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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

• deleted 4y ago
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• 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.
        • bwb 4y ago
          As we have learned, laws don't mean what they used to, just takes a judge changing it when you appeal.
          • ch4s3 4y ago
            What you're describing is a common law system, which is basically what the US has[1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
            • bwb 4y ago
              Ya that is my point :) I would like to see FB challenge it and get a ruling.
      • threeseed 4y ago
        > at the very least this would go to the SC Supreme Court chooses what cases to look at. And since it has swung to being much more conservative are more interested in cases which reinforce the originalism doctrine for interpreting the constitution.
• mcguire 4y ago
  Well, also this: "Still, Meta has remained largely silent on how it will moderate abortion content in general. However, users recently noticed that Instagram and Facebook posts about acquiring abortion pills such as mifepristone were being systematically removed. At the same time, Meta continued to earn revenue from anti-abortion advertisements containing dangerous misinformation, Media Matters found. An investigation by the Markup discovered that Facebook was collecting data from users interacting with abortion services websites, and subequently made that information available to anti-abortion groups."
  • cato_the_elder 4y ago
    They have to comply with the law, and there's nothing wrong with anti-abortion ads. Facebook doesn't have an obligation to only sell ads to Democrats. > subequently made that information available to anti-abortion groups That part is probably misleading, I'm assuming they didn't give them any kind of information, they just allowed demographic targeting like they do for most kinds of ads.
    • not2b 4y ago
      But there's also no law against posts providing information on "acquiring abortion pills such as mifepristone"; Facebook is choosing to remove such posts.
      • vorpalhex 4y ago
        There's also no law restricting guides on how to turn any rifle into an automatic machine gun... but Facebook chooses to remove those too.
        • munk-a 4y ago
          There is no equating healthcare to gun rights - one of these is used to make lives better and the other is used to destroy them.
          • 4y ago
• vkou 4y ago
  Hopefully we can see blue states pass abortion bounty bounty laws, where anyone aiding and abetting this sort of behavior is at least civilly, but maybe even criminally liable. Texas let the genie out of the bottle, and you can't put it back in.
  • munk-a 4y ago
    Texas has a bounty on people helping residents across the boarder to seek care AFAICT - that's an action that happens within the state. Passing a law restricting actions in another state is either 1) super illegal or 2) creates a really awful situation legally in the states. If Texas can say "Hey, Massachusetts, it's illegal for teachers in your state to teach evolution" then we've essentially destroyed any ability to have laws in the US.
    • vkou 4y ago
      Facebook's data centers and personnel might well be located within the jurisdiction of a blue state. Perhaps this will incentivize it to not retain this information, so that it can't be requested by hostile law enforcement or authoritarian regimes. > creates a really awful situation legally in the states. You are correct, it's a pretty awful situation, but it's one that we currently live in. Also, it's rather common for sovereign states to sanction people for committing crimes in other jurisdictions. Meng Wanzhou was arrested for breaking US laws regarding trade with Iran in China.
• cm2187 4y ago
  It's not even an access to abortion issue. Abortion is legal in that state. 23 weeks is really late, an abortion that late would be illegal in most of europe.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    AFAIK 23 weeks would be illegal in the majority of the US as well. Though there is some ambiguity as a number of states just say 'fetal viability' which can be as late as 24 weeks depending on who you ask.
    • throwayyy479087 4y ago
      This would have been illegal in states like New York. The people who are blindly defending this should consider that situations have nuance, and that the child that was born probably also looked like a small newborn instead of a meat bean.
  • spamizbad 4y ago
    Not exactly. European laws have restrictions on when it's available "upon request", but if there are any medical concerns around the fetus or the mother they can and are performed much later. This is likely more of a side-effect of having government sponsored healthcare wanting to limit the number of elective procedures rather than any sort of moral issue like its viewed in countries like the United States.
    • AlanYx 4y ago
      In most of Europe what happened in this particular case would still have been illegal (although it's fair to ask whether the individual in question would have had a legal abortion at an earlier point in time in Europe). The linked article leaves out a lot of relevant contextual details; there's more here: https://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/nebraska/norfolk-mother-and-daughter-accused-of-illegal-abortion-burning-and-burying-body/article_ff99fd49-a710-5ec3-8d51-5aced3001c71.html https://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/nebraska/nor...
