let them)
They trust me. Dumb fucks.
- Mark Zuckerberg
(yes it sounds like satire but that's a real quote)
The Lemmy DM is imo actually quite important. If I want to get in touch with someone about a post, nothing more. It is an easy option, and serves a purpose. It isn't imo meant to be used for anything else.
yep, it's important that we have this capability, but it's also nice that unlike other platforms that do their best to lock you in, lemmy actively pushes you toward a safer alternative
I mean I agree with Zuck on that one.
correction: it was both! fedbook chat also supported xmpp at first, they never federated but you could at least use it with a jabber client. then when they had enough market share they killed it.
fun semi related fact is that, at least a couple of years ago, was using modified ejabberd (ie an xmpp server) as the backend - so arguably they helped with EEE too.
google does seem to be the main culprit, but facebook still played a role as far as i'm aware. these two companies also colluded a lot so i wouldn't trust either of them with anything federated
Some game-of-telephone misinformation originating from this article - though it has gone from Google killed it (which this article states), to it was a protocol that allowed Facebook and Google to communicate and then got killed, to Facebook killed it.
I don't even agree that Google killed it, because it's simply a messaging protocol, it doesn't "die". Maybe you could try to argue that Google killed Jabber, but I used Jabber back in the early 00s, pretty much nobody else did lol, almost all IM communication was done over MSN Messenger. Google Talk brought XMPP "users" and they left when Google sunsetted Talk in favour of Hangouts. Facebook Messenger used XMPP for a time, so if anything they "revived" it (they didn't, it was never dead), but, like all the other messaging apps, they moved to their own proprietary version to add their own features.
This is what XMPP was actually designed for, the X literally means "eXtensible", whether it's extended open source or into proprietary versions.
I feel like there's a lot of anti-tech misinformation on Lemmy and it's great to be skeptical, but honestly I think we waste a ton of time being easily ragebait'd into the wrong shit.
my understanding was that while google is the main culprit, facebook and google both played a big part in killing it. but since we're discussing meta/facebook here, and they're not blameless, i focused on that.
but yeah, fuck google too.
Yeah Google is more to blame for that. When they defedarated it was pretty much the end of XMPP. From what I remember, Facebook used the protocol but never opened their service for federation.
And even if what I do is relatively tame, I want others to be protected from the wolf at the door.
This. I don't need to win, I just want Meta to lose.
Are you saying that the individuals who run these servers and instances aren’t subject to the same laws? I read the article, and Facebook complied with a court order.
You don’t think anyone running Lemmy would do the same without access to lawyers and capital like Facebook has?
Not disagreeing with you there.
Every interaction on Lemmy is copied to all other federated instances. There are instances all over the world with a copy of yours and my comment. They can track and use those comments for any purpose. Its both a blessing and a curse of an open federated structure.
they can also scrape them. that's not really the point.
people can dm on lemmy, and only the two instances that host the people on either end of the dm (which may even be the same instance) store that dm. that instance may actually receive a subpoena. but all of this is heavily discouraged by the lemmy interface itself, instead prompting people to set up a matrix account instead, and matrix chats are end-to-end encrypted.
And how can we be sure that all the instances federated with any instance we participate on aren't run by law enforcement themselves? I'd be surprised if there aren't running instances by every major investigative agency themselves.
This is why everyone should take steps to protect their privacy. You don't have to go 0-100 overnight. Just audit yourself and do a few things now. Keep those habits up. Then audit and add a few more things, repeat.
I need to do this myself, I've been slipping
Almost all countries have similar systems for obtaining evidence. These people were criminals, they broke the law and the legal system worked as designed to bring them to "justice". Meta was just a pawn here with very little influence.
If this story was about a murder rather than an abortion people would think that Meta did the right thing to bring the murderer to justice. As I see it the problem is that people disagree with the law and are using Meta as a scapegoat. But you don't fix stupid laws by having corporations go vigilante. I'd rather not have billionaires coming up with their own set of laws, that is a recipe for disaster. I think we need to fix the laws, which will fix the root cause of this issue.
Also use E2EE for all private information, cryptography can't be compelled to reveal your private data by a court order.
Lemmy promotes using Matrix, which is a separate service, so instance admins don't need to be in the business of hosting private conversations.
Matrix is end-to-end encrypted so even the admins of your Matrix server could not provide your chats to law enforcement.
I wish Lemmy was as well. Ah well.
It's not really possible as long as Lemmy is a website. E2EE works on Matrix because it's an app, and therefore it can manage your encryption keys in ways a browser cannot do for you. (You can save things in the client, but not in a reliable enough way for something like the master key for every communication you ever had that if you lose you get locked out of all your chat history.) In the case of Lemmy, the signing keys for your federated actions are handled by the server, which is perfectly fine for 99% of what you use Lemmy for (public posts and comments), but it also means that even if they implemented E2EE for chats, the keys to decrypt the convo would be right on the same server.
That's why Lemmy actively pushes you to set up a Matrix account, because Matrix makes better tradeoffs for the purposes of messaging, while Lemmy's tradeoffs are more relevant to a link aggregator style social media.
But also fuck these laws and the people passing them and the people voting for the people passing them. They're the real evil.
We have to always assume rich corporations are going to do whatever serves their best interest. It's nature. Like a mantis is gonna bite off her mate's head when they're done mating. It's up to governing factors to keep them in check. On that note, +1 to defederate. They will cannibalize or however abuse Lemmy if it will make them a penny.
I totally agree with your sentiment... However they don't have a choice. They are legally obligated to turn that information over if they are served a warrant. Doing anything less is obstruction at the very least and they could be shut down and put into receivership.
