18 ms·

Facebook Gave Police Teenager's DMs in Abortion Prosecution

349 points by intunderflow 4y ago

willcipriano 4y ago
- manytree 4y ago
  I can think of 0 reasons why the “police should investigate that” Why?
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    If you have a miscarriage you don't normally dodge medical attention, fail to report it, and then bury the remains quietly in an unmarked grave.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - chmod775 4y ago
      A miscarriage can be a very traumatic event. You can't expect someone to act in any way rationally afterwards. In this case it's a bit more suspicious, but it's not an unlikely explanation by itself.
      - vorpalhex 4y ago
        If you are burying a body in the woods, it seems like Police should check it out. They did. They found messages of the girl self aborting well into viability and then planning to hide the body.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      You do if you reasonably fear you're going to be criminalized for seeking medical attention. Here's an example from a few years ago (so reporting is not shaped by current events), and you can find many more recent examples. https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/8/20954980/stillbirth-miscarriage-murder-abortion-chelsea-becker-news https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/8/20954980/stillbirth...
      - vorpalhex 4y ago
        Doing meth to the point that it kills your baby is in fact murder.
        anigbrowl 4y ago
        Not unless you can prove intent, which is probably why the case was dismissed - https://www.ktvu.com/news/murder-case-of-meth-user-who-delivered-stillbirth-dismissed https://www.ktvu.com/news/murder-case-of-meth-user-who-deliv... In any case, such nuance is likely beyond the grasp of a 17 year old. I think you are well aware that this doesn't always yield simple seeming edge cases and that you are capable of looking into other examples but chose not to. Here's some more. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61995250 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61995250
        sophacles 4y ago
        vorpalhex 4y ago
        sophacles 4y ago
        Oh we call that thing a fetus. Babies are what some fetuses turn into, after there is an event called "birth".
        vorpalhex 4y ago
        Oh. Well that fetus at that point knew the sound of it's mothers voice. It had a preference for a dominant hand. It could taste the difference across foods mom was eating. It felt pain, the same way you and I felt pain. If you wouldn't inject a kitten or a puppy with meth just for fun, you probably shouldn't do it to a fetus either.
    - devindotcom 4y ago
      Have you had a lot of miscarriages?
      - vorpalhex 4y ago
        Have you buried a lot of bodies in the woods?
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    Given she is underage and pregnant, who made her pregnant? Why are they so desperate to conceal the evidence of the miscarriage, to the point where they burned the body, was it to prevent DNA testing? That's just the tip of the iceberg here. It needs to be understood why they took this course of action.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - beeboop 4y ago
      A teenager getting pregnant from another teenager is extremely common, and likely more common than the alternative. Burning a body is also an extremely traditional, something like 60% of Americans are cremated. Suggesting the police need to be involved in totally ordinary circumstances seems silly to me.
    - hparadiz 4y ago
      - willcipriano 4y ago
        > The idea that all of those instances require an investigation Only the ones where the woman who is pregnant is underage and someone decides to burn the body. Her mother not taking her to the hospital is neglect at a minimum. A miscarriage at that point could easily result in death.
        hparadiz 4y ago
        It's wild what people on HN will write from a position of privilege. Because everyone has the money to just go to the hospital. Plus everything you just wrote is a deterrent for women to seek care. If you know you'll be criminally investigated for a miscarriage even if you did nothing wrong you'll think twice before seeking care. Which of course means more women will die. But by all means continue with your "investigations".
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    Was she coerced into inducing the miscarriage and then into hiding the remains. Fairly obvious question, among others.
  - AlanYx 4y ago
    The police exhumed the body because the 22-year old man who helped bury the body made a police report. The police didn't seek the Facebook search warrant until after they exhumed the body and found evidence the body was burned.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lscdlscd 4y ago
Sickening. If FB were to selectively refuse to comply with some state subpoenas, what would be the consequences? Banning of FB in Indiana? I think that would be more of a punishment for the Boomers of Indiana than for FB.
- mullen 4y ago
  If there is a Subpoena or Search Warrant for FB messages, FB has no choice to hand them over. However, FB should have fought like hell in the courts to not hand those messages over.
  - aaomidi 4y ago
    Yep. The requests for data always come with a “show up to court if you don’t want to give the data” They made a decision not to.
    - pyuser583 4y ago
      Isn’t it usually: “your archivist is required to appear physically at this address: xxxx, with a physical copy of the following items: yyyy. As a courtesy to you, you can email them to Special Agent zzzz if they are in the proper format.” So showing up (at thousands of courthouses a year) is the default. If you’re helpful (to the prosecution), we will let you do things by email.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    They had a choice - they can tell their lawyers to fight the subpoena/warrant in court. Possibly a long, expensive, and futile exercise, but it would signal whose side they're on. And to the surprise of (hopefully) nobody, they're not on our side at all.
    - pyuser583 4y ago
      Not all legal battles are long and drawn out.
- 4y ago
unicornmama 4y ago
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago
superchroma 4y ago
It is time to go back to treating the internet like it was scary and hostile, because it still is, except it now has a thick veneer of slick marketing to suggest otherwise. Young people should be counselled to stay anonymous online and shown examples like this, because zero good can come from giving personal, compromising information to a company along with your real name in this way.
- colpabar 4y ago
  I think this battle has been lost already. Pretty much all of the non-tech people I know firmly believe the "why do I need anonymity if I'm not doing anything wrong" line of thinking. The powers that be really don't like online anonymity, and the public at large just doesn't care enough to do anything. Maybe this will change some minds, but I'm doubtful it'll be enough.
  - beeboop 4y ago
    I hold onto hope that an alternative system of privacy-protecting internet (e.g. Freenet) takes hold to a bigger tech-nerd audience, and then eventually bleeds out to mainstream just like the internet was doing in the early 90s. At which point, the government will be completely incapable of all the bullshit they do today, and will be as powerless over that system as they are over crypto.
    - colpabar 4y ago
      > as powerless over that system as they are over crypto I see this claim made a lot, and I don't understand it. When the canadian trucker protest (please don't make this discussion about that, I am not saying it was good or bad, I am just using it as an example) switched to crypto after the gov froze their bank accounts, the gov also froze those crypto wallets. That seems like the opposite of powerless. I think it's really naive to think that the gov won't just be able to bully any type of new system into submission, like they always do. If there are people running the system, then those people can be coerced.
      - 4y ago
cies 4y ago
- missedthecue 4y ago
  Disgusting behavior being complying with a valid warrant issued by the government? I could understand not agreeing with the law but maybe encouraging rogue behavior could come back to bite you in unexpected and deleterious ways
  - ptudan 4y ago
    You can push back against a warrant legally. Doesn't sound like facebook cared to.
  - nullc 4y ago
    They shouldn't have had access to the users private communications to begin with. It's an intentional product choice that they do, and if they chose otherwise they wouldn't have had any private messages to turn over.
    - xrikcus 4y ago
      Data has to be stored somewhere. You can end-to-end encrypt it, but that has constraints and adds clunkiness for the user so it's not even obviously a feature. The easy access to the web interface for messenger over whatsapp or signal if a feature of a sort, depending on your point of view. If you don't want a company to have access to the data you store with them you have to keep the encryption key yourself. If you do that, you risk losing access to the data you store with the company. That's a big downside. So yes, it's a product choice, but it's not a product choice out of some strange effort for the company to have access to your data, but because it provides the right product mix. You might as well argue that your bank having access to your account records to hand over is a product choice. Yes, there are ways to work around that. Maybe some blockchain variant will give that level of privacy. It will not do it without significant tradeoffs.
      - 4y ago
twblalock 4y ago
This is the important part: > A Nebraska teenager is facing criminal charges alleging she aborted a fetus in violation of state law, after authorities obtained her Facebook messages using a search warrant. Should companies disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant from a state government in the United States? If so, how is that any different from Uber breaking various laws? I happen to believe that access to abortion is important (although quite a lot of people don't), but the rule of law matters too. It's not reasonable or logical to believe that it's ok for companies to break some laws but not others. So, I can't really be mad at Facebook for doing this.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- aaomidi 4y ago