• erellsworth 4y ago
  Facebook could have refused on the grounds that they aren't based out Nebraska and not subject to their jurisdiction. They could have used some of their extensive legal budget to challenge the warrant on those grounds.
  • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > grounds that they aren't based out Nebraska and not subject to their jurisdiction This isn’t how jurisdiction works. Facebook had a customer in Nebraska who allegedly did a crime in Nebraska under Nebraska law. That creates a legal nexus for them there.
    • kragen 4y ago
      Facebook almost surely does have a jurisdictional nexus in Nebraska, but not merely because they have a customer there.
      • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        One can argue that Facebook users aren't customers either.
        • kragen 4y ago
          This is a good point.
        • throwayyy479087 4y ago
          That's the only interesting point in this thread. "We don't have any advertisers from Nebraska so no customers" would be an interesting case.
          • kragen 4y ago
            Not only is it not sufficient to have customers in a jurisdiction to have a jurisdictional nexus there, it also is not necessary.
• a_shovel 4y ago
  > It's not reasonable or logical to believe that it's ok for companies to break some laws but not others. "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." Martin Luther King Jr.
  • sudden_dystopia 4y ago
  • vlunkr 4y ago
    I don't think we want Facebook to decide which laws are unjust.
    • woodruffw 4y ago
      Nobody is asking Facebook to decide; Facebook is being told which laws are unjust.
      • ben_w 4y ago
        Facebook are being told which laws are unjust by multiple different groups (not just on the topic of abortion) who disagree about everything other than that Facebook is pure evil for allowing the other lot to say anything.
        • woodruffw 4y ago
          This is not a normative statement: I'm not saying which group Facebook should listen to. Only that everybody (except for Facebook themselves) agrees that Facebook should not be making the decision.
          • deleted 4y ago
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    • worik 4y ago
• 8note 4y ago
  It's ok to break some laws and not others. Breaking the law, and following the litigation to have the law struck down through courts is part of the rule of law. That mechanism is built into the system, just as much as democratic change is
• muaytimbo 4y ago
  Yes companies and people should disobey the law more often, we should all strive to minimize the effects of government control and coercion enabling us to lead our lives as we see fit for the short time we're on earth. For me, I'm happy Uber is around today, most likely because the flouted the law. Win/Win for me and them IMO.
  • munk-a 4y ago
    You do realize your cheap transportation is partially built on the backs of hundreds of rape cases,[1] right? 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62158976 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62158976
    • muaytimbo 4y ago
      I'm not really sure I agree Uber was "built" by cab drivers, but for the sake of argument, sure, but what's the alternative? The subway has way more crime.
    • worik 4y ago
      We live in a culture saturated with rape. In which "justifying rape" is only recently (I am getting old. Last decades) gone out of fashion. Some call it a "rape culture", with some justification. Uber is a part of that culture, and it is an open question just where on the spectrum of "angelic operator" to "dangerous predation" they lie. But the claim: "cheap transportation is partially built on the backs of hundreds of rape cases" is only true because of "partially". I think it is a weak claim.
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  If so, how is that any different from Uber breaking various laws? The pursuit of private profit vs the defense of someone else's private liberty. You might think rule of law subsumes both considerations, or something else, but if so you should say that. Asking a rhetorical question whose answer is blindingly obvious is more of a conversational gambit for Socratic authority than a sincere inquiry.
  • threeseed 4y ago
    > Asking a rhetorical question whose answer is blindingly obvious You are either disingenuous or naive if you think this is true. It is an extremely complex question both ethically and practically.
    • anigbrowl 4y ago
      I was able to summarize the difference in 12 words. The ramifications can be complex but the question as asked was simple.
    • DubiousPusher 4y ago
      Regardless, asking capital for justice is foolish and damning Facebook to hell is impossible.