The fault here is with the two individuals trusting a corporation to keep data private and to put the individuals interests ahead of the corporation. Neither is a realistic expectation.
they could have made their shitty DM system end-to-end encrypt messages by default, instead of burying that feature[0] in chat settings
or, they could have used their MASSIVE wealth and lobbying power to directly fight the warrant in court (if there even was one, they have a long history of just requiring a form ostensibly signed by any cop to turn over private data)
or they could have just lied and said they couldn't find the data
I don't disagree that people shouldn't trust Facebook but saying "they don't have a choice" is absurd
Any instance owner operating out of similar jurisdiction is under the same situation.
I vote to write this reasoning at the very top, on the sticked topics when it happens. Like, literally just write "Because Facebook is evil" and don't elaborate.
Plus, if someone shows up being a concern troll on the point, they will laser focus on it, taking the bait, we can all just block the person, a world improved.
The "we should just wait and see what they do" crowd is so cute. So innocent.
If some fuckstick from Nebraska asked me to snitch on my users for something which isn't a crime in my state, I would simply tell them to fuck themselves, go ahead, and try to have me extradited. If my instance were bordering on a trillion dollars market cap, I'd hire a fucking lawyer.
Because it will bring more people to the fedi while bringing a ton more content, support and development. How are people this blind still?
Give the choice to the users and don't decide what you think is best for them.
What good is that bloated userbase if it's just dead or abandoned accounts? If anything, they are more likely to just ctrl + C > ctrl + V their users as well as their privacy policy on their client, which doesn't really help anyone. Besides, can facebook really be trusted to play by the rules?
yo by any chance do you got some stuff I could look into when it comes to how the fediverse works and how threads works as well? If I am wrong, I want to at least see why and also because Yeah to an extent I am kinda assuming stuff based on the comments I'm reading as well as what I personally think.
No one has anything to hide, until they do
I once heard that "Anyone can be charged with a crime if they can be watched closely enough for long enough."
I'm committing a crime right now, pairing this red wine with this halibut.
I remember that from Don't Take to The Police. Since gotchas I can think of is touching an eagle feather lying on the ground (endangered animals plus a market for poachers). Point being, that it's essentially impossible to say with certainty that you've broken no law.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/d-7o9xYp7eE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Found the quote:
The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just what particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.
Stephen G. Breyer, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent
It's used around 4:40 in the Don't Take To The Police video.
I would like to quote a Hungarian movie classic from 1969 (it was sitting in a box for a decade until it somehow got past the censorship):
Mutasson nekem egyetlen embert ebben a tetves országban, akire ha kell, 5 perc alatt nem bizonyítom rá, hogy bűnös! Magára is, magamra is, mindenkire!
Show me a single person in this flea-ridden country who if needed, I can't prove in 5 minutes that they are guilty! You, me, everyone!
Other great quotes from the same movie:
Ahol nem vagyunk mi, ott az ellenség.
Where we are not, there is the enemy.
Ezeken lovagol maga? Amit a vaksi szemével lát? A süket fülével hall? A tompa agyával gondol? Azt hiszi, fölér az a mi nagy céljaink igazságához?!
Are you hung up on these things? What you see with your blind eyes? What you hear with your deaf ears? What you think with your blunt mind? Do you believe these are comparable to the truth of our great cause?
Just if you thought that these people are not the same as the commies were way back when. Authoritarians tend to be alike.
At this point, they'll just say "yeah, but these people did a crime. I don't do crimes so I have nothing to worry about". The problem with that mentality, I would hope, doesn't need to be stated.
I stopped trying to change the world.
How is this an example of the government turning into a "fascist dictatorship"?
Reading comprehension is hard, so I'll help you out.
This [event mentioned on the news] is the perfect example of why you should be worried. Because your government can [i.e. has the potential to] turn into a fascist dictatorship at any time [which is unrelated to this specific piece of news, being a hypothetical scenario] and you ain’t getting that data back.
I agree that these people did a crime.
I just don't think their crime should be illegal.
If this was about murdering a full-grown adult and not aborting a fetus, nobody would be talking about privacy concerns. Guaranteed.
How do you know they committed a crime. After reading the article I don’t know. It looks totally as if it’s possible that she just had a miscarriage.
Maybe there’s just a prosecutor eager for convictions.
Maybe she was trying do avoid exactly this kind of trouble.
She took abortion drugs.....
We'd still be talking about the privacy part because it'd be still more concerning than the death of one random dude.
Would you be ok with someone aborting a 39 week old fetus? What about a 40 week old fetus? What about during labour?
Slippery slope fallacy detected
Also, there's no general agreement or scientific pointing of where life and consciousness is started on a fetus so, if the government job is to conserve the life of a individual, a fetus life still matters and shouldn't be taken by neither the parents or anyone else.
Brazil (ironically enough) has a good constitution about about abortion where's it is strictly prohibited unless some cases apply like: the baby has developed no brain, the baby has originated from a sexual assault case or the process of giving birth or the pregnancy itself represents a risk of death for the mother. It is simple, states that life's have the same values as well as showing the individual rights matter.
Why do you think a life created by sexual assault is less valuable than a life created otherwise? Isn’t the resulting life the same?
Thinking this through might help you understand the tradeoffs behind most abortions. Pregnancy is dangerous, childbirth is dangerous, parenting is incredibly difficult.
A child could push a family into poverty and devastate siblings’ futures. How do you evaluate the harm caused by that against the harm caused by being forced to carry a child produced by sexual assault?
You're joking, right? First, abortions aren't mentioned in the Brazilian constitution - you'd have to look at specific legal codices, such as the Civil Code or the Penal Code. Second, that's the bare minimum, not "pretty good".
For what it's worth, the fetus was viable outside the womb 4 weeks before they did this. Viable at 24 weeks, aborted at 28. Pretty fucked up imo
I agree with you, but I don't think I could explicitly state what's wrong with that mentality. Can you humor me and state it?