  Facebook could have legally gone to court to block this. That wouldn’t be breaking the law. It would actually be following the law.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    They could have tried -- and how do you know they did not? Even if they tried, they could have still been required to turn over the data.
    - bwb 4y ago
      No they could have won, at the very least this would go to the SC over if they have the right to subpoena over a crime outside the state, that isn't illegal in that state.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > if they have the right to subpoena over a crime outside the state, that isn't illegal in that state Yes. This goes back to the fugitive slave act days. That said, they should have fought. They should always fight. There might be novel case law. And it sets the right precedent. Shameful.
cato_the_elder 4y ago
- mcguire 4y ago
  From [1]: "“I don’t think I’ve ever had a case like this,” he said Friday. “Usually, abortions are performed in hospitals, and doctors are involved, and it’s not the type of stuff that occurred in this case.”"
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    Huh. Who'd have thought that making abortions illegal would force people to have dangerous illicit abortions and have to hide the evidence.
    - cato_the_elder 4y ago
      Sure, people respond to incentives. But this one is particularly cruel. Also, despite all those bogus studies (which, for example, don't correct for how much rule of law is upheld when comparing countries), it will reduce the total number of late-stage abortions significantly. That's a win in my books.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - ryneandal 4y ago
        > despite all those bogus studies Citation required. Numerous legitimate studies show that limited/no access to abortions leads to more at-home/back-alley abortions[1,2]. They also show that abortion bans will lead to higher maternal mortality rate [3]. But go off and pat yourself on the back for fetuses having more value than the incubation receptacle they're within. 1: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)61786-8/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... 2:https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(20)30315-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1... 3: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/30/abortion-bans-increase-maternal-mortality-even-more-study-shows https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/30/abortion-bans-incr...
Overtonwindow 4y ago
This is tragic. Women should have access to abortion, and 23 weeks is plenty, but miscarrying and burying it in the backyard needs an investigation. Just to make sure we have all the facts.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Why do we need all the facts exactly? If it was her choice, we don't need all the facts. It is literally a part of her body.
  - googlryas 4y ago
  - eternalban 4y ago
    > It is literally a part of her body. No comment on the general issue of abortion. Question remains for those who push this line as to which body part is that? A fetus is clearly an organism growing inside of someone's body but it is not a "body part" of another organism.
    - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
      It's a part of her umbilical cord at least, even if at the end of that umbilical is a weird collection of cells that will form a different entity. I think of it like cell division, where there is a weird process, and at some point there's kind of two organisms in one, until they separate, and then it's two different organisms (cytokinesis). Human pregnancy is absolutely bizarre and quite dangerous. Some weird facts: - Fertilization doesn't even happen until the 2nd or 3rd week. - Pregnancy can occur outside of the uterus, which quickly leads to ruptured organs and death for the mother. - 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. - The fetus's cells float freely in the mother's blood plasma, which makes the mother a chimera. - A mother's blood can develop antibodies to rhesus antigens in the baby's blood, identifying the baby as a foreign invader. - A fetus's "coating" has genes that inhibit T-cells in the mother, which is the only way the mother's body doesn't destroy the fetus (which is an alien parasite to the mother/host). - Fetal stem cells can travel throughout the mother to repair things - or create an immune disorder. - Women grow an extra organ (the placenta) during pregnancy. - During development, a female fetus develops all the eggs the adult form will carry throughout its lifetime. - Amniotic fluid is fetus pee. - A fetus can't survive outside the uterus before 23-25 weeks.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Outright ghoulish behavior from Facebook. They didn't even put up a fight. And for Nebraska to put this 17 year old on trial as an adult is doubly cruel.
- languageserver 4y ago
  She aborted at 23 WEEKS
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Yeah the fetus was 6 months old. That's a baby at that point if it is outside of her womb. She could have easily given birth and it would have gone on to live a completely normal life. I'm pro abortion generally, but you need to do it long before the fetus is viable.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - midasz 4y ago
      Sorry but are you really saying 'easily' and 'given birth' after eachother? Have you ever witnessed a birth? And how do you know it would have gone on to live a completely normal life? What kind of disney movie do you live in?
      - googlryas 4y ago
        By easily, I meant that the baby would have good chances of survival. It wouldn't be fighting against 1% odds and require $100M expenditures in the NICU Yes, I've witnessed a birth. Most babies born go on to live normal lives. Do you really think I was implying I was a mindreader, and I know the baby would have a normal life, rather than just saying the odds are good? You interpreted my comment 100% in bad faith which is pretty lame for HN. You might feel more comfortable on reddit.
  - throwayyy479087 4y ago
r00fus 4y ago
Information you post to Facebook is essentially public. Best we teach our kids that. The "privacy" safeguards are BS. Also I think that the Nebraska law is a symptom of toxic, fascist mindset that's pervading the country - and that's more concerning to me than Facebook so easily folding (which I expected).
- advisedwang 4y ago
  This is DMs, most people don't think of those as private, and it's unreasonable to tell people to treat DMs as public. By the same logic email, SMS, voicemail and all "essentially public".
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Facebook DMs are public. Zuck can be personally beating his meat to your nudes - as can every other Facebook engineer. Any other belief regarding the privacy of them is flawed and incorrect.
    - scarmig 4y ago
      I haven't worked at Facebook, but I'd be surprised if this were true. Other large companies have audit logs of employee access to user data that are actively monitored; accessing information of users without a paper trail of justification will get you fired.
    - metadat 4y ago
      While this was true in the early days, there have been audit controls in place for a long time now. FB System Abuse == you're fired. And yes, it's well known that Zuck did abuse God-mode back in the day.
      - ronsor 4y ago
        How do we know Zuck isn't still exempt from auditing?
pyuser583 4y ago
There was a meme a while ago about deleting menstrual tracking apps. So many people, including folks who should know better (professors, etc) were freaking out. I wonder if it was dreamed up in FBs PR department as a distraction.
- bena 4y ago
  This is the exact reason why that bit was going around. These corporations are not your friends, they have no obligation to preserve your privacy, and any data you've passed along their servers now belongs to them. People were told to delete tracking apps to stop giving those companies data. So that data can't be used against you. This girl gave Facebook data. Facebook then turned that data over to the police. That data was used against her. Exactly how people said it would be.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    > they have no obligation to preserve your privacy It's not just that they have no obligation they are legally required to comply with subpoena requests and provide any and all data that an independent judge has deemed necessary. You can't have realistically have a situation where the entire management team goes to jail for refusing to comply with them. Nor is it necessarily wrong for them to choose to respect the law even if it's a bad law.
    - bena 4y ago
      The implication from the person I responded to was that telling people to delete tracking apps was a distraction or deception. That somehow it was Facebook trying to get people to funnel data through them. But that's not what it was. The same people who were trying to get people to delete tracking apps would have also said "Don't talk about this through Meta apps" also. It's a bit outside of what Facebook did, whether they should have complied or risked consequences, etc. As an aside, Signal people. If you want to chat discreetly, Signal.
      - pyuser583 4y ago
dutchbrit 4y ago
Did Facebook even know why the police had search warrant?
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Presumably a warrant is signed by an actual judge. I'm not sure I want every company launching their own investigation into the underlying evidence behind a search warrant in order to determine if they should comply or not. If we are unhappy with the warrants, we should address that at the judicial level.
- saxonww 4y ago
  A valid question, I wondered the same. In the US, at least in my state, search warrants have to be specific about what is being searched for, where to search for it, and when the search should occur. So I think the warrant would likely have mentioned what sorts of messages they were looking for between dates X and Y, not just that Meta was ordered to turn over the entire message history for a user.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pyuser583 4y ago
Imagine if the case was against a rapist, child abuser, or insurrectionist. Because there isn’t a huge difference when it comes to complying with subpoenas. FB learned a long time ago that defending unpopular criminals’ communications isn’t worth the political cost.
