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.
Just as an FYI, since it seems like a lot of folks are just reading the headline and not reading the article:
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This article was written almost one year ago, so this is not a new development.
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This alleged offense occurred before any changes to local abortion laws (Nebraska in this case) were made, meaning this is an incident that would have still been illegal under Roe.
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Meta was served a legal subpoena requiring them to turn over all the data they had. Whether that data should have been E2E encrypted is another debate entirely, but they didn’t voluntarily disclose anything.
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The charges were pressed as felonies, meaning that they were considered illegal at the federal level, and so state jurisdiction did not matter for the purposes of this subpoena. -
Even under California’s current sanctuary status (where Meta is headquartered) which protects out-of-state individuals seeking abortions, this was a late-term abortion at 28 weeks, which is still illegal under Californian law.
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To contextualize that for our friends in Europe, this would have been illegal in every EU country, too (short of it being needed as a life-saving intervention, as in most of the US), so this is not a US-exclusive problem.
While this is a mostly great post, I’d point out one error:
The charges were pressed as felonies, meaning that they were considered illegal at the federal level
Felonies exist at both the Federal and State level. Just because something is a felony, does not mean it moves to Federal jurisdiction. And this case appears to have been filed in the Madison County District Court which is part of the Nebraska Judicial Branch. The cases themselves can be found on the District Court’s Calendar though you have to put the details in yourself. The cases IDs are CR220000175 and CR220000132 against the woman and her mother respectively. Getting the court documents themselves appears to require paying a fee to do the search and I don’t care enough about a random comment on the internet to pay for it.
There seems to be one document uploaded here which shows the charges against the woman. And this shows the sections of Nebraska State law under which the woman is being charged. Of the three charges, only the first is a felony. Specifically it’s a Class IV felony under Section 28-1301 of Nebraska State Law. And that law concerns moving buried human remains. The other two charges are misdemeanors for concealing the death of another person and lying to a peace officer.
tl;dr - Felonies exist at both the State and Federal level and jurisdiction is dependent on which laws (State or Federal) are at issue.
Thanks, that was a gap in my knowledge. I’ve edited my post to redact that element.
I had meant to do that much earlier today when I first saw your comment, but the fallout from our instance’s recent oopsie appeared to have been preventing me from editing/writing comments. Hope late is better than never.
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Filing this under my increasingly long list on reasons why to never record personal information in any messaging or social media app except signal
Welp! So much for using facebook
“Why should I care about my privacy? I don’t do anything illegal.”
Hmm? Do we now acknowledge that laws and public perceptions of your actions can change with time, and that you may one day become a “criminal” for continuing behaviors that were once legal?
To preempt the “but it should just be legal” whataboutists: Of course it should just be legal, but “criminal charges” suggests that it isn’t, and privacy helps you not get caught. Furthermore, this issue contains but is not limited to abortion. It’s time that “normal” people wake the fuck up and get on board with privacy rights.
Similar to this one from a few days ago, granted Reddit is trying to do the right thing here but I think it’s clear the Overton window on free speech has shifted
Reddit good guy?
Here is a interesting statistics problem:
Let’s say 50% of your state wants abortion to be legal. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/state/nebraska/views-about-abortion/
Lets say 10% wants it legal, but will vote to convict someone that committed an abortion. So, 40% will vote to acquit since they don’t see it as a crime. Lets say that of the remaining, 10% of those with obvious views of jury nullification will be kept off of the jury by the prosecution.
Twelve people. Each person will vote to convict 70% of the time and 30% will never vote to convict. What is the chance of a conviction? 70%, right? No, in civil trials you need a majority and in criminal trials you need a unanimous vote. So to get all 12, you will have a (0.7)^12 = 1.3% chance of conviction. Lets say the jury pool reflected Nebraska, 0.5^12= 0.02%. What about if only 10% would vote to block? 0.9^12=28%. Remember, ~10% believe the moon landings were faked. You can get 10% to basically believe anything. Even with the worst case scenario, you have under a 1 in 3 chance of being convicted.
That is why all post-roe laws target doctors and not (directly) women. Much easier to remove someones medical license then to get an abortion conviction.
Did anyone notice that this article is a year old?
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I don’t particularly like Facebook but…
If a country makes it legal to criminally prosecute girls who seek an abortion, and the same country makes it legal to allow police enforcement to demand tech companies to handover their data, maybe the problem is the country and its laws, more than Facebook.
You’re not wrong, but Facebook made no effort to fight the issue and simply handed over data they never should have.
I really don’t blame Facebook for not jumping into the abortion debate and martyring themselves. If people don’t like the abortion law, or the law that compels facebook to give this information to law enforcement, they need to make that known by voting for representatives that feel the same. Facebook taking a fat lawsuit to the face isn’t what’s going to change things there - it’s women realizing it could happen to them, it’s men realizing it could happen to their wife/girlfriend/daughter.
Why should they make an effort to break the laws of countries they do business in? If they don’t like the laws, they shouldn’t do business there.
For all of those saying Facebook was just complying with the law- there is absolutely no reason for Facebook to have access to its users’ private information. The company I work for can’t do anything with a customer’s account unless they give us the password. We can’t see anything they have saved there. All of the private stuff they have is private and even if a court ordered us to show it to them, we literally couldn’t comply.
We’re a small company and we can do it. A company the size of Meta can certainly do it.