Edit: can someone else take a shot at it? Tge parent comment is essentially saying "people will counter with X, but everyone knows that doesn't make sense". It's clear that something is wrong with that mentality, but it obviously would have a very real benefit of stating it's flaws since the whole premise of this is that some people don't know what's wrong with that mentality.
The obvious, unspoken part is: what is legal now isn't guaranteed to be legal two seconds in the future, and likewise to what is illegal. The law gives you no guarantee of being ethical nor moral, it's simply a collection of behaviors either sanctioned or unsanctioned by the State.
As a clear example, you may tell me how much you love breathing in fresh air. If, tomorrow, breathing fresh air is made illegal, you've just shared with me a confession to a crime.
Thank you for actually doing this.
I guess that can also be extended to things that can accidentally be suspicious. Imagine if Colonel Mustard, who "doesn't have anything to hide", let the police search their trunk and found a broken candle stick. Even though he wasn't being searched for that in particular, now he's a suspect in Mrs. Peacock's murder at the gazebo (Clue reference).
America is a terrifying church with guns. I pity the citizens.
Every country has the anti-abortion cancer movement and it wouldn't surprise me if the shit gets more serious here in Europe too with the rise of far right parties. As a matter of fact you have only to look at Poland.
We'll keep saying that can't happen here right up until it happens
Y’all better be careful
Ms Smith goes to Washington?
Women's reproductive rights are strongly supported in Canada, but that doesn't stop one of the main national parties playing coy with a commitment to not reopen the debate.
To be fair, it seems most Americans support women's reproductive rights as well, with a referendum in Kansas passing with 59%.
It's gerrymandering and the Supreme Court that are changing things down there.
This isn't purely anti-abortion pearl clutching in this instance. Where this occurred it is perfectly legal to have an abortion into the 20th week of pregnancy.
Fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks.
They killed the fetus with meds at 28 weeks, the pregnant 17 year old still went through labor (with no medical supervision due to how they chose to do this), they burned he remains, and then buried them on a farm.
That's a massive oversimplification of things. Intentionally removing nuance doesn't help people.
More response in my other reply to your similar message
"Less hopeful", maybe?
People are getting all upset at Facebook/Meta here but they were served a valid warrant. I don't think there is much to get mad about them here. The takeaway I get is this:
Avoid giving data to others. No matter how trustworthy they are (not that Meta is) they can be legally compelled to release it. Trust only in cryptography.
There is of course the other question of if abortion being illegal is a policy that most people agree with...but that is a whole different kettle of fish that I won't get into here.
Maybe just elect non fanatical nut jobs?
Good luck with that. The way voting works in the US basically guarantees a 2-party race. With only 2 parties you end up having policies grouped into these huge bundles, so making an actual decision on any particular issue is incredibly difficult. (Unless you are a billionaire and want to lobby a party for a law)
Completely right. This is an education issue.
There are several other issues how these two handled this situation.
Court and police records show that police began investigating 17-year-old Celeste Burgess and her mother Jessica Burgess after receiving a tip-off that the pair had illegally buried a stillborn child given birth to prematurely by Celeste.
Don't discuss this or involve anyone else.
The two women told detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division that they’d discussed the matter on Facebook Messenger, which prompted the state to issue Meta with a search warrant for their chat history and data including log-in timestamps and photos.
Why are they even talking to police? Lawyer up, even if the lawyer is free.
(E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.)
Facebook messenger and text message is the absolute worse way to discuss things like this. They should've at least turned on E2EE but they already admitted fault and their devices would've been taken away anyway.
They seem like they together. They should've just discussed this in person.
This is an older story, and 5 months later Meta announced that they're rolling out full E2EE encryption to Messenger, I don't think that's a coincidence. Are they doing it out of the goodness of their hearts? Probably not, they're a corporation, but this does show that global backlash actually works for something.
Use end to end encrypted messaging apps, and, if you're in a situation like this, know what they can be forced to share via court order. For example, while WhatsApp has full E2EE and messages can't be turned over, IP addresses can, which can be used to track location, so don't connect to an abortion clinic's wifi for example. Probably just a good rule in general, as law enforcement could subpoena router logs if they have a suspicion.
Ideally use something that can hand over less metadata like Signal if you're in this sort of situation, they don't even keep IP address, but this is a lesser known app that also relies on the recipient using Signal.
They couldve opted to end 2 end encryption just like they do on whatsapp. Then the warrant can eat shit.
While whatsapp is using e2e encryption it is still owned by meta, as such I trust it just as much as plain facebook messenger. Signal ftw.
The problem is that private messages should be private, meaning Meta should've had no ability whatsoever to share those messages even if served a warrant. Those messages should be E2E encrypted.
Fwiw, Messeger does have e2e encryption, just opt in only afaik. Whether or not you trust meta with that is another matter, but it is there.
I haven't trusted Meta since they IPO'd. I deleted my account sometime back in 2015 or so, had to recreate it when I went on-site as a contractor for a week, and promptly deleted it again.
But it's good that they have E2E, it should be on by default and not able to be disabled. Regardless, they probably have anything encrypted indexed anyway so they don't lose that little bit of info about you.
They should be? I mean, not just for the crime, but in general privacy should be the default.
I mean yeah it should but you gotta follow the old saying "don't write when you can speak, don't speak when you can nod, don't nod if you can wink" or whatever. You have an expectation of privacy when sending physical mail for example, but it's still a bad idea to put a crime in writing if you don't have to. Even if it can't legally be used as evidence it can be read. We've seen that with 'parallel construction' from law enforcement
I've actually never heard that saying. I like it a lot.
It's one of those quotes with a lot of different versions floating around I think it's generally attributed to this guy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Lomasney
The Klingons of Star Trek also have a saying: If you do not wish a thing heard, do not say it.
True, sadly not many people show up for my key signing parties, even if I serve three kinds of chips.