sudden_dystopia 4y ago
jmyeet 4y ago
The current Supreme has engaged in historical revisionism to reach its anti-abortion stance (eg abortion was perfectly legal 200 years ago, so much so that Ben franklin published at-home instructions for performing an abortion [1]). At the time of the ruling, it was pointed out that these draconian laws that half the states had passed or were passing wouldn't stop abortion, they would simply stop safe abortions. This case is evidence of that. Some might choose to focus on why the defendant chose to get an abortion. I don't see any details of that here. Personally, I don't care. If she wants one, she should be able to get one. Investigating this case at all is both unexpected and psychotic. Trying her as an adult is the next level of psychotic. That all aside, as for Facebook, again this is light on detail regarding the cooperation given. Did they fight the subpoena? Did they have any grounds to? What steps were made to protect that user's privacy? We simply don't know. As an aside, it seems like you have better privacy by using regular SMS than any form of IM. Law enforcement can get metadata but that's not so useful. Getting the actual messages from any IM service seems to be much easier. Perhaps WhatsApp would be better? I don't know how accessible WA messages currently are. As for Facebook removing posts supplying at-home abortion medication, here I'm somewhat sympathetic just because Facebook does have to follow the law (even if that law is psychotic and unjustifiable). It's no different to supplying medical marijuana to people in places where it's illegal. Or supplying much cheaper medications from Canada or Mexico. These are all technically illegal so any company is going to have to try and enforce that. Remember the political forces behind this under the guise of being "pro-life" go to every effort to restrict access to affordable medical care, recently voted against child tax credit (in the IRA) and fight efforts to allow people to fight a living wage. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-franklin-roe-wade-supreme-court-leak https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  What Ben Franklin wrote is completely orthogonal to the legality of abortion. It was a States' rights issue until Roe v. Wade, and now it's a States' rights issue again. There was no single "law" or "right" that ever said abortion was legal, even in the case of Roe v. Wade, which is now considered a flawed ruling.
crmd 4y ago
This level of corporate amorality / lawful evil reminds me of IBM during World War II.
- tunap 4y ago
  The Nazis were big fans of Big Data, too.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  I think the pressures and incentives in play right now are going to generally push big tech companies in that direction, arguably already have quite a bit. I expect to see a lot more of it unfortunately.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
klawcode 4y ago
Need to get more people onboard with end to end encryption and obfuscating every possible piece of data online. As other commenters have stated, the corporations that run the internet are not your friends. There is a large number of people in the US who are authoritarian and can't help but try to get involved in other people's business to the maximum degree. They won't stop at any boundary, they are religious zealots.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  If you think "religious zealots" are the only authoritarians, boy do I have news for you!
  - klawcode 4y ago
    There are plenty of other ones, but religious ones are the only people who truly obsess over the actions of others. Alternative varieties merely want to steal as many resources as possible, beyond that they don't care about the actions of others.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      >> If you think "religious zealots" are the only authoritarians, boy do I have news for you! > There are plenty of other ones, but religious ones are the only people who truly obsess over the actions of others. Sorry, no. I don't know how anyone could come to believe something so incorrect. For instance, the Chinese Communist Party is 1) authoritarian, 2) atheist, and 3) very obsessed over the actions of others (as shown by the massive surveillance and control apparatus it's built).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zuminator 4y ago
Because of "terrorism" etc., text messages and the like will always be subpoenable. Meta would not be able to quash a bog-standard request like this. It's only even newsworthy because it involves the rescinded right to abortion. The lesson here is don't use unencrypted services to discuss your crimes.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  The technical solution would be to not save message contents after message delivery.
hparadiz 4y ago
This thread is disgusting. All these men making excuses for why the state should investigate a 17 year old for a miscarriage. It's not your fucking business. It's a private health matter. Period. You don't get to go on a fishing expedition "to get to the bottom" of anything after the fact with zero evidence of any wrong doing.
- branon 4y ago
  Agreed on your points but less sexism please. The really important part is: when you decide to break an unjust law, don't talk about it on surveilled platforms, they're complicit and will hand your ass in. Don't bring your smartphone with you either. Edit: yes I understand the laws themselves are sexist, but HN users didn't write the laws, and the "all you men" fingerpointing isn't really productive. Why the men here? You have much easier and more significant targets than male HN users. I just want to say for the record that this comment briefly had a positive score before I got dogpiled.
  - bognition 4y ago
    Sure, keeping sensitive conversations off of un-surveilled systems is easy for an informed person to say but most people have no clue how much surveillance actually happens. The battle to get people to chose to use the correct tools has been lost. The only course of action here to to fight and push for privacy rights.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    Sexism is unfortunately a key component of this discussion. Anti-abortion laws are focused on controlling a woman's body. I do agree that it's more productive when the conversation is civil and polite - but sexism is firmly in the middle of this particular topic.
    - 202206241203 4y ago
      - 4y ago
mkaic 4y ago
The real issue I have is that Facebook keeps an unencrypted copy of everyone's DMs stored and just waiting to be handed to the government. I understand it's how they make money, and that they've done it forever, but man, I guess using Signal has spoiled me. It's so weird to me that most people are completely unaware or unworried that their "private" conversations aren't private in the slightest.
- sneak 4y ago
  Google also has a bunch of WhatsApp backups in Google Drive, and Apple has hundreds of millions of iCloud Backups (non-e2e, by design, preserved as an iMessage encryption backdoor for the FBI) containing everyone's iMessages (or realtime iMessage sync private keys). It's not just Facebook that's guilty of this. EDIT: Here's the substantiation requested: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi-complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
  - Bud 4y ago
    I get the objection to Apple's unencrypted iCloud backups, but could we present the facts without multiple exaggerations, distortions, and unsupported opinions, please? First, no, it's not "everyone's iMessages". There has been a lot of very public discussion of this. If you don't back up your Messages to iCloud, which a lot of informed people don't do anymore, then Apple does not have that unencrypted copy. Second, unless you have support that Apple did this "for the FBI", specifically for that reason, as opposed to it being a mix of reasons, and also involving user-support reasons, as has been widely reported, please stop repeating that unsupported claim. And lastly, until Apple commits an offense of the nature under discussion here, let's not tar them with the same broad brush as we are justly using to tar Facebook.
    - sneak 4y ago
      > If you don't back up your Messages to iCloud, which a lot of informed people don't do anymore, then Apple does not have that unencrypted copy. This is false. Apple will still have the unencrypted copies (actually, the effectively-unencrypted sync keys, as "Messages in iCloud" cross-device sync keys are the thing at issue here) because the people you iMessage with will be providing them to Apple. iCloud Backup is on by default, so approximately everyone you talk to using iMessage is escrowing their private keys to Apple. Turning off iCloud Backup on your device does not protect your iMessages, as the backdoor exists on the devices of both conversation participants. It's sort of like switching email providers to get away from Gmail; if everyone you send or receive emails to/from is using Gmail, Google is still getting a copy of all of your correspondence. > Second, unless you have support that Apple did this "for the FBI", specifically for that reason, as opposed to it being a mix of reasons, and also involving user-support reasons, as has been widely reported, please stop repeating that unsupported claim. I updated the comment with the link to the Reuters article that says they did this specifically for the FBI. From the article: > More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee. > Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order. > In private talks with Apple soon after, representatives of the FBI’s cyber crime agents and its operational technology division objected to the plan, arguing it would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against iPhone-using suspects, the government sources said. > When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to the six sources. Reuters could not determine why exactly Apple dropped the plan. > “Legal killed it, for reasons you can imagine,” another former Apple employee said he was told, without any specific mention of why the plan was dropped or if the FBI was a factor in the decision.
martin1975 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Latty 4y ago
  So you are in favour of making IVF illegal, as it involves creating multiple fertilised eggs that get destroyed when one works out?
