9 ms·

> In Texas, you can sue anyone who aids and abets a woman who attempts to get an abortion for $10,000, which is enough to get someone to trick someone into inst

by dkarl 4y ago

> In Texas, you can sue anyone who aids and abets a woman who attempts to get an abortion for $10,000, which is enough to get someone to trick someone into installing malware on a phone. Anecdata for people who think this is unlikely: my wife had an issue getting unclaimed property back from the state of Texas and hired someone who advertise the ability to help. She turned out to be a bulldog with a ton of knowledge of the necessary bureaucracy. She put hours per week into it on our behalf for months, through many rounds of filing paperwork and then hounding bureaucrats on the phone by telling them exactly how and why we could sue if they ignored it. She did all that for a cut that was a fraction of the $10k abortion bounty. The $10k might seem like a symbolic gesture, but it will spawn a cottage industry of bounty hunters. No doubt most of them will be ideologically excited wannabes who quickly give it up, but some will be dogged and effective and will cultivate an expanding repertoire of skills. It's a terrifying prospect. There will be many, many people who never previously entertained the idea of getting involved in serious criminality who now need protection from the prying eyes of the state and their fellow citizens. To look at it from a cold and opportunistic viewpoint, this could change the public perception of digital privacy from being just for dangerous creepy people to something that everybody should value.

