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The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

91 points by gok 4y ago

sbierwagen 4y ago
>In this case, Burgess was 28 weeks pregnant, which is later in pregnancy than mifepristone and misoprostol are recommended for use. 28 weeks is, of course, 7 months. Third trimester elective abortion is illegal in the UK, Spain, France, Germany...
- MilnerRoute 4y ago
  I'm still really surprised. Surprised that a prosecution happened for a 17-year-old girl. And that Facebook gave that 17-year-old girl's private messages to the police to facilitate that prosecution.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Surprised that a prosecution happened for a 17-year-old girl. Yes, this is a total waste. Is this making the world a better place? > And that Facebook gave that 17-year-old girl's private messages to the police to facilitate that prosecution. I'm not surprised that Facebook complied with a lawfully issued search warrant.
    - washbrain 4y ago
      The US justice system isn't about reformation or improving the country. It's a system designed to mete out punishment and revenge. It is both deeply tragic and entirely typical that a case like this is progressing in the US.
  - gambiting 4y ago
    I disagree with the entire idea of prosecution here, I think it's wrong, but I think we should recognize that Facebook was served with a lawful warrant for data here - surely we want facebook to obey the law in the countries they operate, and if a warrant is presented they should comply?
    - iepathos 4y ago
      Yes, Facebook had to comply and because Facebook doesn't implement end-to-end encryption so that they can data mine their users' chat they had to provide the details. They could alternatively implement end-to-end encryption to protect themselves and their users from these warrants. Something like Signal where the service doesn't know what the messages are that are being sent between users so warrants for seizing that data have no impact on the users' privacy.
      - selwynii 4y ago
        Yes, and E2EE was rolled out in 2016 to Messenger, and then was planned to be the default until regulators and NCMEC started screaming about CSAM, and rightly so. It's lose lose. https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904650/meta-facebook-messenger-end-to-end-encryption-chat-video-call https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904650/meta-facebook-me...
      - ahahahahah 4y ago
        > Facebook doesn't implement end-to-end encryption This is, literally, a lie. Both messenger and WhatsApp have e2ee implemented.
        JetSpiegel 4y ago
        Maybe. Have you checked the new Web Whatsapp, it can work without your phone being on. So this is not clear cut now.
- mlyle 4y ago
  Weeks is a reasonable metric; it's what's used in those laws in Europe, too. Note that there's a ~2 week difference in the week metric between the way we talk about pregnancy (weeks since LMP) and the way these laws are generally written (weeks since conception).
- Someone 4y ago
  I don’t think using weeks was anything other than following regular practice. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy: “Childbirth typically occurs around 40 weeks from the start of the last menstrual period (LMP), a span known as the gestational age. This is just over nine months. Counting by fertilization age, the length is about 38 weeks.” I think that’s because months vary in length, making it relatively hard for people to count with them. Example: 28 weeks isn’t 7 months, it is slightly less than 6½ average months (6 months is a tiny bit over 26 weeks, and two weeks under half an average month)
- MilnerRoute 4y ago
  Interestingly, Motherboard says 28-week abortions are perfectly legal -- in about half of America. But Nebraska moved the line between legal and illegal by eight weeks, to 20 weeks. (For what it's worth, this all happened before the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, so that's the issue here: the state's own stricter 20-week deadline.) The 17-year-old will be tried as an adult, on a felony and two misdemeanor charges. Motherboard adds: "Facebook and other tech platforms have previously declined to say whether they would give law enforcement data that relates to abortion cases. This case shows that Facebook, at least, will and already has."
- rcoveson 4y ago
  The overwhelming majority of babies delivered in a hostpital at 28 weeks survive. It would have had a < 50% chance of lasting complications. I actually had a cousin born recently who was more premature than this. It's tragic to think of the circumstances that drove somebody to this, but you could say that about any act of violence.
- guelo 4y ago
  Why is the European angle suddenly in every abortion discussion? I'm fascinated by how these kind of talking points emerge and then are suddenly everywhere, must be some kind of influencer coordination. (I'll probably get down voted for this because whenever I bring this kind of thing up people seem to get personally offended. Even though it's not your talking point, you picked up somewhere recently)
  - bpodgursky 4y ago
    Because it's incredibly annoying to hear Europeans to complain about the oppression of US abortion laws which are actually more permissive than the ones in their own country.
    - kwhitefoot 4y ago
      The oppression in the US appears to be on the procedural side of things rather than the laws themselves. The impression I often get is that in the US the enforcement of such laws is rather more capricious and hard to predict than in Europe. I think what most Europeans find difficult to understand is quite how partisan the US system is and how little support is available for those caught up in legal difficulties of this kind. Just my impression of course, but impression seems to be what a lot of it is about.
  - botverse 4y ago
    Because in Europe there are a lot of civilised countries with freedoms to aspire to.
    - thereare5lights 4y ago
      This doesn't answer the question. Why should we care what the European standard for abortion is? Whether or not they have other freedoms that we don't have is irrelevant.
      - drpyser22 4y ago