Yeah, that sounds pretty on-brand for Meta
They are just complying with the law here. As much as I don't think Meta are great people I'd rather that they follow the law than make their own decisions. Of course we should also consider fixing these laws, but that isn't really Meta's responsibility.
If law enforcement knocks on my door with a valid warrant I'm going to comply. It would be nice to have some legal assistance to help validate the warrant but at the end of the day in this case it was almost certainly valid.
If this was about a murder rather than abortion people would be applauding Meta for helping catch the murderer. I think what people are actually mad about is the law, and they are using Meta as a scapegoat.
But at the end of the day E2EE is the best solution here. Don't give private data to others, they can't be trusted because they can be compelled by the law.
And this is one thing that people don't seem to understand about Lemmy et al. If you post messages (including DM's) on any one host, that message will be duplicated to any federated hosts. In most cases the only encryption would be in transit, so all it takes is for one of those hosts to be in a jurisdiction where the local authorities can seize the data, hackers can infiltrate poorly secured server, etc
If you are worried about the privacy/security of your data, it's not really any safer here then on Reddit or Facebook etc. It may be more resistant to corporate influence but at the same time a kind citizen running a node is less likely to have money to fight legal action and warrants.
Just wondering (INAL): if these women would have been using e2ee, could the police not legally require them to let them read it
Edit: I mean would the women not be required to let the police read the e2ee?
If the oberstgruppenfuhrer of the schutsstaffel came to your house and asked where the juden were hiding and had a valid order, would you show them the attic?
For the murder example, remember Apple being in the news for not providing the FBI access via a backdoor in the OS to the San Bernardino shooter’s phone? There were plenty of people on both sides of that argument saying they should or shouldn’t comply. That’s why it’s essential for E2EE to maintain privacy
I'm almost certain that if something like this happened to any fediverse instance - that a local police enforcement would contact the admin and asked for user's data, which they are required by law to provide or they would go to jail/get a hefty fine and possibly a criminal record, they would do that too. That's also why E2E is required, to prevent such problems for instance admins - but then again, there's really nothing you can do against local law, and if it requires that you have to be able to cooperate, well... Then there's not much the admin can do, without putting himself in a real risk of prosecution, because he is breaking the law by have E2E.
That's also a good reason to be careful when selecting your home instance, and making sure that you choose one in a country that has all right laws in that regard.
Of course, that's assuming the police makes contact. I don't suppose that the admins would be searching through the DMs of people to snitch on them. And if Meta is doing that preemtively and is actively snitching on people - that's downright evil.
1984 indeed..
However, private chat messages are only one component in a whole range of digital evidence that is likely to be used by police to prosecute illegal abortions in the United States. Investigators will be able to request access to many data sources, including digital health records, Google search history, text messages, and phone location data.
Obligatory:
A racist, a snitch, a plagiarist and a rapist walk into a bar. The bartender asks: "How's the new book coming mr. Orwell?"
Also to the "well he only snitched on evil Stalinists" Radlibs, that's not even true. He snitched on social democrats like you. He was never a friend of the proletariat.
Social democrats like you
wha? ok?
She was 7 months pregnant. That baby is viable outside the womb in many scenarios. It’s disgusting to abort a child at that point. The local law allows abortions up to 5 months into the pregnancy (20 weeks). That’s plenty of time to make a decision, and a pretty liberal allowance. Prosecution of this mother and daughter is justified and there is nothing wrong with Meta complying with the info request.
The article:
Court and police records show that police began investigating 17-year-old Celeste Burgess and her mother Jessica Burgess after receiving a tip-off that the pair had illegally buried a stillborn child given birth to prematurely by Celeste. The two women told detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division that they’d discussed the matter on Facebook Messenger, which prompted the state to issue Meta with a search warrant for their chat history and data including log-in timestamps and photos.
From Motherboard (where you also can read court documents):
The state’s case relies on evidence from the teenager’s private Facebook messages, obtained directly from Facebook by court order, which show the mother and daughter allegedly bought medication to induce abortion online, and then disposed of the body of the fetus.
According to court records, Celeste Burgess, 17, and her mother, Jessica Burgess, bought medication called Pregnot designed to end pregnancy. Pregnot is a kit of mifepristone and misoprostol, which is often used to safely end pregnancy in the first trimester. In this case, Burgess was 28-weeks pregnant, which is later in pregnancy than mifepristone and misoprostol are recommended for use. It’s also later than Nebraska’s 20-week post-fertilization abortion ban, which makes allowances only if the pregnant person is at risk of death or "serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function." (Nebraska’s abortion laws have not changed since Roe v Wade was overturned).
Yes, I’m not arguing or anything, I forgot to mention I appreciated the added context you provided. Just wanted to further expand on it for those wanting to get more context, as it seems to be a lot of people in the thread that didn’t read the article
Thanks for adding some nuance that people might miss if they just read the headline. This girl broke some long established abortion laws by aborting at 7 months like you said. She is definitely in the wrong here.
At the same time, I don't like meta for violating people's privacy and working with law enforcement. Make law enforcement do their own jobs.
Still, I don't feel sorry for them. These women definitely dug their own hole. You think it would be obvious to people by now to not talk about illegal things on any social media, especially meta.
I’m trying, but it seems that unfortunately Lemmy is yet another platform chock full of people so hard left that they downvote an opinion that 7 months pregnant is a bit too far along to have an abortion… it’s insane to me that 7 months is even a debate. I’m pro-abortion up to a point. That point starts to become concerning after the first trimester. This baby was in the third trimester…
You would want to force a 17 year old (or any person) to go through pregnancy and childbirth because you personally feel that's the right thing to do? What about her rights? Does she lose them by getting impregnated? Because that's what you are wanting to enforce.
No not at all. Just don't get an abortion at 7 months. Literally doctors won't do it because it's unethical at that point. Did you even read the article? Like she took a bunch of drugs illegally to abort a fetus that could just about live outside the womb.