fastball 4y ago
Yeah except putting malware on someone's phone is actually illegal, so seems like a pretty bad tradeoff since, ya know, you'd have to mention how you got the data when you sue someone in court.
- kelnos 4y ago
  Police use this sort of tactic (parallel construction) all the time, though: they collect evidence in ways not admissible in court, but use knowledge of that evidence to find new lines of investigation and new evidence that can be admissible in court. Presumably someone could use malware on someone's phone to know who to target with an abortion-related lawsuit, and then use legal forms of investigation to find evidence to prove that they got an abortion.
  - alwillis 4y ago
    Yes! I have no doubt this is exactly what’s happening.
  - bb88 4y ago
    The trick of course is that the malware can't be traced back to the police. Otherwise, the parallel construction narrative vanishes, as well as potentially a bunch of previous convictions that were constructed using the same technique -- At least until the conservative supreme court neuters the 4th amendment. This needs to be the case of course, unless you support law enforcement agencies doing unlawful actions to get convictions.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      > The trick of course is that the malware can't be traced back to the police Isn't this even more complicated to prove in the case of private bounty hunters, instead of the police?
    - 8note 4y ago
      Isn't the parallel construction narrative that it doesn't matter how you got the information as long as after you get it, you can show a way that you could have gotten it? Even if the method used was illegal, and found to be illegal in court, the evidence is still admissible iirc?
      - not2b 4y ago
        Ever read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon? The WW2 part shows a team going through elaborate measures to create a plausible way that the allies can find out what the Germans are up to without revealing that they can read all of their messages. They would tell a submarine to surface at a particular location at a particular time and report what they see, for instance, and the sub crew would have no idea why, to produce a plausible explanation of why some German action was discovered. Parallel construction often means they hide how they got the original information from the court and from the defense.
- BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
- Angostura 4y ago
  Getting information through an illegal trawl, is an amazingly effective way of working out how to get related information "legally". Find out from the phone, that they have an appointment at a particular time and place? It's easy to just be there and photograph them, "as part of occasional surveilance" or whatever.
- toofy 4y ago
  its trivial for well-funded organizations to get around such legal issues when they use something called “parallel construction” this is when evidence is collected in nefarious and often illegal ways. it is then given to the organization which will weaponize the information. this organization then launders how they acquired the evidence, obscuring the shady way it was originally obtained. there is no shortage of instances where different groups (including local police) have laundered how evidence was obtained to get around legality requirements for obtaining evidence.. [various links below] as the above commenter highlights, it’s about to get even more terrifying as incredibly well funded, incredibly authoritarian groups jump into the fray using religion as their excuse. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intelligence-laundering https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel... https://www.jurist.org/news/2018/01/hrw-us-authorities-concealing-information-about-how-evidence-was-obtained/ https://www.jurist.org/news/2018/01/hrw-us-authorities-conce... https://reason.com/2018/01/09/federal-agencies-may-be-regularly-hiding/?amp https://reason.com/2018/01/09/federal-agencies-may-be-regula... https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/aclu-foia-seeks-information-about-how-government https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te... https://www.techdirt.com/2014/02/03/parallel-construction-revealed-how-dea-is-trained-to-launder-classified-surveillance-info/ https://www.techdirt.com/2014/02/03/parallel-construction-re... https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/01/09/dark-side/secret-origins-evidence-us-criminal-cases https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/01/09/dark-side/secret-origi... https://www.scmagazine.com/news/security-news/fbi-stingray-nda-instructs-police-to-use-parallel-construction https://www.scmagazine.com/news/security-news/fbi-stingray-n... https://www.wired.com/story/stingray-secret-surveillance-programs/amp https://www.wired.com/story/stingray-secret-surveillance-pro...
- lrvick 4y ago
  You make the bold assumption all courts are fair.
nextos 4y ago
Also, I personally know many old people who use a device just for managing their finances as they are inexperienced with security and fear their main device might get hacked. This functionality makes a lot of sense in such a case.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  I dare say app functionality will be reduced by cutting policies such as gps, which may prevent legitimate apps from functioning.
cirgue 4y ago
To add to this: the whole point of the private right to action is so that anti-abortion groups can target individuals in order to create precedent-setting cases. This is a mechanism that is designed to be used by well-funded groups. The threat model here isn’t some rando deciding they want to sue you, it’s a team of determined lawyers that absolutely will take your case as far as they possibly can.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > the whole point of the private right to action is so that anti-abortion groups can target individuals in order to create precedent-setting cases. Fairly sure this is wrong. The point was to create a mechanism to sue various people "in orbit" around an abortion without involving state officials. This was supposed to "immunize" the process from any Roe v. Wade-related block. With Roe v. Wade now struck down, Texas can basically do whatever "it" wants w.r.t abortion, and the federal government cannot intervene. SB8 at this point is possibly (just possibly) a way to reduce state spending on abortion legal cases, but not much more beyond that.