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  - Latty 4y ago
    - daptaq 4y ago
      > all the other cases they hand wave and ignore are sacrifices they are willing to make to control women Could you elaborate on this point? I hope I don't come off as insensitive, when saying that just as a social phenomenon, this discussion is peculiarly interesting, and while I ultimately believe that the an (actual) woman has the absolute right to decide over her own life including a (potential) child, I can understand why "pro-life" people make the arguments they make -- and at first I'd believe their own reasoning. To me it the entire topic of abortion seems like something beyond morality, there is no good and bad choice, just bad and less bad. The reason I say it is "interesting" is that it appears people are talking past one another on such a massive scale, and as it appears to me considering different images as unstated examples. The pro-choice image (to me) involves an every day woman who cannot handle a child in her current circumstances, and decides to abort the pregnancy out of necessity, while the pro-life image appears to involve notions of promiscuity, indifference towards a child and egoism. I have to wonder why these contrasting views have arisen, and who stands to profit from it. Arguments like "controlling women's bodies" are in my eyes to this end too simplistic. The danger -- as with any social debate -- of misunderstanding the opposing side is that one cannot reason and anticipate their behaviour, as one is distracted by a moral mirage, that might be easier to make fun of, but that fighting is a dangerous waste of energy.
commoner 4y ago
While this case involved a search warrant, Facebook also gives information to police departments without a warrant for any case that they determine to be an "emergency". Here is the portal where the information is requested and provided: https://www.facebook.com/records https://www.facebook.com/records Back when I used to have a Facebook account, Facebook provided private information from my account to a police department without a warrant for a situation that they deemed an "emergency", but that I did not. I no longer use Facebook.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- jjulius 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
SpaceManNabs 4y ago
Please use Signal and remember that your receiver still has a copy of your messages.
kodah 4y ago
This story leaves out some details: https://nypost.com/2022/08/09/nebraska-mom-and-daughter-charged-for-burning-burying-aborted-fetus/ https://nypost.com/2022/08/09/nebraska-mom-and-daughter-char... > When an investigator interviewed the teen, she allegedly confirmed that she had a miscarriage after midnight on April 22, and said that she and her mother placed the fetus in a bag in the back of their van, according to the court papers. > Jessica and Celeste also said that Barnhill, whose relationship to the two women has not been revealed, later helped them bury the fetus on his property. > Police were led to the makeshift gravesite and unearthed the corpse, which was found to show signs of “thermal injuries,” the documents stated. > Barnhill reportedly confirmed to the investigators that the mother and daughter had attempted to burn the fetus before putting it in the ground. My opinion might be a bit contrarian, but I was always taught that Roe v Wade was because abortions had become so unsafe without a proper place to do them. I imagine in this case we're missing some details, because the actual abortion involved sourcing some pills that are specifically used for abortion. I don't imagine sourcing those was quick. My read on this set of circumstances is that if you put arbitrary blockers on something that someone really wants to do, it course corrects them into a very unhealthy path. In this case, the details are shocking, but not incongruent with what I have been told was the reasoning for Roe v Wade and true to other harm reduction logic. It's awful easy to argue post-facto that she could just have given birth, but I think that ignores a lot of changes and sacrifices a woman at 17-18 years old will have to endure.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  I think it's important to keep in mind the date. On April 22, Roe was still settled law from decades ago. The leak hadn't even happened yet.
  - kodah 4y ago
    I mean that's a point, but I'm not sure especially relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Nebraska https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Nebraska also, the requirements for an abortion: https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/state-facts-about-abortion-nebraska https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/state-facts-about-abor... There's three clinics total in the entire state and quite a number of hurdles. Including one that a patient must wait 24 hours after a consultation to have the procedure performed. If a patient has to travel to the clinic, and odds are she did, that's at minimum two days but maximally four. Then there's the cost, 2-3 nights at a hotel, plus abortions can't be paid by insurance - they're now looking at several hundred dollars of out of pocket cost in a state like Nebraska. If this young woman waited to tell her mother until she was showing (or didn't know until she was showing - which at 23 weeks, and a few weeks prior, she would be) then I can see this putting them in a weird place. My point here isn't to reason about the things that happened after the abortion, but rather to say I think the more arbitrary hurdles that are introduced the more zany the outcomes will be.
Clubber 4y ago
- Latty 4y ago
  > The only sacrifice in that case would have been giving birth itself. You say that like this is trivial. Giving birth is literally life-threatening.
  - Clubber 4y ago
    So is driving to the store, give me a break. Here ya go: In 2020, 861 women were identified as having died of maternal causes in the United States, compared with 754 in 2019 NHTSA projects that an estimated 42,915 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year It's good to keep some perspective when you say giving birth is, "literally life threatening."
    - metadat 4y ago
      Please stop trolling. Step outside yourself for a moment and realize this is precisely the kind of discourse which greatly degrades the quality of the discussion.
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      Putting aside that completing a pregnancy is drastically more risky than a single drive to the store: You are never legally forbidden from hitting the brakes and deciding that a particular drive to the store is too risky and that you aren't going to complete it. You should have the same right to choose not to complete a pregnancy.
  - anchochilis 4y ago
    My wife almost died earlier this year giving birth to our very much wanted child. She was in great health and had a normal pregnancy, then developed HELLP and related complications (DIC, kidney injury) while in labor. This took place at a world-class hospital in a major American city. We both believe she would have died had she been anywhere else. No should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, ever.
nix23 4y ago
omegacharlie 4y ago
Someone reading this may disagree with abortion. But if we can separate the controversy of the topic at hand from the fact a state government requested data from a private company for what is not universally considered a crime it could lead to a pragmatic discussion into data requests and privacy (i.e questionable practice of 'emergency data requests' that function outside the normal process of a subpoena[1]) [1]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/hackers-gaining-power-of-subpoena-via-fake-emergency-data-requests/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/hackers-gaining-power-of...
- googlryas 4y ago
  What do you mean "universally considered a crime"? Would that universe just be the state that Facebook is incorporated? It seemed probable that a crime that broke Nebraska state law was committed, and that is what the Nebraska police were looking into.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    Facebook is not a Nebraska company, and the user being in a separate state would make this an interstate commerce issue. Facebook would be justified (I'd personally say it's their duty to) in refusing, and letting it bubble up into the courts and let the federal government decide.
    - googlryas 4y ago
      That's pretty much how it works - you file a subpoena from a foreign jurisdiction, and then the state court helps forward it, for example see Delaware § 4311
- scarmig 4y ago
  The battle to get large tech companies to respect user privacy has been fought and lost (at least in the US). Systems are explicitly built that provide portals for the government to look into people's "private" data, often without any active oversight by employees of the company itself. I'd be the first to line up to support some kind of action to change that, but at this point every large company is so closely intertwined with the State that it's a lost cause. Building out new systems that respect privacy and users is the action item here, not raging at Facebook for Facebooking.
twirlock 4y ago
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
According to the article, Nebraska currently allows abortion up to 20 weeks. So for a valid criminal case, this one either had to take place after 20 weeks or be done in violation of other regulations, like taking place at a licensed medical provider. The article mentions mother and daughter burying fetus in backyard after trying to burn it. This implies fairly large fetus that would normally be subject to medical rather than chemical abortion. All in all, this makes the situation less shocking. I may oppose criminal prosecution of cocaine users, yet I wouldn't be that shocked if Facebook provided state law enforcement with DMs between a user and a dealer.
- smt88 4y ago
  The article says the abortion occurred at 22 weeks.
ck2 4y ago
Just a reminder, in the USA all emails older than six-months old can be read by virtually any law enforcement agency without a warrant. This is why there was a server in the basement and everyone probably should have a server in the basement. Spam management made that almost impossible for the end-user though. We could have put spammers in prison but oddly lawmakers never decided that was a problem.

