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Correcting the Record on Meta’s Involvement in Nebraska Case

57 points by eatonphil 4y ago

etchalon 4y ago
Was anyone mad at Facebook for responding to a valid warrant? Whether the warrant mentioned abortion or not is irrelevant. It was a warrant. They had to comply. However, this should be a fairly huge signal that Facebook needs to move to E2EE by default for Messenger.
PaulHoule 4y ago
You kinda don't want to be making press releases like that because all they do is reinforce the impression people got the first time.
- eatonphil 4y ago
  It also doesn't say very much. For an official statement I found it confusing. Maybe I'm not the audience.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    It's part of the "act like a chicken running around with its head cut off" antipattern. In many organizations there is a lot of pressure after a dramatic event to come out with a statement right away and this denies people the chance to deliberate about what the message should be. A big problem with Facebook's PR is that they reflexively deny that Facebook has any negative effects, that they had responsibility for anything, that anything is their fault, etc. It's a major reason why people think they are out of touch and why Zuckerberg has such low favorables. You're better off keeping your mouth shut and letting people think you don't give a f--k as opposed to writing a press release like that and proving it. They've been outmaneuvered for one thing because even before the supreme court struck down Roe there has been a drumbeat about the risks that people could have social media and other digital communications used against them in an abortion case and those people have been waiting for a real case to turn up.
  - natch 4y ago
    Maybe confusion was the intent. If not, they need to hire better writers.
- 3np 4y ago
  I for one think this was a very well-executed PR, with the caveat that I lack context as I am not aware of the referred reporting and still am. As someone without preconceptions to set straight, I can look up the backstory to fill in the blanks elsewhere should I be so inclined. It's concise and to the point, mostly factual with a twist of putting in their understanding and framing. No fluff.
  - cptcobalt 4y ago
    I agree. "Crisis PR" is a different animal from normal PR.
djbusby 4y ago
They say they are correcting the record but their statement matches with what I've read in the news and saw on Reddit. Nothing new.
- fzfaa 4y ago
  The problem is not what people read, but what they do not read - journalists have an axe to grind against Facebook, so they write titles that make it sound like Facebook willingly gave the data to the police, and most people don't go beyond reading the title.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Whether you think Facebook is right or not, this story gives pause about what kind of information you share online. It's one more reason to participate less or not participate at all in these services.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    What makes you say journalists have an axe to grind against Facebook? If anything, I think they spent more than a decade being too generous to Facebook, and even now are overly credulous a lot of the time.
    - ninth_ant 4y ago
      Facebook was a media darling until they became profitable and ate the media’s lunch. When it became clear that FB would swallow a large chunk of online ad dollars that the media companies coveted, their attitude changed rather suddenly.
  - Miraste 4y ago
    They did willingly give the data to the police. Compare Apple v. FBI. "But the iPhone was encrypted" - nothing is stopping Facebook from encrypting Messenger.
beeboop 4y ago
My biggest take-away and concern from this is that non-disclosures can be part of warrants. What? I thought this was unique to national security letters.
- throwawaymanbot 4y ago
- branon 4y ago
  Guess not. This must be why some organizations maintain warrant canaries. Of course Meta probably receives enough search warrants to make a canary useless, but it begs the question: if they had one, how many times per day would it need updated?
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    s/begs/raises/
    - 93po 4y ago
      I've long given up on this fight - it seems to be that it's acceptable to say "begs the question" as long as it's followed up with the question that it's "begging". I think using "begs the question" without the follow-up question is still problematic though when they're not referring to the fallacy that "begs the question" originally meant.
      - denton-scratch 4y ago
        I apologise for shaking that hornet's nest. It's just that there's a right way of saying that something raises a question; it doesn't involve the use of the word "beg". If you want to really say that something "begs the question", then you could say what the question is supposed to be. For "begging the question", the question is one or other of the propositions in an argument, and "begging" it means assuming it's truth or falsehood. I find it pretentious to use terms like "beg the question" incorrectly. Instead of using these erudite-sounding formulations, one could just say what one means. Apart from anything else, I think simple, straight talk is more convincing. Especially if your audience might include people for whom English is a second language.
infamouscow 4y ago
Does Meta release data on how many warrants they do and do not comply with?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
natch 4y ago
This clarification is either very poorly written, or very duplicitous. They say what court documents in part indicate, but give no clarity on whether that portion of the court documents were, or were not, part of what was under the secrecy order, nor do they reveal whether or not they had access to those portions of the documents at the time. The entire statement seems designed to confuse the issue. Laying that aside, are they saying that they will not turn over user data when they know the request for data relates to a person being prosecuted for seeking or helping with an abortion? I don’t think they are saying that, but they are trying to get good will as if they would fight such a request, even though they wouldn’t.
Moeancurly 4y ago
Is there a good (for the end user) reason that Messenger does not have E2EE enabled by default? From The Verge's article[1]: > However, campaigners note that Meta always has to comply with legal requests for data, and that the company can only change this if it stops collecting that data in the first place. In the case of Celeste and Jessica Burgess, this would have meant making end-to-end encryption (E2EE) the default in Facebook Messenger. This would have meant that police would have had to gain access to the pair’s phones directly to read their chats. (E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.) [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/10/23299502/facebook-chat-messenger-history-nebraska-teen-abortion-case https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/10/23299502/facebook-chat-me...
- tomuli38 4y ago
  If you think it is a good thing to obey the state's abortion laws, then yes it is a good for violating messages to be reported to law enforcement. The question I think you meant to ask if it is a good thing for companies to obey the state.
  - jakelazaroff 4y ago
    No, the question is whether Facebook should have access to those messages at all.
    - tomuli38 4y ago
      I am at a loss for words if people expect Facebook of all companies to not access the data on their platform. Of course they will access the data on their platform. Texts and apps like Signal are a different story.