• kragen 4y ago
  Yes, companies definitely should disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant in cases where someone is being prosecuted for having an abortion. Obeying the law in this case is clearly immoral! There is nothing unreasonable or illogical about believing that it is okay for companies to break some laws but not others. You can come to that conclusion in at least two perfectly reasonable ways: you can believe that breaking laws is not in itself a bad thing (but that actions that break some law may be bad for some other reason, such as harming people), or that it is a bad thing but in some cases the lesser of two evils. However, in practice it may be difficult for a company to organize such disobedience, particularly since, for example, Facebook cannot avoid hiring employees from religious groups who are in favor of these laws. So, a more practical approach is to avoid being in the position of surveilling people's private communications in the first place, so that no employees at the company have access to the information the police seek. End-to-end encryption is a crucial structural protection against this kind of pervasive surveillance, because it prevents intermediaries from having the private information in the first place. Pseudonymity is another one: the teenager should never have given Facebook her legal name, but unfortunately Facebook has extensive policies in place to extort legal names from its users, making them vulnerable to such abuses. Of course talking about encryption always brings out the knuckledraggers who link to XKCD 538 and talk about hitting people with $5 wrenches. Hopefully this example clarifies why encryption sometimes defeats a $5 wrench: neither the Nebraska teenager nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case.
  • threeseed 4y ago
    > Obeying the law in this case is clearly immoral Everyone has different morals. That's why laws exist.
    • kragen 4y ago
      People have different beliefs about many different things, not just morals. For example, some people believe that the Earth was created 6000 years ago. I'm not claiming my beliefs are infallible, just explaining what they are and, in some cases, why I hold them. It's difficult to tell from your one-line comment, but it sounds like one of your beliefs is moral relativism: that there is no objective reality of what is good and bad, only "different morals" held by different people. That belief is false.* Laws exist only in the same sense that Zeus or Santa Claus exists, which I think is the sense you believe that morals exist: they are collections of ideas that are passed from mind to mind, but there is no sense in which it can be objectively true or false to say, "The law forbids [such and such]." There is only, at best, a social consensus. ______ * Of course, my belief that goodness and badness exist objectively is fallible, but even if it is as incorrect as the belief that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, its veracity is still an objective question; it could be true, false, or partly true, but not meaningless.
• staticassertion 4y ago
  > Should companies disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant from a state government in the United States? a) Yes, they should b) At minimum they should fight the warrant and advocate for their users c) They should protect that data such that they can't turn it over
• hedgehog 4y ago
  Facebook selectively complies in what could charitably be viewed as a profit-focused strategy and less charitably as nakedly partisan. Case in point, ongoing violation of Washington State campaign finance laws.
• wolpoli 4y ago
  > after authorities obtained her Facebook messages using a search warrant. The fact that it was obtained using a search warrant is an very important part of the story. Right now, the headline is designed to create an outrage against Facebook. Forbes is being very misleading here.
• guelo 4y ago
  The law is immoral according to many of us and people will be breaking it.
• tlogan 4y ago
  23 weeks might be illegal even in California. In California, there is no strict cut-off date as to when a pregnancy may be terminated. But absent special circumstances, abortion cannot be performed once the fetus becomes viable. Hospitals will resuscitate and actively treat babies born in the 22nd week of pregnancy.
  • DubiousPusher 4y ago
    > abortion cannot be performed once the fetus becomes viable I don't think that's universally true. That would depend upon the state. The Roe decision protected women from government intervention before the fetus was vaible but now that Roe is gone that does not mean the inverse is true.
    • tlogan 4y ago
      Yes - but let’s not use this instance as “abortion” story. This story can also be used by anti-abortion people to show how abortion is about killing babies. In short, if you ask any nurse or doctor they will tell you that rules are to try to save any baby which is more than 22 weeks.
• DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Yeah, the only real civil rights question I see here that relates to Facebook and social media is how are courts looking at warrants for social media accounts. If the police suspect you of a crime they can't just ask for warrants to acquire the letters you may have written to anyone you've ever corresponded with. They have to be more specific. But if they can request a broad swath of your messages simply because you have a social media account then that's a bit like requesting papers from someone simply because they own a filing cabinet.