        Irrelevant to you maybe? Looking at others for reference and comparison is standard practice. Also, i assume this hackernews community involves a number of European people.
joenot443 4y ago
This is an incredibly sad story all around. The saddest part, to me, was that for whatever reason they chose to wait rather than legally ending the pregnancy much earlier. The fetus aborted was 28 weeks, or 7 months, and almost certainly viable.
- washbrain 4y ago
  The saddest part to me is that two women are going to face prison time, effectively ruining their lives. Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Who could say. I can say for sure that two humans are experiencing something truly, truly awful and may be forced into enduring the awfulness for years to come.
  - sp527 4y ago
    > Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Can someone ELI5 why this is the standard? Shouldn't it be something more reasonable like "has a relatively developed brain", "can experience pain", "shows early signs of consciousness", "has major organs", "is a recognizably bipedal/human lifeform", etc? Every cutoff I've encountered seems to be entirely subjective and like it reduces down to "whatever I find politically expedient". The very cynical side of me feels like the standard typically used was meant to buy as much time as possible for an abortion and not because it was grounded in anything scientific or morally conscionable.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      Because all of these other than the last one describe living cows which most people think it's ethical to kill and eat?
    - washbrain 4y ago
      For me, personally, I believe that human pregnancy is unusual. Most mammalian mothers can self terminate pregnancy if desired, by cutting off the flow of resources to their fetus. Humans are somewhat unique in that they can't. Our fetuses are parasitic, and attempt to force the mother to carry them to term through endocrinological trucks. Except... We can now disrupt that parasitism and join every other mammalian species in giving mothers the authority over whether their bodies supply resources to a developing clump of cells within them. We choose, however, in some parts of the world to not give women control of the resources in their body and instead tell them, "this fetus could become a human, so you are required to use your resources to make it so." Until the fetus is viable on its own, it's literally in a parasitic relationship with the mother. It might have human-like traits, but until it's capable of surviving outside of that parasitic relationship, I'm inclined to give the mother the authority to say whether they want to play host.
belval 4y ago
I'll preface this by saying that I am pro-choice, but 28 weeks is late, very late. > Survival rates for infants born at 28 weeks gestation is between 80-90 percent. Babies born at 28 weeks old only have a 10 percent chance of having long-term health problems.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  It doesn’t make the way the case was prosecuted any less dystopian really. Just all-around awful. The real question was why they (the defendants) felt they had to do it the way they did and couldn’t involve a medical professional.
- washbrain 4y ago
  You don't know the circumstances, though. I can imagine dozens of scenarios where someone would be forced or feel forced to wait this long, or experience a change in their life that makes them rethink carrying the fetus to term. The victims here are the two people who are standing trial, and no amount of, "Welllllll buuuuut, it was pretty late... soooo..." changes the fact that two women will needlessly have their lives and reputations destroyed.
  - rcoveson 4y ago
    But if the same entity had been located outside the woman when it was killed, then it would be another victim, right? What detail about it being in utero makes it an ethical non-entity? The shared blood supply? The fact that it doesn't breath air? 28 weeks isn't even considered a "previably delivery". At that mark it's just called premature. In your ethical system, when does it gain the ability to be a victim?
  - Someone 4y ago
    IMO, the aborted child is the main victim. In all likelihood, it was healthier than the average child born at 28 weeks, and most of those survive. Yes, there may be mitigating circumstances, and that should affect the severity of any punishment, but from the info I read here, it looks looks highly likely (1) these women are guilty, and because of that it IMO is good that the government tried to find out whether they were. (1) one way they wouldn’t be guilty is if they neither knew nor suspected she was pregnant for over 20 weeks.
samfisher83 4y ago
It was court ordered. Facebook didn't just give this information voluntarily to police.
- washbrain 4y ago
  My understanding is that a court order is not an immediate, absolute command with zero recourse or ability to have one's lawyers respond? Surely Facebook could have done something, even if it wasn't ultimately successful?
  - creato 4y ago
    I fully believe abortion should be reasonably legal, and if it were more accessible it may have prevented a lot of the tragedy of this case. But given the details in this article, it seems like this case would be criminal even in that hypothetical world.
    - 988747 4y ago
      The keyword here is “reasonably”. What I hate the most is “lifestyle abortion” when a woman says she’s not ready for a baby, but at the same time treats sex like a cheap entertainment, fucking her way through dozens of guys.
      - washbrain 4y ago
        Sex is cheap entertainment, and should be. It feels good, it's your body, why should anyone have any judgements about how you use it. Let me fuck the men and women and non binary pals I want, it doesn't affect you. One should be able to have sex separate from concerns about having to carry a fetus to term.
  - nickff 4y ago
    There are many things that might have been done; if the warrant should not have been served, the best person to challenge it would probably be the defendant (or their counsel). They would likely challenge the admissibility of the evidence. I am not sure what grounds Facebook would have to challenge this warrant, unless it would be improper for them to provide private communications for some reason.