I am extremely pro choice, but we have a cutoff point for it that science has established to prevent cruelty.
The baby was nearly fully formed with a face, hands, feet, and a heartbeat that could have survived outside the womb. I implore you to go look up some photos of a 28 week fetus and I guarantee you'll be surprised how much it looks like a normal baby.
Why should we continue birthing children when we already have so many that are insufficiently cared for?
If you, personally, would assume responsibility for this child, great, but otherwise leave it up to the individual.
The morality of having children at all is a separate point entirely. There are countless ways this could have ended or been prevented long before the fetus was viable outside the womb.
Pregnancy can never be 100 % prevented. Unless you sterilise someone. And you do not know the reasons for why this girl didn't go through abortion earlier.
It's disgusting to wish on women that they should lose the rights to their own bodies that easily.
She carried the baby to nearly full term. It had a face, hands, feet, and a heartbeat. It was a living being that could have survived outside the womb. Then she took abortion medication that wasn't meant for pregnancies that far along. I'm not even religious and have always been pro-abortion, but there needs to be a reasonable cut-off point. In 2 and half more months she could have given it up for adoption.
It’s not your decision and should not be the government’s. Only the pregnant person and their doctor matter. Possible input from their parents and/or other potential-parent of the fetus.
You’re giving away your right wingery too easily. When you call a fetus a baby, red flag, but sometimes people just use that (if the fetus is an intended pregnancy and the parent(s) plan to actually have a child, usually). So, in the interest of debate-bro “good faith,” ok.
Referring to abortion as disgusting. Well, that pretty much just ruined anything else you had to say. I bet open heart surgery or getting your arm reset after breaking can be pretty disgusting to most of us who aren’t used to such things. They’re all still medical procedures and their disgustingness or not is completely irrelevant to outsiders to the procedure. And if you’re simply disgusted at the idea of the procedure being done, that meaning, well one choose better words and two, yeah, that’s just reactionary mindset creeping in and spewing out your little fingers. At the end of the day whatever little nuggets of shit were implanted into YOUR brain as a child (such as “abortions are only valid until X arbitrarily decided date”) are irrelevant to the world and to this completely other human being seeking a medical procedure. Long story short: it’s none of your fucking business. A fetus is NOT a baby or a child and you’re purposely wrongly using the word to conflate the two. Again… right wingery…
Prosecution is not warrant for a seeking to obtain medical procedures. This isn’t the year 1647. Please fucking stop.
If you were discussing a purely rhetorical topic on “the moral and ethics of abortions and when they’re done” maybe you’d have some valid points and perhaps, because my brain was also rotted by arbitrary religious deadlines growing up, I’d be inclined to agree with hypothetical “if it were MY gf/wife, I’d want…” whatever to happen. But at the end of the day this isn’t our partner, it wasn’t our body, we aren’t doctors involved in the decision, we aren’t the person’s parent(s), we aren’t fucking Jesus or whatever. It’s not our decision to make, it’s no one’s but the person with the fetus under the care of a qualified physician. Who, btw, very well might be, and I’d assume probably was, advising towards birth and then surrendering for adoption. But it’s not their decision either. Just one single person gets that right with some important advisors along the way. We are none of those people, so, we and the government should probably fuck off forever.
And Zuck can completely fuck himself. Not even going to rant on that because corporations bending over and spreading fully for the government at the slightest hint of a request for private data has been happening for decades. They’re morally bankrupt cowards. Even protected from personal legal liability (by their corporations, which do provide that, unfortunately in most cases) they won’t even attempt to stand up for privacy rights if nothing else. Gross.
7 months is entirely viable and no doctor would recommend an abortion at 7 months barring some painful fatal disease in the fetus (am a physician myself) that’s why it was an illegal sketchy abortion. Even if the life of the mother were in danger it’d be an early delivery that would get performed, not an abortion.
This is the kind of case that the anti abortion rights folks will point to as a reason why abortion should be illegal so for so many people here to support this particular case is wild, you’re doing more harm than good.
You’re not a physician because no physician worth a grain of shit would be concerned about the fetus and not the insane overreach of government forcing the endangerment of the pregnant person’s life.
More right wingery.
If you are concerned with the fetus here in any fashion, sorry to be the first to break the news, but you have a reactionary take on this topic. I’ve been incredibly generous even (which many purists would roast us both alive for) and given that YOU can hold whatever opinions you want on birth and abortion and whatever- but you cannot apply your perceived morality around a medical procedure to other humans. You can say that makes whoever “look bad” all you want, ok, you think I give a fuck about the opinions of reactionaries who support forcing women to birth babies on top of the wars they want to send that future-kid to so that kid can shoot some random poor person in some far off land to enrich aforementioned reactionaries? I’m supposed to bow down to their opinions and their thoughts on me? No. That’s not how any of this works. Now you’ve been informed of what you support and going forward will never have the excuse of ignorance again. I’d suggest you do a little reflection. And stop lying about being a doctor online. No one cares. I’m Jesus Christ btw.
I can't believe you wrote this long a response and tried to dunk on someone without reading the article.
It’s not a “dunk” you debate pervert. It’s informing the uninformed in a generalized fashion.
Reading is hard. School was hard. I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault. Someone failed you along the way. I’m sorry that happened to you. If you keep reading and think really really hard, though, it might get better. I can’t promise anything 😔
Only the pregnant person and their doctor matter.
They avoided going to a hospital because they didn't want the child, so they gave birth elsewhere. There was no doctor present to give medical advice.
The baby didn't make it because of their negligence, so they burned and buried it.
How in the world could you defend something as gruesome as that? They're monsters.
"private chat history" on Facebook...
"I gUeSs IlL use ThReAdS. WhAts ThE hArM" /s
Meta needs to be destroyed. No organisation, person, or people should hold that much power.