349 points by intunderflow 4y ago

willcipriano 4y ago

manytree 4y ago
I can think of 0 reasons why the “police should investigate that” Why?
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  If you have a miscarriage you don't normally dodge medical attention, fail to report it, and then bury the remains quietly in an unmarked grave.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - chmod775 4y ago
    A miscarriage can be a very traumatic event. You can't expect someone to act in any way rationally afterwards. In this case it's a bit more suspicious, but it's not an unlikely explanation by itself.
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      If you are burying a body in the woods, it seems like Police should check it out. They did. They found messages of the girl self aborting well into viability and then planning to hide the body.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    You do if you reasonably fear you're going to be criminalized for seeking medical attention. Here's an example from a few years ago (so reporting is not shaped by current events), and you can find many more recent examples. https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/8/20954980/stillbirth-miscarriage-murder-abortion-chelsea-becker-news https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/8/20954980/stillbirth...
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      Doing meth to the point that it kills your baby is in fact murder.
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        Not unless you can prove intent, which is probably why the case was dismissed - https://www.ktvu.com/news/murder-case-of-meth-user-who-delivered-stillbirth-dismissed https://www.ktvu.com/news/murder-case-of-meth-user-who-deliv... In any case, such nuance is likely beyond the grasp of a 17 year old. I think you are well aware that this doesn't always yield simple seeming edge cases and that you are capable of looking into other examples but chose not to. Here's some more. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61995250 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61995250
      - sophacles 4y ago
        vorpalhex 4y ago
        sophacles 4y ago
        Oh we call that thing a fetus. Babies are what some fetuses turn into, after there is an event called "birth".
        vorpalhex 4y ago
        Oh. Well that fetus at that point knew the sound of it's mothers voice. It had a preference for a dominant hand. It could taste the difference across foods mom was eating. It felt pain, the same way you and I felt pain. If you wouldn't inject a kitten or a puppy with meth just for fun, you probably shouldn't do it to a fetus either.
  - devindotcom 4y ago
    Have you had a lot of miscarriages?
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      Have you buried a lot of bodies in the woods?
- willcipriano 4y ago
  Given she is underage and pregnant, who made her pregnant? Why are they so desperate to conceal the evidence of the miscarriage, to the point where they burned the body, was it to prevent DNA testing? That's just the tip of the iceberg here. It needs to be understood why they took this course of action.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - beeboop 4y ago
    A teenager getting pregnant from another teenager is extremely common, and likely more common than the alternative. Burning a body is also an extremely traditional, something like 60% of Americans are cremated. Suggesting the police need to be involved in totally ordinary circumstances seems silly to me.
  - hparadiz 4y ago
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      > The idea that all of those instances require an investigation Only the ones where the woman who is pregnant is underage and someone decides to burn the body. Her mother not taking her to the hospital is neglect at a minimum. A miscarriage at that point could easily result in death.
      - hparadiz 4y ago
        It's wild what people on HN will write from a position of privilege. Because everyone has the money to just go to the hospital. Plus everything you just wrote is a deterrent for women to seek care. If you know you'll be criminally investigated for a miscarriage even if you did nothing wrong you'll think twice before seeking care. Which of course means more women will die. But by all means continue with your "investigations".
- remarkEon 4y ago
  Was she coerced into inducing the miscarriage and then into hiding the remains. Fairly obvious question, among others.
- AlanYx 4y ago
  The police exhumed the body because the 22-year old man who helped bury the body made a police report. The police didn't seek the Facebook search warrant until after they exhumed the body and found evidence the body was burned.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lscdlscd 4y ago

Sickening. If FB were to selectively refuse to comply with some state subpoenas, what would be the consequences? Banning of FB in Indiana? I think that would be more of a punishment for the Boomers of Indiana than for FB.

mullen 4y ago
If there is a Subpoena or Search Warrant for FB messages, FB has no choice to hand them over. However, FB should have fought like hell in the courts to not hand those messages over.
- aaomidi 4y ago
  Yep. The requests for data always come with a “show up to court if you don’t want to give the data” They made a decision not to.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    Isn’t it usually: “your archivist is required to appear physically at this address: xxxx, with a physical copy of the following items: yyyy. As a courtesy to you, you can email them to Special Agent zzzz if they are in the proper format.” So showing up (at thousands of courthouses a year) is the default. If you’re helpful (to the prosecution), we will let you do things by email.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  They had a choice - they can tell their lawyers to fight the subpoena/warrant in court. Possibly a long, expensive, and futile exercise, but it would signal whose side they're on. And to the surprise of (hopefully) nobody, they're not on our side at all.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    Not all legal battles are long and drawn out.
4y ago

unicornmama 4y ago

nopenopenopeno 4y ago

superchroma 4y ago

It is time to go back to treating the internet like it was scary and hostile, because it still is, except it now has a thick veneer of slick marketing to suggest otherwise. Young people should be counselled to stay anonymous online and shown examples like this, because zero good can come from giving personal, compromising information to a company along with your real name in this way.

colpabar 4y ago
I think this battle has been lost already. Pretty much all of the non-tech people I know firmly believe the "why do I need anonymity if I'm not doing anything wrong" line of thinking. The powers that be really don't like online anonymity, and the public at large just doesn't care enough to do anything. Maybe this will change some minds, but I'm doubtful it'll be enough.
- beeboop 4y ago
  I hold onto hope that an alternative system of privacy-protecting internet (e.g. Freenet) takes hold to a bigger tech-nerd audience, and then eventually bleeds out to mainstream just like the internet was doing in the early 90s. At which point, the government will be completely incapable of all the bullshit they do today, and will be as powerless over that system as they are over crypto.
  - colpabar 4y ago
    > as powerless over that system as they are over crypto I see this claim made a lot, and I don't understand it. When the canadian trucker protest (please don't make this discussion about that, I am not saying it was good or bad, I am just using it as an example) switched to crypto after the gov froze their bank accounts, the gov also froze those crypto wallets. That seems like the opposite of powerless. I think it's really naive to think that the gov won't just be able to bully any type of new system into submission, like they always do. If there are people running the system, then those people can be coerced.
    - 4y ago

cies 4y ago

missedthecue 4y ago
Disgusting behavior being complying with a valid warrant issued by the government? I could understand not agreeing with the law but maybe encouraging rogue behavior could come back to bite you in unexpected and deleterious ways
- ptudan 4y ago
  You can push back against a warrant legally. Doesn't sound like facebook cared to.
- nullc 4y ago
  They shouldn't have had access to the users private communications to begin with. It's an intentional product choice that they do, and if they chose otherwise they wouldn't have had any private messages to turn over.
  - xrikcus 4y ago
    Data has to be stored somewhere. You can end-to-end encrypt it, but that has constraints and adds clunkiness for the user so it's not even obviously a feature. The easy access to the web interface for messenger over whatsapp or signal if a feature of a sort, depending on your point of view. If you don't want a company to have access to the data you store with them you have to keep the encryption key yourself. If you do that, you risk losing access to the data you store with the company. That's a big downside. So yes, it's a product choice, but it's not a product choice out of some strange effort for the company to have access to your data, but because it provides the right product mix. You might as well argue that your bank having access to your account records to hand over is a product choice. Yes, there are ways to work around that. Maybe some blockchain variant will give that level of privacy. It will not do it without significant tradeoffs.
    - 4y ago

twblalock 4y ago

This is the important part: > A Nebraska teenager is facing criminal charges alleging she aborted a fetus in violation of state law, after authorities obtained her Facebook messages using a search warrant. Should companies disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant from a state government in the United States? If so, how is that any different from Uber breaking various laws? I happen to believe that access to abortion is important (although quite a lot of people don't), but the rule of law matters too. It's not reasonable or logical to believe that it's ok for companies to break some laws but not others. So, I can't really be mad at Facebook for doing this.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
aaomidi 4y ago
Facebook could have legally gone to court to block this. That wouldn’t be breaking the law. It would actually be following the law.
- twblalock 4y ago
  They could have tried -- and how do you know they did not? Even if they tried, they could have still been required to turn over the data.
  - bwb 4y ago
    No they could have won, at the very least this would go to the SC over if they have the right to subpoena over a crime outside the state, that isn't illegal in that state.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > if they have the right to subpoena over a crime outside the state, that isn't illegal in that state Yes. This goes back to the fugitive slave act days. That said, they should have fought. They should always fight. There might be novel case law. And it sets the right precedent. Shameful.