      - fknorangesite 4y ago
        > Texts and apps like Signal are a different story. In what way are they "a different story" from Messenger?
superkuh 4y ago
So they both played along and now they're saying that they will be forced to play along every single time and there's no way to stop it. This is even worse then them being knowingly complicit.
- crayboff 4y ago
  They are forced to comply with legal warrants. They can try to fight some things, but if the warrant doesn't even mention everything (like abortion suspicions) then what do you expect? Though I would say, they appear to be choosing to not use end to end encryption. I don't know if that's due to technical limitations or because they don't want to, but I imagine they could figure something out if they wanted to.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    I don't expect anything. I'm merely stating how things are. Unless it effects Facebook's income I don't expect the situation to change. The solution is obvious. Individual humans should stop using corporate controlled communication services for personal, or private, communications. Corporations both cannot and will not protect you from authoritarian government abuses. I've been saying this since the early 2000s but like with most things, people will never care until it effects them personally.
crayboff 4y ago
I can believe that this particular case wasn't Meta being nefarious and trying to get specific people in trouble over a possible abortion. But I don't think that was ever the real concern here. The press release only enforces my concern about how easy it seems for governments to get private conversations between a mother and daughter. Also that apparently Facebook stores the conversations in plain (or easily decryptable) text.
- colpabar 4y ago
  > my concern about how easy it seems for governments to get private conversations between a mother and daughter. I struggle to understand how anyone can still think that facebook (and any other major social media platform) has any issue (moral, technical, or otherwise) with giving away any and all data from their systems, to anyone willing to pay enough or who can threaten them with fines. Why would they? Their business model is selling user data to advertisers. Do people really think they're just leaving money on the table and saying "well, that's private, people might not like that data being sold." They don't give a shit! I also struggle to understand how anyone can look at the current social media landscape, where seemingly everyone has accounts on multiple platforms and uses them to post/message about their personal lives, and not think the us government/law enforcement is involved somehow. Does anyone really think the microphones we all willingly put inside our homes that are controlled by one of the largest corporations in the entire world aren't readily available for intelligence agencies? I admit I am very cynical, but it's very difficult not to be. It feels like every month we hear about how some massive platform was actually lying about handling data that they totally promised they were keeping safe and private, which is followed up some new expansion of their ability to collect said data. But we all continue to give them the benefit of the doubt, and act surprised when things like this happen.
  - engineer_22 4y ago
    I think a lot of people are still pretty naive about it. Most people probably believe their messages are private. Dear kids: if it could embarrass you or get you in trouble, don't send it with a messaging app. Kind of like "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"... except it doesn't roll off the tongue.
typomatic 4y ago
So Facebook's point here is that their legal team is so utterly clownshoes that when receiving a warrant about burning a stillbirth they couldn't clue in that it might be about abortion. Their press release is designed to convince us that a local NE PD completely snowed this international corporate powerhouse.
- nimbius 4y ago
  a read the piece as a barking tantrum. that they, a company so magnanimously capable of eschewing everything from taxation to even cursory efforts at regulation could be tricked into delivering a very public, very negative publicity event by not a nation, but a middling state that generates less GDP than the annual revenue of meta. It also felt like a shot across the bow for Nebraska that a correction was mentioned at all, and so tersely as im sure legislators in the state of two million were expecting business as usual. either way this is a 117bn company that owns the eyes and ears of nearly the entire planet. piss in their cheerios and 'the algorythm' might make your next re-election a lost cause.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jmyeet 4y ago
I'm not sure what people are expecting from Facebook/Meta here. I mean they have to comply with legal warrants and the laws of the land. The only unanswered question here is could Facebook have fought this search warrant? We still don't know that. But would any other company have done anything different? The only thing you, as a user, can really do is use a messaging service that has end-to-end encryption so the company doesn't have that ability. But do they really not have that ability? It's harder to say. Signal? WhatsApp? Telegram?
barbazoo 4y ago
Great of FB to correct the record on this. I hope they correct the record on millions of instances of misinformation spread on their platform as well. They didn't seem too eager to do that in the past.
- draw_down 4y ago
harshitaneja 4y ago
Everyone talking about not having E2EE in messenger, am I missing something? How would one implement E2EE on a web application? How would the key sharing work on such a transient platform?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- aftbit 4y ago
  Well, there _is_ E2EE in messenger, it is just off by default. I am not sure how they manage key sharing, but likely in some way that would allow them to add another device to your session relatively transparently, which means that they could always bypass it in that way. Of course, they could also bypass it by shipping a targeted software update to force your app to resubmit all the messages unencrypted.
  - ahahahahah 4y ago
    And of course, all those ways to bypass e2ee are properties of e2ee itself (or of common features required for usable e2ee like being able to add devices), not properties of facebook or facebook's implementation. e2ee generally should not be considered to be protecting you from a malicious messaging service.
einpoklum 4y ago
This is the first I'm hearing about this case. Taking FB's text at face value, I would say: My comments: > We received valid legal warrants from local law enforcement ... investigating the alleged illegal burning and burial of a stillborn infant. Law enforcement should not be investigating this IMHO; and the availability of people's Facebook interactions record lets the police access additional information they would not otherwise have had in their misplaced investigation. > The warrants were accompanied by non-disclosure orders, which prevented us from sharing information about them. That's just dandy, the government will order large corporations to keep everything secret from you, and of course Facebook is a law-abiding corporation, so of course they will hide this from you. Secret investigations, constant mass surveillance used in secret investigations, extremely carcerally-minded legal system, and a trigger-happy police in case you somehow get the wrong idea about resisting anything. Verily, the USA is the land of the free.