• moomin 4y ago
  To answer your question breaking laws designed to help people versus laws designed to persecute people are very different things. It’s all very well being in favour of the rule of law, but unjust laws are tyranny. When companies assist with tyranny, they can and should get bad press, whether that tyrrany happens in China, Russia or America. They choose where to trade, where to be registered and where to employ people.
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  • nathanaldensr 4y ago
    Many, many people do not agree with your insinuation that abortion laws are "tyrrany;" that's why laws are passed in states whose populations have determined to various degrees that abortion must not be allowed.
    • vkou 4y ago
      Even in those states, abortion enjoys wide popular support (See: The Kansas referendum), it's just that they've been gerrymandered to the point that their governments are not remotely representative of the wishes of most of their constituents.
  • Dracophoenix 4y ago
    Uber provides services at a lower cost to the consumer and lowered barriers of entry for millions of drivers compared to taxi companies entrenched by state monopolies. How is that not helping people? A paternalistic state is as much a tyranny as a persecutory one. The only only difference is in the overt methods. The motives and thinking behind the two are the same. If you're of the view that certain laws are inherently unjust, by whom or by what standards should that distinction be made? Who watches the watchers? Why would you think a country that dictates with whom or how one can form an economic contract would leave alone the right to bodily integrity? Individual human beings, whether representing companies or themselves, choose where to trade, register, and employ (or be employed by) people. Human beings are the ones decide to create companies, governments, and tyrannies. You give companies far too much agency when you want to pin them as enablers of tyranny but deny them any in their contributions to personal liberty, whether political or economic. You can't have it both ways.
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• nonameiguess 4y ago
  Everybody seems to be reading and answering this from the assumption that the writer of this article wants you to believe Facebook is bad for complying with this warrant, but I can't see where that is the case. I read the article and she's just reporting what happened. There is no statement saying this is bad, anyone should be outraged, or that they should ignore and/or break laws. Presumably, part of the reason for writing articles like this is just to inform people who might think of breaking the law not to engage in their conspiracies to break laws using Facebook private messages as the communications medium. Drug dealers and terrorists are well aware by now, but people who weren't breaking the law a few weeks ago need to know.
  • johnnyanmac 4y ago
    >this article wants you to believe Facebook is bad for complying with this warrant, but I can't see where that is the case. That's probably due the headline missing vital context that turns this from arguments on backdoors(a topic FB has often got into trouble with) to one of "can you issue search warrants on digital media?" But I understand writers don't often write the headline in larger publications. Maybe the writer wanted to be impartial but some higher power wanted to maximize engagement
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• iso1631 4y ago
  > Should companies disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant from a state government in the United States? Yes
• moolcool 4y ago
  Facebook shouldn't have had access to this access this data in the first place. Sure, they have to (within some framework) cooperate with law enforcement, but their entire platform is optimized to be a data vacuum for advertising from the jump. The fact that mass surveillance for the state is a side effect is just piling unacceptable effect onto unacceptable cause. Fuck facebook all day long.
• michaelmrose 4y ago
  We would expect individuals to disobey fugitive slave laws and refuse to return slaves to bondage. We also would expect people not to turn in jews in nazi occupied states. It is curious if we were to expect civil disobedience by individuals risking everything but also expect companies who risk little to turn in little Anne Frank at the first opportunity without even diminishing our respect.
• snarf21 4y ago
  Or Hatebook could decide that this law is unjust and block all users from Nebraska from accessing their platform as a protest. This would do more to get the law changed than a letter writing campaign, etc. Twitter and the other social platforms could follow suit. And sure the company has a responsibility to share holders but that shouldn't override all else. A stance of "we don't want to get involved in politics" is a political statement in and of itself and these companies donate millions to campaigns. Look at all the CA stuff that got abused in a previous election. Or they can say that "they are just following the law" while they collect all the ad $$$. They have the power to morally affect this issue. They can very trivially put out a statement that they will no longer continue operate in states and countries that violate the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But we see the big players chasing money over humanity and democracy and even decency. And it isn't just Hatebook, look at the concessions Apple and Google and others have made to get access to markets in China and other totalitarian regimes.