  - flave 4y ago
    You're right. It's directly (and I believe explicitly) modelled on the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA creates a model in which private citizens can and do bring lawsuits against all types of organisations for any type of harm they can define. This has spun out a cottage industry of disabled people who's full time occupation is visiting everything from websites to restaurants, being harmed and bringing lawsuits. While that may sound like a bad thing, it is in fact a very very cost effective way of enforcing the law quite effectively without bureaucratic bloat. Strangely, it's been quite successful. The history of why this decision was made is very interesting. For all your devs, this is why large American companies care so much about accessibility on their websites - because it creates an almost unlimited liability on their end if you do it badly. Companies now scan websites for accessibility as soon as they're launched, then others will buy the set of companies which 'fail', then visit those sites in order to be harmed. It's an interesting little cottage industry which keeps legitimate disability rights enforced quite nicely without too big a government.
greiskul 4y ago
I hadn't thought about this, but you are right. Hell, they don't necessarily even have to be immediately targeted attacks bounty hunters. Try to perform attacks in mass to read personal messages/e-mails of people, use filtering to try to find messages of people discussing getting abortions, and then parallel construct a innocent sounding story to use in court. With 10k per success, you really don't need that many hits to start making big money.
- IgorPartola 4y ago
  I’ll just leave this video here: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRNqQCvF/?k=1 https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRNqQCvF/?k=1
  - ngcc_hk 4y ago
    Great. In the discussion about privacy we use tik tok to get our data, aren’t we? Great communist china welcome you. Heard of the leaky story of the firm lately and the FCC case.
- ridgered4 4y ago
  IIRC they're civil suits as well which have a much lower burden of proof required for judgement.
auggierose 4y ago
I've been warned before by dang here on this site not to spew Anti-American propaganda (that was pre Jan 6, I think), but I never did such a thing. When I studied in SF in 1999, I freaking loved it. But I've seen some things since that are deeply troubling. It seems more people are catching up now to what I observed: if you still think that the US is a modern western democracy with reasonable values, wake up. I mean, people hunting other people who need an abortion for $10K? How can you read that and not have a cold chill running down your spine?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
  I’ve spend four years in IL and consider them among the happiest in my life The US right now is a fucking shitshow. It’s one bad election away from being yet another gunslinging theocracy hating women and gay people. They’d probably switch sides and bomb Ukraine, without necessarily looking at a map.
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    Well if Trump or his followers get the top seat again, Ukraine, and with it half of Europe is fucked. He was pretty clear about that. With this, steep decline in US power projection is inevitable, I mean you can't lose half a billion big rich western population almost 100% aligned with your values.
    - nebula8804 4y ago
      You say that but where are they going to align themselves to? China? The US benefits by having a lack of good competition. Things would have to get extremely bad for the rest of the west to dump the US. Word on the street is that Trump is going to announce a run for 2024 as a way to get ahead of his rivals. He has a reasonable shot at winning barring unforeseen circumstances. You can't dismiss the odds given how incredibly poorly the Democrats have messed up their two years since taking office. I feel that if given another Trump win, the rest of the west will be forced to remain in another holding pattern for four years and suffer whatever consequences occur hoping that four years later things improve.
languageserver 4y ago
There are LITERALLY abortion bounty hunters in Texas, who earn money by hounding women seeking abortions and turning them in for profit. I cannot believe the state of this country.
- 55555 4y ago
  Does anyone know how many abortion bounty hunters there are? I imagine a lot of people assume this is rare/hyperbole.
  - languageserver 4y ago
    https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive-freedom/texas-bounty-hunter-abortion-ban-is-a-dire-warning-of-what-lays-ahead-for-our-reproductive-rights https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive-freedom/texas-bounty-... https://www.texastribune.org/2021/10/11/texas-abortion-bounty-hunters/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/10/11/texas-abortion-bount... https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/pk9e28/reddit_shut_down_a_forum_for_selfdescribed_texas/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/pk9e28/reddit_s...
    - simplify 4y ago
      As bad as the law is, these links don't answer the question of how many there are.
YooLi 4y ago
Any way you can name the person who helped with the unclaimed property issue?
adamc 4y ago
What needs to happen to such bounty hunters probably isn't safe to print.