57 points by eatonphil 4y ago

Was anyone mad at Facebook for responding to a valid warrant? Whether the warrant mentioned abortion or not is irrelevant. It was a warrant. They had to comply. However, this should be a fairly huge signal that Facebook needs to move to E2EE by default for Messenger.

PaulHoule 4y ago

You kinda don't want to be making press releases like that because all they do is reinforce the impression people got the first time.

eatonphil 4y ago
It also doesn't say very much. For an official statement I found it confusing. Maybe I'm not the audience.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  It's part of the "act like a chicken running around with its head cut off" antipattern. In many organizations there is a lot of pressure after a dramatic event to come out with a statement right away and this denies people the chance to deliberate about what the message should be. A big problem with Facebook's PR is that they reflexively deny that Facebook has any negative effects, that they had responsibility for anything, that anything is their fault, etc. It's a major reason why people think they are out of touch and why Zuckerberg has such low favorables. You're better off keeping your mouth shut and letting people think you don't give a f--k as opposed to writing a press release like that and proving it. They've been outmaneuvered for one thing because even before the supreme court struck down Roe there has been a drumbeat about the risks that people could have social media and other digital communications used against them in an abortion case and those people have been waiting for a real case to turn up.
- natch 4y ago
  Maybe confusion was the intent. If not, they need to hire better writers.
3np 4y ago
I for one think this was a very well-executed PR, with the caveat that I lack context as I am not aware of the referred reporting and still am. As someone without preconceptions to set straight, I can look up the backstory to fill in the blanks elsewhere should I be so inclined. It's concise and to the point, mostly factual with a twist of putting in their understanding and framing. No fluff.
- cptcobalt 4y ago
  I agree. "Crisis PR" is a different animal from normal PR.

djbusby 4y ago

They say they are correcting the record but their statement matches with what I've read in the news and saw on Reddit. Nothing new.

fzfaa 4y ago
The problem is not what people read, but what they do not read - journalists have an axe to grind against Facebook, so they write titles that make it sound like Facebook willingly gave the data to the police, and most people don't go beyond reading the title.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Whether you think Facebook is right or not, this story gives pause about what kind of information you share online. It's one more reason to participate less or not participate at all in these services.
- wpietri 4y ago
  What makes you say journalists have an axe to grind against Facebook? If anything, I think they spent more than a decade being too generous to Facebook, and even now are overly credulous a lot of the time.
  - ninth_ant 4y ago
    Facebook was a media darling until they became profitable and ate the media’s lunch. When it became clear that FB would swallow a large chunk of online ad dollars that the media companies coveted, their attitude changed rather suddenly.
- Miraste 4y ago
  They did willingly give the data to the police. Compare Apple v. FBI. "But the iPhone was encrypted" - nothing is stopping Facebook from encrypting Messenger.