newfonewhodis 4y ago
Some points that folks on this thread are missing: 1. This is not a story about when a pregnancy can/should be terminated. 2. The person in this story is a child - 17 years old. Many times, what seems like normal weight gain ends up being a pregnancy. This is especially true for younger/skinnier folks. 3. Remove the hot-button issue - abortion - from this story and consider the implications. Two people were having what they thought was a private conversation. HN crowd is not representative of the real world where FB/Messenger is essential AND where people don't understand privacy (and social) implications of using FB.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
  > Two people were having what they thought was a private conversation. They can now be the poster girl(s) for two causes: "more abortion" and "facebook isn't private".
- abigail95 4y ago
  At the risk of being extremely inflammatory, Plenty of criminals think they are having a private conversation, when in fact, the government is listening in. What they did was a crime in Nebraska. It has been a crime in Nebraska for decades (centuries?). The government used due process to get a subpoeona for information to investigate a crime. Yes, the wounded parties here will feel like their privacy was violated, but from the information we have in the article, it seems justified. The privacy and social implications have been the same for decades: your communications can be intercepted or retrieved by law enforcement, so if there is probable cause that you committed a crime, someone might go looking.
whywhywhydude 4y ago
Why vice is highlighting Facebook is beyond me. If a judge gives you a warrant, aren’t you forced to provide the data? Otherwise, don’t you face contempt of court charges and possibly get jailed?
- mattnewton 4y ago
  I think because a lot of people have an expectation of privacy in messaging services that is demonstratively not true here. They either think warrants aren’t possible because of some of the noise around different end-to-end encrypted systems, they don’t think a warrant will be issued for cases like this, or they aren’t really thinking about it at all.
- kragen 4y ago
  If they'd had this conversation over Freenode, Signal, Pond, WhatsApp, or maybe even Matrix or Telegram, probably nobody except the mother and daughter would have a copy of their private messages. Because they used Facebook Messenger instead, Facebook was in a position to provide the private chat to the police. Facebook Messenger is no different in this way from Slack, Discord, or numerous other insecure chat systems. It's unfortunate that Vice didn't bother to mention this.
kragen 4y ago
To repeat my comment on the earlier now-buried post: 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! This does not entail that obeying the law is always immoral, or even that breaking it is always moral. You can come to the conclusion that it is okay for companies to break some laws but not others 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, and also because the court order may not inform Facebook what the case is about. 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 Celeste Burgess, the Nebraska teenager, nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case. (originally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32402302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32402302, edited a bit)
- lmm 4y ago
  > 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! I like living in a country where it's illegal to kill babies on a whim, thank you very much. So no, while you might disagree with this law, it's not at all "clear". > 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 Celeste Burgess, the Nebraska teenager, nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case. Facebook employees who refused to comply with a warrant would absolutely be thrown in jail once they ran out of lawyers and money (admittedly a process that would probably take years). Just look at the ProtonMail guy.
cato_the_elder 4y ago
This is a duplicate with significant discussion in the previous submission, from an outlet with a similar slant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32401381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32401381
- kragen 4y ago
  I don't think the other submission included the actual chat transcript.
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
331c8c71 4y ago
It's all incredibly sad: the abortion itself, the decision to do it (which could've been avoided in a better society), the ruined lives or at least the psychological burden, the naiveté of using f-ing facebook, the compliance of the meta. Sad, just sad, and a reminder that the technogical "innovation" (praised so highly here) is (oftetimes) much less about transforming the society and human lives for the better than it might appear from the hyped-up kool-aid spread generously to/by the tech crowd and the general populace.
ta8645 4y ago
This gives a different reason why "They're a private company, they can implement any policies they want", is a horrible argument. Even for the cases where you happen to agree with the outcome. We need to regulate these large, ubiquitous platforms as we would the town square or any other public infrastructure.
- washbrain 4y ago
  Ok, I'll bite, how would making them a "town square" have helped the defendent here?
- kragen 4y ago
  We did, that's the problem! Facebook didn't send the messages to the police because they thought the issue needed attention; they sent the messages to the police because a court order threatened them with contempt of court if they didn't.
causality0 4y ago
abigail95 4y ago
So much fuss about privacy, data collection, facebook, and police. The real issue here is someone tried to abort a 28 week old fetus? Only Americans find this acceptable. It's a fringe and extreme position in all of the developed world to abort a viable fetus on-demand. I continue to be shocked at the permissiveness of American abortion law. I hope this ends in conviction of those responsible.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