cato_the_elder 4y ago

mcguire 4y ago
From [1]: "“I don’t think I’ve ever had a case like this,” he said Friday. “Usually, abortions are performed in hospitals, and doctors are involved, and it’s not the type of stuff that occurred in this case.”"
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Huh. Who'd have thought that making abortions illegal would force people to have dangerous illicit abortions and have to hide the evidence.
  - cato_the_elder 4y ago
    Sure, people respond to incentives. But this one is particularly cruel. Also, despite all those bogus studies (which, for example, don't correct for how much rule of law is upheld when comparing countries), it will reduce the total number of late-stage abortions significantly. That's a win in my books.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ryneandal 4y ago
      > despite all those bogus studies Citation required. Numerous legitimate studies show that limited/no access to abortions leads to more at-home/back-alley abortions[1,2]. They also show that abortion bans will lead to higher maternal mortality rate [3]. But go off and pat yourself on the back for fetuses having more value than the incubation receptacle they're within. 1: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)61786-8/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... 2:https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(20)30315-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1... 3: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/30/abortion-bans-increase-maternal-mortality-even-more-study-shows https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/30/abortion-bans-incr...

Overtonwindow 4y ago

This is tragic. Women should have access to abortion, and 23 weeks is plenty, but miscarrying and burying it in the backyard needs an investigation. Just to make sure we have all the facts.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago
Why do we need all the facts exactly? If it was her choice, we don't need all the facts. It is literally a part of her body.
- googlryas 4y ago
- eternalban 4y ago
  > It is literally a part of her body. No comment on the general issue of abortion. Question remains for those who push this line as to which body part is that? A fetus is clearly an organism growing inside of someone's body but it is not a "body part" of another organism.
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    It's a part of her umbilical cord at least, even if at the end of that umbilical is a weird collection of cells that will form a different entity. I think of it like cell division, where there is a weird process, and at some point there's kind of two organisms in one, until they separate, and then it's two different organisms (cytokinesis). Human pregnancy is absolutely bizarre and quite dangerous. Some weird facts: - Fertilization doesn't even happen until the 2nd or 3rd week. - Pregnancy can occur outside of the uterus, which quickly leads to ruptured organs and death for the mother. - 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. - The fetus's cells float freely in the mother's blood plasma, which makes the mother a chimera. - A mother's blood can develop antibodies to rhesus antigens in the baby's blood, identifying the baby as a foreign invader. - A fetus's "coating" has genes that inhibit T-cells in the mother, which is the only way the mother's body doesn't destroy the fetus (which is an alien parasite to the mother/host). - Fetal stem cells can travel throughout the mother to repair things - or create an immune disorder. - Women grow an extra organ (the placenta) during pregnancy. - During development, a female fetus develops all the eggs the adult form will carry throughout its lifetime. - Amniotic fluid is fetus pee. - A fetus can't survive outside the uterus before 23-25 weeks.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

Outright ghoulish behavior from Facebook. They didn't even put up a fight. And for Nebraska to put this 17 year old on trial as an adult is doubly cruel.

languageserver 4y ago
She aborted at 23 WEEKS
- googlryas 4y ago
  Yeah the fetus was 6 months old. That's a baby at that point if it is outside of her womb. She could have easily given birth and it would have gone on to live a completely normal life. I'm pro abortion generally, but you need to do it long before the fetus is viable.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - midasz 4y ago
    Sorry but are you really saying 'easily' and 'given birth' after eachother? Have you ever witnessed a birth? And how do you know it would have gone on to live a completely normal life? What kind of disney movie do you live in?
    - googlryas 4y ago
      By easily, I meant that the baby would have good chances of survival. It wouldn't be fighting against 1% odds and require $100M expenditures in the NICU Yes, I've witnessed a birth. Most babies born go on to live normal lives. Do you really think I was implying I was a mindreader, and I know the baby would have a normal life, rather than just saying the odds are good? You interpreted my comment 100% in bad faith which is pretty lame for HN. You might feel more comfortable on reddit.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago

r00fus 4y ago

Information you post to Facebook is essentially public. Best we teach our kids that. The "privacy" safeguards are BS. Also I think that the Nebraska law is a symptom of toxic, fascist mindset that's pervading the country - and that's more concerning to me than Facebook so easily folding (which I expected).

advisedwang 4y ago
This is DMs, most people don't think of those as private, and it's unreasonable to tell people to treat DMs as public. By the same logic email, SMS, voicemail and all "essentially public".
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Facebook DMs are public. Zuck can be personally beating his meat to your nudes - as can every other Facebook engineer. Any other belief regarding the privacy of them is flawed and incorrect.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    I haven't worked at Facebook, but I'd be surprised if this were true. Other large companies have audit logs of employee access to user data that are actively monitored; accessing information of users without a paper trail of justification will get you fired.
  - metadat 4y ago
    While this was true in the early days, there have been audit controls in place for a long time now. FB System Abuse == you're fired. And yes, it's well known that Zuck did abuse God-mode back in the day.
    - ronsor 4y ago
      How do we know Zuck isn't still exempt from auditing?

pyuser583 4y ago

There was a meme a while ago about deleting menstrual tracking apps. So many people, including folks who should know better (professors, etc) were freaking out. I wonder if it was dreamed up in FBs PR department as a distraction.

bena 4y ago
This is the exact reason why that bit was going around. These corporations are not your friends, they have no obligation to preserve your privacy, and any data you've passed along their servers now belongs to them. People were told to delete tracking apps to stop giving those companies data. So that data can't be used against you. This girl gave Facebook data. Facebook then turned that data over to the police. That data was used against her. Exactly how people said it would be.
- threeseed 4y ago
  > they have no obligation to preserve your privacy It's not just that they have no obligation they are legally required to comply with subpoena requests and provide any and all data that an independent judge has deemed necessary. You can't have realistically have a situation where the entire management team goes to jail for refusing to comply with them. Nor is it necessarily wrong for them to choose to respect the law even if it's a bad law.
  - bena 4y ago
    The implication from the person I responded to was that telling people to delete tracking apps was a distraction or deception. That somehow it was Facebook trying to get people to funnel data through them. But that's not what it was. The same people who were trying to get people to delete tracking apps would have also said "Don't talk about this through Meta apps" also. It's a bit outside of what Facebook did, whether they should have complied or risked consequences, etc. As an aside, Signal people. If you want to chat discreetly, Signal.
    - pyuser583 4y ago

dutchbrit 4y ago

Did Facebook even know why the police had search warrant?

rootusrootus 4y ago
Presumably a warrant is signed by an actual judge. I'm not sure I want every company launching their own investigation into the underlying evidence behind a search warrant in order to determine if they should comply or not. If we are unhappy with the warrants, we should address that at the judicial level.
saxonww 4y ago
A valid question, I wondered the same. In the US, at least in my state, search warrants have to be specific about what is being searched for, where to search for it, and when the search should occur. So I think the warrant would likely have mentioned what sorts of messages they were looking for between dates X and Y, not just that Meta was ordered to turn over the entire message history for a user.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

pyuser583 4y ago

Imagine if the case was against a rapist, child abuser, or insurrectionist. Because there isn’t a huge difference when it comes to complying with subpoenas. FB learned a long time ago that defending unpopular criminals’ communications isn’t worth the political cost.