by dkarl 4y ago

fastball 4y ago

Yeah except putting malware on someone's phone is actually illegal, so seems like a pretty bad tradeoff since, ya know, you'd have to mention how you got the data when you sue someone in court.

kelnos 4y ago
Police use this sort of tactic (parallel construction) all the time, though: they collect evidence in ways not admissible in court, but use knowledge of that evidence to find new lines of investigation and new evidence that can be admissible in court. Presumably someone could use malware on someone's phone to know who to target with an abortion-related lawsuit, and then use legal forms of investigation to find evidence to prove that they got an abortion.
- alwillis 4y ago
  Yes! I have no doubt this is exactly what’s happening.
- bb88 4y ago
  The trick of course is that the malware can't be traced back to the police. Otherwise, the parallel construction narrative vanishes, as well as potentially a bunch of previous convictions that were constructed using the same technique -- At least until the conservative supreme court neuters the 4th amendment. This needs to be the case of course, unless you support law enforcement agencies doing unlawful actions to get convictions.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > The trick of course is that the malware can't be traced back to the police Isn't this even more complicated to prove in the case of private bounty hunters, instead of the police?
  - 8note 4y ago
    Isn't the parallel construction narrative that it doesn't matter how you got the information as long as after you get it, you can show a way that you could have gotten it? Even if the method used was illegal, and found to be illegal in court, the evidence is still admissible iirc?
    - not2b 4y ago
      Ever read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon? The WW2 part shows a team going through elaborate measures to create a plausible way that the allies can find out what the Germans are up to without revealing that they can read all of their messages. They would tell a submarine to surface at a particular location at a particular time and report what they see, for instance, and the sub crew would have no idea why, to produce a plausible explanation of why some German action was discovered. Parallel construction often means they hide how they got the original information from the court and from the defense.
BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Angostura 4y ago
Getting information through an illegal trawl, is an amazingly effective way of working out how to get related information "legally". Find out from the phone, that they have an appointment at a particular time and place? It's easy to just be there and photograph them, "as part of occasional surveilance" or whatever.
toofy 4y ago
its trivial for well-funded organizations to get around such legal issues when they use something called “parallel construction” this is when evidence is collected in nefarious and often illegal ways. it is then given to the organization which will weaponize the information. this organization then launders how they acquired the evidence, obscuring the shady way it was originally obtained. there is no shortage of instances where different groups (including local police) have laundered how evidence was obtained to get around legality requirements for obtaining evidence.. [various links below] as the above commenter highlights, it’s about to get even more terrifying as incredibly well funded, incredibly authoritarian groups jump into the fray using religion as their excuse. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intelligence-laundering https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel... https://www.jurist.org/news/2018/01/hrw-us-authorities-concealing-information-about-how-evidence-was-obtained/ https://www.jurist.org/news/2018/01/hrw-us-authorities-conce... https://reason.com/2018/01/09/federal-agencies-may-be-regularly-hiding/?amp https://reason.com/2018/01/09/federal-agencies-may-be-regula... https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/aclu-foia-seeks-information-about-how-government https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te... https://www.techdirt.com/2014/02/03/parallel-construction-revealed-how-dea-is-trained-to-launder-classified-surveillance-info/ https://www.techdirt.com/2014/02/03/parallel-construction-re... https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/01/09/dark-side/secret-origins-evidence-us-criminal-cases https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/01/09/dark-side/secret-origi... https://www.scmagazine.com/news/security-news/fbi-stingray-nda-instructs-police-to-use-parallel-construction https://www.scmagazine.com/news/security-news/fbi-stingray-n... https://www.wired.com/story/stingray-secret-surveillance-programs/amp https://www.wired.com/story/stingray-secret-surveillance-pro...
lrvick 4y ago
You make the bold assumption all courts are fair.

nextos 4y ago

Also, I personally know many old people who use a device just for managing their finances as they are inexperienced with security and fear their main device might get hacked. This functionality makes a lot of sense in such a case.

hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
I dare say app functionality will be reduced by cutting policies such as gps, which may prevent legitimate apps from functioning.

cirgue 4y ago

To add to this: the whole point of the private right to action is so that anti-abortion groups can target individuals in order to create precedent-setting cases. This is a mechanism that is designed to be used by well-funded groups. The threat model here isn’t some rando deciding they want to sue you, it’s a team of determined lawyers that absolutely will take your case as far as they possibly can.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> the whole point of the private right to action is so that anti-abortion groups can target individuals in order to create precedent-setting cases. Fairly sure this is wrong. The point was to create a mechanism to sue various people "in orbit" around an abortion without involving state officials. This was supposed to "immunize" the process from any Roe v. Wade-related block. With Roe v. Wade now struck down, Texas can basically do whatever "it" wants w.r.t abortion, and the federal government cannot intervene. SB8 at this point is possibly (just possibly) a way to reduce state spending on abortion legal cases, but not much more beyond that.
- flave 4y ago
  You're right. It's directly (and I believe explicitly) modelled on the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA creates a model in which private citizens can and do bring lawsuits against all types of organisations for any type of harm they can define. This has spun out a cottage industry of disabled people who's full time occupation is visiting everything from websites to restaurants, being harmed and bringing lawsuits. While that may sound like a bad thing, it is in fact a very very cost effective way of enforcing the law quite effectively without bureaucratic bloat. Strangely, it's been quite successful. The history of why this decision was made is very interesting. For all your devs, this is why large American companies care so much about accessibility on their websites - because it creates an almost unlimited liability on their end if you do it badly. Companies now scan websites for accessibility as soon as they're launched, then others will buy the set of companies which 'fail', then visit those sites in order to be harmed. It's an interesting little cottage industry which keeps legitimate disability rights enforced quite nicely without too big a government.