91 points by gok 4y ago

>In this case, Burgess was 28 weeks pregnant, which is later in pregnancy than mifepristone and misoprostol are recommended for use. 28 weeks is, of course, 7 months. Third trimester elective abortion is illegal in the UK, Spain, France, Germany...

MilnerRoute 4y ago
I'm still really surprised. Surprised that a prosecution happened for a 17-year-old girl. And that Facebook gave that 17-year-old girl's private messages to the police to facilitate that prosecution.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mlyle 4y ago
  > Surprised that a prosecution happened for a 17-year-old girl. Yes, this is a total waste. Is this making the world a better place? > And that Facebook gave that 17-year-old girl's private messages to the police to facilitate that prosecution. I'm not surprised that Facebook complied with a lawfully issued search warrant.
  - washbrain 4y ago
    The US justice system isn't about reformation or improving the country. It's a system designed to mete out punishment and revenge. It is both deeply tragic and entirely typical that a case like this is progressing in the US.
- gambiting 4y ago
  I disagree with the entire idea of prosecution here, I think it's wrong, but I think we should recognize that Facebook was served with a lawful warrant for data here - surely we want facebook to obey the law in the countries they operate, and if a warrant is presented they should comply?
  - iepathos 4y ago
    Yes, Facebook had to comply and because Facebook doesn't implement end-to-end encryption so that they can data mine their users' chat they had to provide the details. They could alternatively implement end-to-end encryption to protect themselves and their users from these warrants. Something like Signal where the service doesn't know what the messages are that are being sent between users so warrants for seizing that data have no impact on the users' privacy.
    - selwynii 4y ago
      Yes, and E2EE was rolled out in 2016 to Messenger, and then was planned to be the default until regulators and NCMEC started screaming about CSAM, and rightly so. It's lose lose. https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904650/meta-facebook-messenger-end-to-end-encryption-chat-video-call https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904650/meta-facebook-me...
    - ahahahahah 4y ago
      > Facebook doesn't implement end-to-end encryption This is, literally, a lie. Both messenger and WhatsApp have e2ee implemented.
      - JetSpiegel 4y ago
        Maybe. Have you checked the new Web Whatsapp, it can work without your phone being on. So this is not clear cut now.
mlyle 4y ago
Weeks is a reasonable metric; it's what's used in those laws in Europe, too. Note that there's a ~2 week difference in the week metric between the way we talk about pregnancy (weeks since LMP) and the way these laws are generally written (weeks since conception).
Someone 4y ago
I don’t think using weeks was anything other than following regular practice. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy: “Childbirth typically occurs around 40 weeks from the start of the last menstrual period (LMP), a span known as the gestational age. This is just over nine months. Counting by fertilization age, the length is about 38 weeks.” I think that’s because months vary in length, making it relatively hard for people to count with them. Example: 28 weeks isn’t 7 months, it is slightly less than 6½ average months (6 months is a tiny bit over 26 weeks, and two weeks under half an average month)
MilnerRoute 4y ago
Interestingly, Motherboard says 28-week abortions are perfectly legal -- in about half of America. But Nebraska moved the line between legal and illegal by eight weeks, to 20 weeks. (For what it's worth, this all happened before the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, so that's the issue here: the state's own stricter 20-week deadline.) The 17-year-old will be tried as an adult, on a felony and two misdemeanor charges. Motherboard adds: "Facebook and other tech platforms have previously declined to say whether they would give law enforcement data that relates to abortion cases. This case shows that Facebook, at least, will and already has."
rcoveson 4y ago