sudden_dystopia 4y ago

jmyeet 4y ago

The current Supreme has engaged in historical revisionism to reach its anti-abortion stance (eg abortion was perfectly legal 200 years ago, so much so that Ben franklin published at-home instructions for performing an abortion [1]). At the time of the ruling, it was pointed out that these draconian laws that half the states had passed or were passing wouldn't stop abortion, they would simply stop safe abortions. This case is evidence of that. Some might choose to focus on why the defendant chose to get an abortion. I don't see any details of that here. Personally, I don't care. If she wants one, she should be able to get one. Investigating this case at all is both unexpected and psychotic. Trying her as an adult is the next level of psychotic. That all aside, as for Facebook, again this is light on detail regarding the cooperation given. Did they fight the subpoena? Did they have any grounds to? What steps were made to protect that user's privacy? We simply don't know. As an aside, it seems like you have better privacy by using regular SMS than any form of IM. Law enforcement can get metadata but that's not so useful. Getting the actual messages from any IM service seems to be much easier. Perhaps WhatsApp would be better? I don't know how accessible WA messages currently are. As for Facebook removing posts supplying at-home abortion medication, here I'm somewhat sympathetic just because Facebook does have to follow the law (even if that law is psychotic and unjustifiable). It's no different to supplying medical marijuana to people in places where it's illegal. Or supplying much cheaper medications from Canada or Mexico. These are all technically illegal so any company is going to have to try and enforce that. Remember the political forces behind this under the guise of being "pro-life" go to every effort to restrict access to affordable medical care, recently voted against child tax credit (in the IRA) and fight efforts to allow people to fight a living wage. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-franklin-roe-wade-supreme-court-leak https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...

nathanaldensr 4y ago
What Ben Franklin wrote is completely orthogonal to the legality of abortion. It was a States' rights issue until Roe v. Wade, and now it's a States' rights issue again. There was no single "law" or "right" that ever said abortion was legal, even in the case of Roe v. Wade, which is now considered a flawed ruling.

crmd 4y ago

This level of corporate amorality / lawful evil reminds me of IBM during World War II.

tunap 4y ago
The Nazis were big fans of Big Data, too.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
I think the pressures and incentives in play right now are going to generally push big tech companies in that direction, arguably already have quite a bit. I expect to see a lot more of it unfortunately.

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klawcode 4y ago

Need to get more people onboard with end to end encryption and obfuscating every possible piece of data online. As other commenters have stated, the corporations that run the internet are not your friends. There is a large number of people in the US who are authoritarian and can't help but try to get involved in other people's business to the maximum degree. They won't stop at any boundary, they are religious zealots.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
If you think "religious zealots" are the only authoritarians, boy do I have news for you!
- klawcode 4y ago
  There are plenty of other ones, but religious ones are the only people who truly obsess over the actions of others. Alternative varieties merely want to steal as many resources as possible, beyond that they don't care about the actions of others.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> If you think "religious zealots" are the only authoritarians, boy do I have news for you! > There are plenty of other ones, but religious ones are the only people who truly obsess over the actions of others. Sorry, no. I don't know how anyone could come to believe something so incorrect. For instance, the Chinese Communist Party is 1) authoritarian, 2) atheist, and 3) very obsessed over the actions of others (as shown by the massive surveillance and control apparatus it's built).

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zuminator 4y ago

Because of "terrorism" etc., text messages and the like will always be subpoenable. Meta would not be able to quash a bog-standard request like this. It's only even newsworthy because it involves the rescinded right to abortion. The lesson here is don't use unencrypted services to discuss your crimes.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
The technical solution would be to not save message contents after message delivery.

hparadiz 4y ago

This thread is disgusting. All these men making excuses for why the state should investigate a 17 year old for a miscarriage. It's not your fucking business. It's a private health matter. Period. You don't get to go on a fishing expedition "to get to the bottom" of anything after the fact with zero evidence of any wrong doing.

branon 4y ago
Agreed on your points but less sexism please. The really important part is: when you decide to break an unjust law, don't talk about it on surveilled platforms, they're complicit and will hand your ass in. Don't bring your smartphone with you either. Edit: yes I understand the laws themselves are sexist, but HN users didn't write the laws, and the "all you men" fingerpointing isn't really productive. Why the men here? You have much easier and more significant targets than male HN users. I just want to say for the record that this comment briefly had a positive score before I got dogpiled.
- bognition 4y ago
  Sure, keeping sensitive conversations off of un-surveilled systems is easy for an informed person to say but most people have no clue how much surveillance actually happens. The battle to get people to chose to use the correct tools has been lost. The only course of action here to to fight and push for privacy rights.
- munk-a 4y ago
  Sexism is unfortunately a key component of this discussion. Anti-abortion laws are focused on controlling a woman's body. I do agree that it's more productive when the conversation is civil and polite - but sexism is firmly in the middle of this particular topic.
  - 202206241203 4y ago
    - 4y ago

mkaic 4y ago

The real issue I have is that Facebook keeps an unencrypted copy of everyone's DMs stored and just waiting to be handed to the government. I understand it's how they make money, and that they've done it forever, but man, I guess using Signal has spoiled me. It's so weird to me that most people are completely unaware or unworried that their "private" conversations aren't private in the slightest.

sneak 4y ago
Google also has a bunch of WhatsApp backups in Google Drive, and Apple has hundreds of millions of iCloud Backups (non-e2e, by design, preserved as an iMessage encryption backdoor for the FBI) containing everyone's iMessages (or realtime iMessage sync private keys). It's not just Facebook that's guilty of this. EDIT: Here's the substantiation requested: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi-complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
- Bud 4y ago
  I get the objection to Apple's unencrypted iCloud backups, but could we present the facts without multiple exaggerations, distortions, and unsupported opinions, please? First, no, it's not "everyone's iMessages". There has been a lot of very public discussion of this. If you don't back up your Messages to iCloud, which a lot of informed people don't do anymore, then Apple does not have that unencrypted copy. Second, unless you have support that Apple did this "for the FBI", specifically for that reason, as opposed to it being a mix of reasons, and also involving user-support reasons, as has been widely reported, please stop repeating that unsupported claim. And lastly, until Apple commits an offense of the nature under discussion here, let's not tar them with the same broad brush as we are justly using to tar Facebook.
  - sneak 4y ago
    > If you don't back up your Messages to iCloud, which a lot of informed people don't do anymore, then Apple does not have that unencrypted copy. This is false. Apple will still have the unencrypted copies (actually, the effectively-unencrypted sync keys, as "Messages in iCloud" cross-device sync keys are the thing at issue here) because the people you iMessage with will be providing them to Apple. iCloud Backup is on by default, so approximately everyone you talk to using iMessage is escrowing their private keys to Apple. Turning off iCloud Backup on your device does not protect your iMessages, as the backdoor exists on the devices of both conversation participants. It's sort of like switching email providers to get away from Gmail; if everyone you send or receive emails to/from is using Gmail, Google is still getting a copy of all of your correspondence. > Second, unless you have support that Apple did this "for the FBI", specifically for that reason, as opposed to it being a mix of reasons, and also involving user-support reasons, as has been widely reported, please stop repeating that unsupported claim. I updated the comment with the link to the Reuters article that says they did this specifically for the FBI. From the article: > More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee. > Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order. > In private talks with Apple soon after, representatives of the FBI’s cyber crime agents and its operational technology division objected to the plan, arguing it would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against iPhone-using suspects, the government sources said. > When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to the six sources. Reuters could not determine why exactly Apple dropped the plan. > “Legal killed it, for reasons you can imagine,” another former Apple employee said he was told, without any specific mention of why the plan was dropped or if the FBI was a factor in the decision.