Gonna Re-Share this resource... PLEASE forward to individuals who may need it! https://www.eff.org/...
If you have nothing to hide... but then they just change the laws, now you are a criminal and they already have handy tools in place to convict you.
You cannot be convicted for an action that was made illegal after you comitted it. This is just Facebook sucking data and making money off others' misfortune. I am sure that they didn't hand over the chat logs for free. "I got nothing to hide" is exactly the reason Meta is a multi-billion company. Your agenda should be "I have nothing to gain from sharing my life with them".
It's like "don't talk to cops, it will not help you".
You cannot be convicted for an action that was made illegal after you comitted it.
That was not my point. The point is, if the tech for mass surveillance is already in place and the laws change to more authoritarian or even just more dumb, it will be harder to escape those.
“I have nothing to gain from sharing my life with them”.
That is obvious not true, otherwise people would not be using social media.
I am sure that they didn’t hand over the chat logs for free
They handed over the chat logs in response to a court order to do so. The gov't didn't pay them. They forced them.
I can't remember the last time I saw anything that made me think "I would like to go to America".
These days it's just another thing to add to the ever increasing list of reasons NOT to go there.
I live in a third world country with a crumbling infrastructure, shitloads of violence and crime, a rapidly rising cost of living, crap working opportunities and corrupt government.
Americans live in a first world country where it seems more and more like most of the problems I mentioned are somehow worse there and the ones they haven’t got yet are on the horizon.
I used to think it would be my future home. Now I’m looking for literally anything other than the US/China.
Not sure how this is in any way an America specific thing.
The abortion was at 28 weeks, fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks, and Nebraska allows abortions until 20 weeks. They waited two whole months past the point they could have taken care of this with no fuss, one month past the point of viability.
They didn't do this through a doctor or any safe/proper way. The pregnant woman took medicine to kill the fetus, then delivered it as a stillbirth. Her and her mother then burned the stillborn and buried it on a farm.
The mother and daughter told police they discussed it in their facebook dms, police made a formal legal request for the dms to facebook and facebook complied. They didn't follow the golden rule of "don't talk to police". On top of that, the court documents indicate that the dms were part of a bunch of evidence that made the case, not the single piece of evidence that convicted them.
Honestly asking, is there something I'm missing here that would have made this turn out differently in another country? America isn't as great as its own patriotism claims, but I see this take very often in situations that don't seem to have much at all to do with it happening in America.
The godawful changes with Roe v Wade happened after this incident, and you can't be charged with breaking a law by actions taken before the law was in effect/changed. So at the time, they still could have done the abortion legally.
I thought messenger was end-to-end encrypted, at least according to Facebook. How were they able to hand over the chat logs? The messages should be encrypted with a key that is itself encrypted with user's password, which Facebook doesn't store.
What am I missing?
Use Signal messenger and have it set for auto deletion of messages if you must message!!!
Of course use Signal or Matrix but please don't think that makes your messaging entirely impenetrable. I am not saying their end-to-end encryption has been breached. But a compromised device is a compromised device. Signal might be secure at least for now, but is your keyboard?
We do live in times of zero-click spyware and while the general public doesn't necessarily have to worry about things like Pegasus atm, it is still used increasingly and not just against people who break the law.
I do my best, although I do fail to be up to date every once in a while, to stay as secure as possible, but to think any communication is entirely secure is not a good policy.
Unless you pissed off an entire nation state I wouldn't worry about signal as long as you encrypt your device and use a password to unlock. Although I believe that some police in the u.s. have some kind of black box for unlocking phones. In that case, I guess you break off your USB port and rely on wireless charging. Even then, they could send the phone to someone to disassemble and pull an image from the device image and try to get in that way.
Pissing off entire nation state or at least people in power in that nation is unfortunately easy these days. And while the average person usually doesn't run into these issues the shrinking spaces and criminalization of civil society even in countries you wouldn't think are that far gone are at the level that surprising people might run into these issues. There are also some situations where you don't need to piss off entire governments to get a lot of data from a person. Tech-savvy abusive spouse might be enough.
We are not really disagreeing here. I just think that we need to be open about the vulnerabilities and strengths of software. The security of Signal and Matrix are absolutely great especially compared to things like WhatsApp. But they are not 100% secure. Very little is.
Agreed. Basically if you know that nobody will have physical access to the device and that nobody who cares has the money to buy a vulnerability from an Israeli firm, then you're good.
This isn't subversion, or any sort of theocratic hellscape.
Girl could have gotten an abortion 100% legally up through 20 weeks of preganancy. At 24 weeks the fetus becomes viable outside the womb. At 28 weeks she (with the assistance of her mother) took meds to kill the fetus and induce a stillbirth, commenting that she couldn't wait to be able to wear jeans again.
She goes through natural labor to pass the stillbirth outside of any medical facility or supervision, burns the remains, and buries them on a farm. When questioned by police, she and her mother admit to using Facebook Messenger to discuss their plans.
The only thing in any way related to the romanticized fiction of some sort of downtrodden freedom seeker you're talking about is that using encrypted communications would have prevented their discussions from being available to be subpeona'd. That said, admitting to police you even had those discussions in the first place kind of defeats the damn purpose.
I think I'm missing something here. She was allowed to just get an abortion, for 20 weeks. This was all before the godawful Roe v Wade repeal.
It was also in a state that didn't change their abortion stance after Roe v Wade was repealed. Nothing was stopping her getting an abortion for the first 20 weeks like you said.
That's none of your business, though. It's not your body. Besides, Nebraska is basically a third world country when it comes to maternal health care availability, which makes this applicable:
In low-income countries, half of newborns born at or below 32 weeks gestational age die due to a lack of medical access
You are right, but you're swimming against the tide here. 28 weeks is a fully formed child that moves and would survive of born at this point. I am all for reproductive rights but going up to 28 weeks is just irresponsible.