The overwhelming majority of babies delivered in a hostpital at 28 weeks survive. It would have had a < 50% chance of lasting complications. I actually had a cousin born recently who was more premature than this. It's tragic to think of the circumstances that drove somebody to this, but you could say that about any act of violence.
guelo 4y ago
Why is the European angle suddenly in every abortion discussion? I'm fascinated by how these kind of talking points emerge and then are suddenly everywhere, must be some kind of influencer coordination. (I'll probably get down voted for this because whenever I bring this kind of thing up people seem to get personally offended. Even though it's not your talking point, you picked up somewhere recently)
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  Because it's incredibly annoying to hear Europeans to complain about the oppression of US abortion laws which are actually more permissive than the ones in their own country.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    The oppression in the US appears to be on the procedural side of things rather than the laws themselves. The impression I often get is that in the US the enforcement of such laws is rather more capricious and hard to predict than in Europe. I think what most Europeans find difficult to understand is quite how partisan the US system is and how little support is available for those caught up in legal difficulties of this kind. Just my impression of course, but impression seems to be what a lot of it is about.
- botverse 4y ago
  Because in Europe there are a lot of civilised countries with freedoms to aspire to.
  - thereare5lights 4y ago
    This doesn't answer the question. Why should we care what the European standard for abortion is? Whether or not they have other freedoms that we don't have is irrelevant.
    - drpyser22 4y ago
      Irrelevant to you maybe? Looking at others for reference and comparison is standard practice. Also, i assume this hackernews community involves a number of European people.

joenot443 4y ago

This is an incredibly sad story all around. The saddest part, to me, was that for whatever reason they chose to wait rather than legally ending the pregnancy much earlier. The fetus aborted was 28 weeks, or 7 months, and almost certainly viable.

washbrain 4y ago
The saddest part to me is that two women are going to face prison time, effectively ruining their lives. Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Who could say. I can say for sure that two humans are experiencing something truly, truly awful and may be forced into enduring the awfulness for years to come.
- sp527 4y ago
  > Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Can someone ELI5 why this is the standard? Shouldn't it be something more reasonable like "has a relatively developed brain", "can experience pain", "shows early signs of consciousness", "has major organs", "is a recognizably bipedal/human lifeform", etc? Every cutoff I've encountered seems to be entirely subjective and like it reduces down to "whatever I find politically expedient". The very cynical side of me feels like the standard typically used was meant to buy as much time as possible for an abortion and not because it was grounded in anything scientific or morally conscionable.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    Because all of these other than the last one describe living cows which most people think it's ethical to kill and eat?
  - washbrain 4y ago
    For me, personally, I believe that human pregnancy is unusual. Most mammalian mothers can self terminate pregnancy if desired, by cutting off the flow of resources to their fetus. Humans are somewhat unique in that they can't. Our fetuses are parasitic, and attempt to force the mother to carry them to term through endocrinological trucks. Except... We can now disrupt that parasitism and join every other mammalian species in giving mothers the authority over whether their bodies supply resources to a developing clump of cells within them. We choose, however, in some parts of the world to not give women control of the resources in their body and instead tell them, "this fetus could become a human, so you are required to use your resources to make it so." Until the fetus is viable on its own, it's literally in a parasitic relationship with the mother. It might have human-like traits, but until it's capable of surviving outside of that parasitic relationship, I'm inclined to give the mother the authority to say whether they want to play host.