martin1975 4y ago

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Latty 4y ago
So you are in favour of making IVF illegal, as it involves creating multiple fertilised eggs that get destroyed when one works out?
kspacewalk2 4y ago
- Latty 4y ago
  - daptaq 4y ago
    > all the other cases they hand wave and ignore are sacrifices they are willing to make to control women Could you elaborate on this point? I hope I don't come off as insensitive, when saying that just as a social phenomenon, this discussion is peculiarly interesting, and while I ultimately believe that the an (actual) woman has the absolute right to decide over her own life including a (potential) child, I can understand why "pro-life" people make the arguments they make -- and at first I'd believe their own reasoning. To me it the entire topic of abortion seems like something beyond morality, there is no good and bad choice, just bad and less bad. The reason I say it is "interesting" is that it appears people are talking past one another on such a massive scale, and as it appears to me considering different images as unstated examples. The pro-choice image (to me) involves an every day woman who cannot handle a child in her current circumstances, and decides to abort the pregnancy out of necessity, while the pro-life image appears to involve notions of promiscuity, indifference towards a child and egoism. I have to wonder why these contrasting views have arisen, and who stands to profit from it. Arguments like "controlling women's bodies" are in my eyes to this end too simplistic. The danger -- as with any social debate -- of misunderstanding the opposing side is that one cannot reason and anticipate their behaviour, as one is distracted by a moral mirage, that might be easier to make fun of, but that fighting is a dangerous waste of energy.

commoner 4y ago

While this case involved a search warrant, Facebook also gives information to police departments without a warrant for any case that they determine to be an "emergency". Here is the portal where the information is requested and provided: https://www.facebook.com/records https://www.facebook.com/records Back when I used to have a Facebook account, Facebook provided private information from my account to a police department without a warrant for a situation that they deemed an "emergency", but that I did not. I no longer use Facebook.

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jjulius 4y ago
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SpaceManNabs 4y ago

Please use Signal and remember that your receiver still has a copy of your messages.

kodah 4y ago

This story leaves out some details: https://nypost.com/2022/08/09/nebraska-mom-and-daughter-charged-for-burning-burying-aborted-fetus/ https://nypost.com/2022/08/09/nebraska-mom-and-daughter-char... > When an investigator interviewed the teen, she allegedly confirmed that she had a miscarriage after midnight on April 22, and said that she and her mother placed the fetus in a bag in the back of their van, according to the court papers. > Jessica and Celeste also said that Barnhill, whose relationship to the two women has not been revealed, later helped them bury the fetus on his property. > Police were led to the makeshift gravesite and unearthed the corpse, which was found to show signs of “thermal injuries,” the documents stated. > Barnhill reportedly confirmed to the investigators that the mother and daughter had attempted to burn the fetus before putting it in the ground. My opinion might be a bit contrarian, but I was always taught that Roe v Wade was because abortions had become so unsafe without a proper place to do them. I imagine in this case we're missing some details, because the actual abortion involved sourcing some pills that are specifically used for abortion. I don't imagine sourcing those was quick. My read on this set of circumstances is that if you put arbitrary blockers on something that someone really wants to do, it course corrects them into a very unhealthy path. In this case, the details are shocking, but not incongruent with what I have been told was the reasoning for Roe v Wade and true to other harm reduction logic. It's awful easy to argue post-facto that she could just have given birth, but I think that ignores a lot of changes and sacrifices a woman at 17-18 years old will have to endure.

rootusrootus 4y ago
I think it's important to keep in mind the date. On April 22, Roe was still settled law from decades ago. The leak hadn't even happened yet.
- kodah 4y ago
  I mean that's a point, but I'm not sure especially relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Nebraska https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Nebraska also, the requirements for an abortion: https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/state-facts-about-abortion-nebraska https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/state-facts-about-abor... There's three clinics total in the entire state and quite a number of hurdles. Including one that a patient must wait 24 hours after a consultation to have the procedure performed. If a patient has to travel to the clinic, and odds are she did, that's at minimum two days but maximally four. Then there's the cost, 2-3 nights at a hotel, plus abortions can't be paid by insurance - they're now looking at several hundred dollars of out of pocket cost in a state like Nebraska. If this young woman waited to tell her mother until she was showing (or didn't know until she was showing - which at 23 weeks, and a few weeks prior, she would be) then I can see this putting them in a weird place. My point here isn't to reason about the things that happened after the abortion, but rather to say I think the more arbitrary hurdles that are introduced the more zany the outcomes will be.

Clubber 4y ago

Latty 4y ago
> The only sacrifice in that case would have been giving birth itself. You say that like this is trivial. Giving birth is literally life-threatening.
- Clubber 4y ago
  So is driving to the store, give me a break. Here ya go: In 2020, 861 women were identified as having died of maternal causes in the United States, compared with 754 in 2019 NHTSA projects that an estimated 42,915 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year It's good to keep some perspective when you say giving birth is, "literally life threatening."
  - metadat 4y ago
    Please stop trolling. Step outside yourself for a moment and realize this is precisely the kind of discourse which greatly degrades the quality of the discussion.
  - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
    Putting aside that completing a pregnancy is drastically more risky than a single drive to the store: You are never legally forbidden from hitting the brakes and deciding that a particular drive to the store is too risky and that you aren't going to complete it. You should have the same right to choose not to complete a pregnancy.
- anchochilis 4y ago
  My wife almost died earlier this year giving birth to our very much wanted child. She was in great health and had a normal pregnancy, then developed HELLP and related complications (DIC, kidney injury) while in labor. This took place at a world-class hospital in a major American city. We both believe she would have died had she been anywhere else. No should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, ever.

nix23 4y ago

omegacharlie 4y ago

Someone reading this may disagree with abortion. But if we can separate the controversy of the topic at hand from the fact a state government requested data from a private company for what is not universally considered a crime it could lead to a pragmatic discussion into data requests and privacy (i.e questionable practice of 'emergency data requests' that function outside the normal process of a subpoena[1]) [1]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/hackers-gaining-power-of-subpoena-via-fake-emergency-data-requests/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/hackers-gaining-power-of...

googlryas 4y ago
What do you mean "universally considered a crime"? Would that universe just be the state that Facebook is incorporated? It seemed probable that a crime that broke Nebraska state law was committed, and that is what the Nebraska police were looking into.
- falcolas 4y ago
  Facebook is not a Nebraska company, and the user being in a separate state would make this an interstate commerce issue. Facebook would be justified (I'd personally say it's their duty to) in refusing, and letting it bubble up into the courts and let the federal government decide.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    That's pretty much how it works - you file a subpoena from a foreign jurisdiction, and then the state court helps forward it, for example see Delaware § 4311
scarmig 4y ago
The battle to get large tech companies to respect user privacy has been fought and lost (at least in the US). Systems are explicitly built that provide portals for the government to look into people's "private" data, often without any active oversight by employees of the company itself. I'd be the first to line up to support some kind of action to change that, but at this point every large company is so closely intertwined with the State that it's a lost cause. Building out new systems that respect privacy and users is the action item here, not raging at Facebook for Facebooking.

twirlock 4y ago

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

According to the article, Nebraska currently allows abortion up to 20 weeks. So for a valid criminal case, this one either had to take place after 20 weeks or be done in violation of other regulations, like taking place at a licensed medical provider. The article mentions mother and daughter burying fetus in backyard after trying to burn it. This implies fairly large fetus that would normally be subject to medical rather than chemical abortion. All in all, this makes the situation less shocking. I may oppose criminal prosecution of cocaine users, yet I wouldn't be that shocked if Facebook provided state law enforcement with DMs between a user and a dealer.

smt88 4y ago
The article says the abortion occurred at 22 weeks.

ck2 4y ago

Just a reminder, in the USA all emails older than six-months old can be read by virtually any law enforcement agency without a warrant. This is why there was a server in the basement and everyone probably should have a server in the basement. Spam management made that almost impossible for the end-user though. We could have put spammers in prison but oddly lawmakers never decided that was a problem.