You can do it because you’re a small company. Get enough attention, and the FBI will force you to decrypt on demand. They’ve done it before and the supreme court backed them up. Do it over seas and expect your US traffic to get blocked, if they don’t raid your offices.
WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram don’t have that issue.
Signal yes, WhatsApp yes but not the meta data, telegram only if explicitly set to encrypted otherwise no.
Because they have a back door due to cloud storage.
That is untrue. The FBI tried to get Apple to decrypt a shooter’s iPhone in Florida a few years back and they wouldn’t budge.
This isn’t quite right…
Apple didn’t have the means to decrypt the information, but it was within their ability to do (by writing code to do so.)
But asking a company for the unencrypted data, and forcing a company to produce a new application, are completely different things.
Don’t ever admit to anything illegal online. Never.
I do the opposite. Admit to every single thing, keep’em guessing what’s true.
I’m pretty sure self-aborting and burying a stillborn baby is against the law regardless of the status of Roe.
This is 100% true, but also this is less of a Facebook bad issue and more of a state law issue.
Facebook was subpoenaed to provide this info, they didn’t willingly hand it over. I’d be interested to see how many lemmings here jumping down the meta bad rabbithole would have the stones to ignore a subpoena lmao.
Well it could have been end to end encrypted leaving no way to turn anything over. It’s like turning over someones mail after it has been delivered because you made a copy of everything that came through.
Or, and I know Meta would find this absurd, but maybe don’t collect that data to begin with?!
How… do you think messaging platforms work?
Why would I compare myself to a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Someone somewhere along the chain of command would have to give the order to ignore the subpoena. That person would presumably be held responsible as an individual, just like you or me.
They could get contempt of court charges and spend time in jail, pretty much arbitrarily long - as long as judge feels
What? You think individuals in corporations are held accountable in the US?
It happens occasionally although you are more or less correct. My state’s old governor was the CEO of a company that committed at the time the largest healthcare fraud in US history.
Instead of going to jail he became the governor.
So ya I see your point. I would still of course be hesitant to push my luck and ignore a subpoena. Pushed hard enough, they will get ya. Look at how Epstein was eventually out in jail.
I suppose mainly it’s about money and power. It’s rare for someone really wealthy to suffer serious consequences. Before Epstein went to prison, he got a ridiculous deal from the guy who was later Trump’s Sec of Labor, Acosta, where he had to report to prison each night but was out for 12 hours a day or something… since, you know, his work is so important because he was wealthy.
I’m not sure about individuals, but a company can be sanctioned in various ways for ignoring a subpoena… usually something like being prohibited to operate in a state, or being dissolved. Fairly unlikely that would happen to a company the size of facebook. I guess I’m not sure whether a subpoena like the one in the article is addressed to a corporation in general, a department of the company, or an individual?
Yeah no shit, they’ve been don’t this in authoritarian countries from the beginning. Surprise, they’ll do it here too. shocked Pikachu face
Just because it’s expected at this point doesn’t make it acceptable.
It’s not acceptable for companies to follow the laws of the countries they operate in?
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They are required by law to turn over the chats. This isn’t hard to understand.
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However, campaigners note that Meta always has to comply with legal requests for data, and that the company can only change this if it stops collecting that data in the first place. In the case of Celeste and Jessica Burgess, this would have meant making end-to-end encryption (E2EE) the default in Facebook Messenger. This would have meant that police would have had to gain access to the pair’s phones directly to read their chats. (E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.)
I swear it’s like you can’t read. This is pretty simple stuff. They aborted a 28 week old fetus (which would be an illegal act in pretty much every state and every place in the world), burned and hid the body, and discussed it over an unencrypted platform. The owner of said platform is legally obligated to turn that info over.
How’s that end-to-end encryption working out?
Doesn’t matter if the company doing the e2e can get your messages.
but fb messenger is not e2e encrypted at all. If the company is doing e2e then they can’t read your messages
This is true, FB messenger is as open as it will get with seeing your messages, WhatsApp is dubious too so either Signal or Session are best e2e messenger apps imo.
I have never heard of them, are they social media apps?
The two apps I’ve mentioned are exclusively messenger apps. Think of Facebooks messenger but more secure with no big company servers looking at your chat and messages.
It is if you enable secret messages for a conversation, I believe, but not the default chat mode. In either case people should use other apps.
but only on mobile apps afaik. So if you use it, be careful
For the love of gods everyone please delete FB now
This is why I have 20 fake accs there
Wish I could. My family uses messenger :(
Were you unable to communicate with them before messenger? :( must have been hard times.
So does mine, I deleted it anyway. You’ve got their phone numbers for texting and calling.
Family group chat so it isn’t that easy. On the other hand I never open Facebook so 🤷
It still data mines on your phone even when you don’t open it
Lol i told my family and friends if they want to talk to me they have to install signal. Those that want to talk to me did and those that don’t didn’t. Problem solved.
I can’t, the facebook installer is baked into my phone’s bootloader
I hate that phone so much
Oof yeah I feel that. After my last phone broke I finally was able to get a Google Pixel at a good price and then put GrapheneOS on it. No more spyware
I have never heard of GrapheneOS. Is it doable on a Realmi phone?
It is only available on Google Pixel
You could maybe look at LineageOS
And what’s lineageOS now…I have never done custom OS on an Android and I only have one phone. If I can do it without messing up I would love to try
“Company follows laws in the country it operates in.” More at 11.