greiskul 4y ago

I hadn't thought about this, but you are right. Hell, they don't necessarily even have to be immediately targeted attacks bounty hunters. Try to perform attacks in mass to read personal messages/e-mails of people, use filtering to try to find messages of people discussing getting abortions, and then parallel construct a innocent sounding story to use in court. With 10k per success, you really don't need that many hits to start making big money.

IgorPartola 4y ago
I’ll just leave this video here: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRNqQCvF/?k=1 https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRNqQCvF/?k=1
- ngcc_hk 4y ago
  Great. In the discussion about privacy we use tik tok to get our data, aren’t we? Great communist china welcome you. Heard of the leaky story of the firm lately and the FCC case.
ridgered4 4y ago
IIRC they're civil suits as well which have a much lower burden of proof required for judgement.

auggierose 4y ago

I've been warned before by dang here on this site not to spew Anti-American propaganda (that was pre Jan 6, I think), but I never did such a thing. When I studied in SF in 1999, I freaking loved it. But I've seen some things since that are deeply troubling. It seems more people are catching up now to what I observed: if you still think that the US is a modern western democracy with reasonable values, wake up. I mean, people hunting other people who need an abortion for $10K? How can you read that and not have a cold chill running down your spine?

IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
I’ve spend four years in IL and consider them among the happiest in my life The US right now is a fucking shitshow. It’s one bad election away from being yet another gunslinging theocracy hating women and gay people. They’d probably switch sides and bomb Ukraine, without necessarily looking at a map.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Well if Trump or his followers get the top seat again, Ukraine, and with it half of Europe is fucked. He was pretty clear about that. With this, steep decline in US power projection is inevitable, I mean you can't lose half a billion big rich western population almost 100% aligned with your values.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    You say that but where are they going to align themselves to? China? The US benefits by having a lack of good competition. Things would have to get extremely bad for the rest of the west to dump the US. Word on the street is that Trump is going to announce a run for 2024 as a way to get ahead of his rivals. He has a reasonable shot at winning barring unforeseen circumstances. You can't dismiss the odds given how incredibly poorly the Democrats have messed up their two years since taking office. I feel that if given another Trump win, the rest of the west will be forced to remain in another holding pattern for four years and suffer whatever consequences occur hoping that four years later things improve.

languageserver 4y ago

There are LITERALLY abortion bounty hunters in Texas, who earn money by hounding women seeking abortions and turning them in for profit. I cannot believe the state of this country.

55555 4y ago
Does anyone know how many abortion bounty hunters there are? I imagine a lot of people assume this is rare/hyperbole.
- languageserver 4y ago
  https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive-freedom/texas-bounty-hunter-abortion-ban-is-a-dire-warning-of-what-lays-ahead-for-our-reproductive-rights https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive-freedom/texas-bounty-... https://www.texastribune.org/2021/10/11/texas-abortion-bounty-hunters/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/10/11/texas-abortion-bount... https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/pk9e28/reddit_shut_down_a_forum_for_selfdescribed_texas/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/pk9e28/reddit_s...
  - simplify 4y ago
    As bad as the law is, these links don't answer the question of how many there are.

YooLi 4y ago

Any way you can name the person who helped with the unclaimed property issue?

adamc 4y ago

What needs to happen to such bounty hunters probably isn't safe to print.