I've taken the liberty of re-reading the article and have some things to point out 1. the girl was 17, a literal child, something you seemed to forget in your comment 2. You mentioned that she wanted to wear jeans again and that that was the motive, but the word 'jeans' wasn't even mentioned, which makes me wonder if you're tampering with anything in your comment coming from the article. All that considered you have a good point with some things such as in this specific situation such as them confessing to conspiracy was not a good idea, but I will still say use something end to end encrypted when doing something like this.
It might not be in this article but there are others that state that one of her messages about doing the abortion was that she couldn't wait to wear jeans again.
She should have legally gotten an abortion in the first 20 weeks of the pregnancy. I'm all for abortion and reproductive rights, but not when it's a viable baby already like it is at 28 weeks. She had 5 months to abort legally and easily and she didn't. Not only did she then illegally abort it, but she burned the stillborn baby and buried it. That's not ok.
We don’t even know if she had an abortion. May she had a miscarriage and was just trying to avoid what’s happening now, being accused of having had an abortion.
Now that sounds a lot like theocratic hellscape…
She took abortion drugs.....
This is really interesting (and awful) context.
This isn't a simple "my body my choice" type situation.
Someone feel free to refresh me but I think it's Samsung in the US you can only disable Facebook not delete it and it still calls home even if disabled. Probably other manufacturers as well. If you roll with android over apple 100% get a pixel. Yes fuck Google as well but they don't have any 3rd party shit collecting your data unless you install it.
You can use adb to uninstall those kinds of baked in apps. Its completely fucked up that you need to though.
Adb? Link, please?
https://www.xda-developers.com/...
It's basically remote command line control for android, from your PC.
You can backup stuff, copy stuff, install stuff...
Google "ADB Samsung debloat". You'll find a lot of tutorials. ADB is a part of android developer tools (it's free).
I believe thats just part of the service provider bloatware packages that come preinstalled into the OS. You have to root the phone and do a clean install without the bloatware to get rid of it. Its annoying as hell and I think its stupid that these companies can preinstall anything on these phones.
Not so. Unlocked is Facebook free. Blame your carrier
This isn't correct or at least it isn't a universal issue. My Samsung Galaxy 21+ doesn't have Facebook on it, disabled or otherwise.
America fuck yeahhh 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅🦅🦅
There is no way for these companies to say no to law enforcement. That is why you should stay away from corporate social media.
Fuck Meta!!
Are they listening from the eaves or listening with ease? Or perhaps both.
People don't think of medical care as "something illegal"
the pair’s private chat history
There is no such thing as a private chat on a platform you do not own. And even if you DO own the platform it is only as private as the participants decide it to be. Hopefully people start to realize this before complete non-privacy becomes the accepted norm.
Private doesn't means the privacy in this case just a formal formatting. If they were not discussing in a publicly available chat then it is already considered private by the definition but yeah, 99% true.
Not that facebook doesn't suck and we definitely shouldn't federate with Threads. But here's another article on this. Very late abortion where the fetus was probably viable. 17 year old was like, "I can't wait to get this thing out of me. I can finally where jeans." swallowed some pills to abort. Burned and buried the body on a farm. and the mom and daughter told the police about the facebook messages.
Yep. I'm pro-abortion rights, but this was just murder.
Any and every Lemmy instance owner would hand over your DMs to law enforcement as well btw.
Wait what the heck is an illegal abortion? You mean getting one from unlicensed practioners? Some do it time to time to save money or don't know any better.
Aside from any moral or political views, it amuses me when people do criminal acts and fail to realize police can inspect personal data like text messages, email, and social media. I think people smart enough to realize that are smart enough to avoid committing a crime in the first place. Though there are smart criminals that get away with it, you just don't hear about them because they don't get caught. In any case I tend to think being stupid is prerequisite to being a criminal.
They had the agency to take care of this for 20 damn weeks into the pregnancy where they were at 100% legally, even disregarding the options we all have to prevent conception in the first place.
On top of that, fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks, assuming the pregnant woman doesn't kill it at week 28 using medicine as this one did. I can't help but feel that makes 24 weeks a pretty important deadline for when this sort of choice is more than just about the pregnant woman.
That's a massive oversimplification of things. Intentionally removing nuance doesn't help people.
Even if the difference is largely academic, the police needed a warrant to get this info from Facebook. This info was not directly government owned and directly available to law enforcement.
Proper opsec and infosec is all about controlling for the threat level of your adversary. If you have nation state level adversaries then yes, you're screwed by simple merit of doing things online where the US government has major internet relays tapped at the source. That isn't the case here and black and white statements just muddy the waters and make proper security feel impossible to the average person. Don't help the powers that be to make you and others feel helpless. That helps no one.
The threat level here was minor. They told the police where to look for evidence.
Beyond that, I'm not personally going to continue into the rabbit hole of the current hellscape post the godawful repeal of Roe v Wade. That situation is absolutely fucked.
As always, don't talk with police, and don't discuss illegal activity unencrypted or connected to your real life identity.
Yeah it’s horrible for innocent people to be deprived of life against their own will
I can’t think of a single organism that doesn’t have a survival instinct
What? They had 20 weeks to do this properly with medical supervision but waited to do shit until week 28 of pregnancy, then most importantly broke rule #1: Don't talk to the fucking police. They admitted to the police that they planned it using FB messenger. Whether the police got the DMs isn't as relevant as the fact that when they were questioned they admitted it.
The victim in question openly stated they wanted an abortion at 28 weeks so they could wear jeans again.
Please stop using the phrase "victim blaming" to abrogate the necessity for critical thought.
This isn't some "she shouldn't have dressed like a slut" situation.
At some point people need to be held accountable to some absolute minimum level of personal responsibility.
It amuses me people use anything Facebook created.