belval 4y ago

I'll preface this by saying that I am pro-choice, but 28 weeks is late, very late. > Survival rates for infants born at 28 weeks gestation is between 80-90 percent. Babies born at 28 weeks old only have a 10 percent chance of having long-term health problems.

mattnewton 4y ago
It doesn’t make the way the case was prosecuted any less dystopian really. Just all-around awful. The real question was why they (the defendants) felt they had to do it the way they did and couldn’t involve a medical professional.
washbrain 4y ago
You don't know the circumstances, though. I can imagine dozens of scenarios where someone would be forced or feel forced to wait this long, or experience a change in their life that makes them rethink carrying the fetus to term. The victims here are the two people who are standing trial, and no amount of, "Welllllll buuuuut, it was pretty late... soooo..." changes the fact that two women will needlessly have their lives and reputations destroyed.
- rcoveson 4y ago
  But if the same entity had been located outside the woman when it was killed, then it would be another victim, right? What detail about it being in utero makes it an ethical non-entity? The shared blood supply? The fact that it doesn't breath air? 28 weeks isn't even considered a "previably delivery". At that mark it's just called premature. In your ethical system, when does it gain the ability to be a victim?
- Someone 4y ago
  IMO, the aborted child is the main victim. In all likelihood, it was healthier than the average child born at 28 weeks, and most of those survive. Yes, there may be mitigating circumstances, and that should affect the severity of any punishment, but from the info I read here, it looks looks highly likely (1) these women are guilty, and because of that it IMO is good that the government tried to find out whether they were. (1) one way they wouldn’t be guilty is if they neither knew nor suspected she was pregnant for over 20 weeks.

samfisher83 4y ago

It was court ordered. Facebook didn't just give this information voluntarily to police.

washbrain 4y ago
My understanding is that a court order is not an immediate, absolute command with zero recourse or ability to have one's lawyers respond? Surely Facebook could have done something, even if it wasn't ultimately successful?
- creato 4y ago
  I fully believe abortion should be reasonably legal, and if it were more accessible it may have prevented a lot of the tragedy of this case. But given the details in this article, it seems like this case would be criminal even in that hypothetical world.
  - 988747 4y ago
    The keyword here is “reasonably”. What I hate the most is “lifestyle abortion” when a woman says she’s not ready for a baby, but at the same time treats sex like a cheap entertainment, fucking her way through dozens of guys.
    - washbrain 4y ago
      Sex is cheap entertainment, and should be. It feels good, it's your body, why should anyone have any judgements about how you use it. Let me fuck the men and women and non binary pals I want, it doesn't affect you. One should be able to have sex separate from concerns about having to carry a fetus to term.
- nickff 4y ago
  There are many things that might have been done; if the warrant should not have been served, the best person to challenge it would probably be the defendant (or their counsel). They would likely challenge the admissibility of the evidence. I am not sure what grounds Facebook would have to challenge this warrant, unless it would be improper for them to provide private communications for some reason.