One thing I hate is while I dont trsut metas encryotion, it isnt even a default which at this point in American history is just irresonabile and reckless. It sucks we can't teach about open source in schools.
That’s messed up
Obligatory IANAL, but...
Generally a search warrant needs to be issued by a local authority, and that requires the crime to be prosecutable in the place where it was issued.
So in theory, California is potentially able to refuse requests to search for things that are not illegal in California but may be illegal somewhere else.
That being said, it looks like there are specific practices in place making it easier to issue warrants for electronic data like this scenario, even across state lines.
And in this particular circumstance, the alleged offense is even illegal in California (abortion of a viable fetus), so it's a bit of a moot point anyways. A Californian judge would have issued this warrant if a local police department requested one.
Generally, if in the same country you'd have to comply. As another example though: If your server was in Canada, and some department in Alabama wanted your data, you could tell them to pound sand. Though they may put some sort of warrant out for you for failure to comply (doesn't matter though if you never go there)
Facebook doesn't use e2e.
There is a private chat e2e feature, but then your chats don't show up on PC.
I don't think it's Facebook's business, nor in its best interest or ours to store those messages, either way.
Read the article again and again, and then eventually understand the meta-issue here.
Facebook offers a platform to send messages. Those messages are stored somewhere. They never claimed it was end to end encrypted. If they are served a warrant they must comply. If you dont like it use a service that is end to end encrypted like Sigal or Matrix.
And by the way, if you read the article again and again, you will understand that Facebook was asked for this information because the police were told about it. Facebook simply complied with a warrant.
I cant stand Facebokk as much as the next guy, but this is a terrible example of something to get out the pitchforks. These women used an unenecrypted platform to commit a crime that has never been legal in the US. And find me another country that allows you to abort a baby at 28 weeks for non medical reasons.
In short: Fetuses are viable outside the womb by that point, and no US state has ever allowed abortions that late into pregnancy.
Actually there is no debate. It's called a fetus until it is born. It doesn't suddenly turn into a person with superior rights because some other person suddenly decides that now the woman lost the rights to her own body.
Anyone happen to know if this was chat history through Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp? WhatsApp claims end to end encryption doesn't it? I thought they say Facebook Messenger is also encrypted, but not end to end.
The main point to know is if you do not encrypt it with keys generated localy on your machine and encrypt it locally, then you can not be sure it really is E2E encrypted. If a corporation does it for you with their keys they can ready anything so this kind of E2E is more or less marketing bullshit and Apple is guilty of this too.
Probably WhatsApp but even if it isn't we have to "assume" (certainly they're doing it) that they're are sniffing through every of your WhatsApp messages too.
This was messenger, and before Facebook even claimed to have E2E encryption on it. Chill.
???
Another case of Meta cowering in front of local extremist laws. For those arguing that it should follow the local laws, hell no and fuck you. Do you realize Saudi Arabia for instance officially calls atheists terrorists and that we could imagine Meta handing over lists of atheists based on private conversations to the Saudi government to have them beheaded using some bogus anti-terrorism search warrant? We're not very far from that if we still believe Meta did nothing wrong.
Huh? This is a company responding to a legal warrant for evidence disclosure in an area it operates in. What does capitalosm have to do with it?
Ok, that's absolutely vile and reprehensible. But that's not actually related to what occurred in this instance. The suspects told the police that they discussed breaking the law using FB messenger. Police made a legal search warrant to collect that data from Facebook. Facebook complied.
Capitalism or anti-abortionism doesn't really enter the situation.
First off, capitalist power structures invented police - which means that everything police does is tied up with capitalism straight off the bat.
Second, just because something has been declared illegal does not make that thing immoral - and police doing something that is legal does not make the police any less inherently immoral. The fact that the police is doing the patriarchy's bidding by policing women's bodies in this way is about as immoral as it gets.
Third, you could argue that the women in question shouldn't have admitted this information to the police in the first place - but that ignores the conditions under which these women were probably interrogated.
Fourth, capitalist institutions will inevitably always side with the power structures that protect the status quo - it doesn't matter how many "Woman's Day" marketing they put up... at the end of the day, they will side with the patriarchy and enable it's violence - as you can see with the link I provided to you in my first response.
She aborted at 28 weeks. That's nearly 6 and a half months pregnant. Most babies can survive outside the womb when they're around 22 to 23 weeks. This was a baby, not some tiny fetus.
Yea, this wasn't an abortion, this was straight up murder. Headline is clickbait as fuck.
As long as it's inside someone's body, it's a body part, not a person, and there's no such thing as murdering a body part.
Had it been outside of her body at the time it would have been viable as a stand alone person.
did anyone actually read the article? you guys are responding like meta sent this data on its own. it was issued a search warrant after the two women told police that they had discussed the third trimester (28 week) abortion on facebook. they literally gave the police the tip off and meta just followed the law written by the people elected in that state by properly responding to the search warrant.
do i like meta? no.
do i agree with abortion law as it is? no.
do i think meta should follow the law? yes.
Abortion is legal in Nebraska, where this occurred, through the 20th week.
Fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks.
She even still went through labor and gave birth in this situation. She just took medicine to kill the fetus first. At that point is it really absurd to say she could have just not taken the meds and given it up for adoption?
Jesus Christ if I couldn't hate the United States more, just makes me more motivated to improve Lemmygrad's secure communications guide...
They aborted a child 7 months into pregnancy. That’s murdering a baby. Fuck those people, glad they are being prosecuted, and it’s good that Meta complied. The law in that state gives her 20 weeks to abort. That’s 5 months. That is a pretty liberal allowance.
After a dramatic filibuster effort earlier this year NE changed their abortion law to a ban that starts at 12 weeks.
In this instance it would have been viable outside the womb at the time it was killed.
Serious clickbait bs, the one time FB didn't do anything slimy, at least not by FB standards of slimy
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This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
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2: Do not post low effort posts
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