newfonewhodis 4y ago

Some points that folks on this thread are missing: 1. This is not a story about when a pregnancy can/should be terminated. 2. The person in this story is a child - 17 years old. Many times, what seems like normal weight gain ends up being a pregnancy. This is especially true for younger/skinnier folks. 3. Remove the hot-button issue - abortion - from this story and consider the implications. Two people were having what they thought was a private conversation. HN crowd is not representative of the real world where FB/Messenger is essential AND where people don't understand privacy (and social) implications of using FB.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
> Two people were having what they thought was a private conversation. They can now be the poster girl(s) for two causes: "more abortion" and "facebook isn't private".
abigail95 4y ago
At the risk of being extremely inflammatory, Plenty of criminals think they are having a private conversation, when in fact, the government is listening in. What they did was a crime in Nebraska. It has been a crime in Nebraska for decades (centuries?). The government used due process to get a subpoeona for information to investigate a crime. Yes, the wounded parties here will feel like their privacy was violated, but from the information we have in the article, it seems justified. The privacy and social implications have been the same for decades: your communications can be intercepted or retrieved by law enforcement, so if there is probable cause that you committed a crime, someone might go looking.

whywhywhydude 4y ago

Why vice is highlighting Facebook is beyond me. If a judge gives you a warrant, aren’t you forced to provide the data? Otherwise, don’t you face contempt of court charges and possibly get jailed?

mattnewton 4y ago
I think because a lot of people have an expectation of privacy in messaging services that is demonstratively not true here. They either think warrants aren’t possible because of some of the noise around different end-to-end encrypted systems, they don’t think a warrant will be issued for cases like this, or they aren’t really thinking about it at all.
kragen 4y ago
If they'd had this conversation over Freenode, Signal, Pond, WhatsApp, or maybe even Matrix or Telegram, probably nobody except the mother and daughter would have a copy of their private messages. Because they used Facebook Messenger instead, Facebook was in a position to provide the private chat to the police. Facebook Messenger is no different in this way from Slack, Discord, or numerous other insecure chat systems. It's unfortunate that Vice didn't bother to mention this.

kragen 4y ago

To repeat my comment on the earlier now-buried post: 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! This does not entail that obeying the law is always immoral, or even that breaking it is always moral. You can come to the conclusion that it is okay for companies to break some laws but not others 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, and also because the court order may not inform Facebook what the case is about. 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 Celeste Burgess, the Nebraska teenager, nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case. (originally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32402302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32402302, edited a bit)

lmm 4y ago
> 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! I like living in a country where it's illegal to kill babies on a whim, thank you very much. So no, while you might disagree with this law, it's not at all "clear". > 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 Celeste Burgess, the Nebraska teenager, nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case. Facebook employees who refused to comply with a warrant would absolutely be thrown in jail once they ran out of lawyers and money (admittedly a process that would probably take years). Just look at the ProtonMail guy.

cato_the_elder 4y ago

This is a duplicate with significant discussion in the previous submission, from an outlet with a similar slant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32401381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32401381

kragen 4y ago
I don't think the other submission included the actual chat transcript.

machina_ex_deus 4y ago

331c8c71 4y ago

It's all incredibly sad: the abortion itself, the decision to do it (which could've been avoided in a better society), the ruined lives or at least the psychological burden, the naiveté of using f-ing facebook, the compliance of the meta. Sad, just sad, and a reminder that the technogical "innovation" (praised so highly here) is (oftetimes) much less about transforming the society and human lives for the better than it might appear from the hyped-up kool-aid spread generously to/by the tech crowd and the general populace.

ta8645 4y ago

This gives a different reason why "They're a private company, they can implement any policies they want", is a horrible argument. Even for the cases where you happen to agree with the outcome. We need to regulate these large, ubiquitous platforms as we would the town square or any other public infrastructure.

washbrain 4y ago
Ok, I'll bite, how would making them a "town square" have helped the defendent here?
kragen 4y ago
We did, that's the problem! Facebook didn't send the messages to the police because they thought the issue needed attention; they sent the messages to the police because a court order threatened them with contempt of court if they didn't.

causality0 4y ago

abigail95 4y ago

So much fuss about privacy, data collection, facebook, and police. The real issue here is someone tried to abort a 28 week old fetus? Only Americans find this acceptable. It's a fringe and extreme position in all of the developed world to abort a viable fetus on-demand. I continue to be shocked at the permissiveness of American abortion law. I hope this ends in conviction of those responsible.

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