beeboop 4y ago

My biggest take-away and concern from this is that non-disclosures can be part of warrants. What? I thought this was unique to national security letters.

throwawaymanbot 4y ago
branon 4y ago
Guess not. This must be why some organizations maintain warrant canaries. Of course Meta probably receives enough search warrants to make a canary useless, but it begs the question: if they had one, how many times per day would it need updated?
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  s/begs/raises/
  - 93po 4y ago
    I've long given up on this fight - it seems to be that it's acceptable to say "begs the question" as long as it's followed up with the question that it's "begging". I think using "begs the question" without the follow-up question is still problematic though when they're not referring to the fallacy that "begs the question" originally meant.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      I apologise for shaking that hornet's nest. It's just that there's a right way of saying that something raises a question; it doesn't involve the use of the word "beg". If you want to really say that something "begs the question", then you could say what the question is supposed to be. For "begging the question", the question is one or other of the propositions in an argument, and "begging" it means assuming it's truth or falsehood. I find it pretentious to use terms like "beg the question" incorrectly. Instead of using these erudite-sounding formulations, one could just say what one means. Apart from anything else, I think simple, straight talk is more convincing. Especially if your audience might include people for whom English is a second language.

infamouscow 4y ago

Does Meta release data on how many warrants they do and do not comply with?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

natch 4y ago

This clarification is either very poorly written, or very duplicitous. They say what court documents in part indicate, but give no clarity on whether that portion of the court documents were, or were not, part of what was under the secrecy order, nor do they reveal whether or not they had access to those portions of the documents at the time. The entire statement seems designed to confuse the issue. Laying that aside, are they saying that they will not turn over user data when they know the request for data relates to a person being prosecuted for seeking or helping with an abortion? I don’t think they are saying that, but they are trying to get good will as if they would fight such a request, even though they wouldn’t.

Moeancurly 4y ago

Is there a good (for the end user) reason that Messenger does not have E2EE enabled by default? From The Verge's article[1]: > However, campaigners note that Meta always has to comply with legal requests for data, and that the company can only change this if it stops collecting that data in the first place. In the case of Celeste and Jessica Burgess, this would have meant making end-to-end encryption (E2EE) the default in Facebook Messenger. This would have meant that police would have had to gain access to the pair’s phones directly to read their chats. (E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.) [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/10/23299502/facebook-chat-messenger-history-nebraska-teen-abortion-case https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/10/23299502/facebook-chat-me...

tomuli38 4y ago
If you think it is a good thing to obey the state's abortion laws, then yes it is a good for violating messages to be reported to law enforcement. The question I think you meant to ask if it is a good thing for companies to obey the state.
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  No, the question is whether Facebook should have access to those messages at all.
  - tomuli38 4y ago
    I am at a loss for words if people expect Facebook of all companies to not access the data on their platform. Of course they will access the data on their platform. Texts and apps like Signal are a different story.
    - fknorangesite 4y ago
      > Texts and apps like Signal are a different story. In what way are they "a different story" from Messenger?

superkuh 4y ago

So they both played along and now they're saying that they will be forced to play along every single time and there's no way to stop it. This is even worse then them being knowingly complicit.

crayboff 4y ago
They are forced to comply with legal warrants. They can try to fight some things, but if the warrant doesn't even mention everything (like abortion suspicions) then what do you expect? Though I would say, they appear to be choosing to not use end to end encryption. I don't know if that's due to technical limitations or because they don't want to, but I imagine they could figure something out if they wanted to.
- superkuh 4y ago
  I don't expect anything. I'm merely stating how things are. Unless it effects Facebook's income I don't expect the situation to change. The solution is obvious. Individual humans should stop using corporate controlled communication services for personal, or private, communications. Corporations both cannot and will not protect you from authoritarian government abuses. I've been saying this since the early 2000s but like with most things, people will never care until it effects them personally.

crayboff 4y ago

I can believe that this particular case wasn't Meta being nefarious and trying to get specific people in trouble over a possible abortion. But I don't think that was ever the real concern here. The press release only enforces my concern about how easy it seems for governments to get private conversations between a mother and daughter. Also that apparently Facebook stores the conversations in plain (or easily decryptable) text.

colpabar 4y ago
> my concern about how easy it seems for governments to get private conversations between a mother and daughter. I struggle to understand how anyone can still think that facebook (and any other major social media platform) has any issue (moral, technical, or otherwise) with giving away any and all data from their systems, to anyone willing to pay enough or who can threaten them with fines. Why would they? Their business model is selling user data to advertisers. Do people really think they're just leaving money on the table and saying "well, that's private, people might not like that data being sold." They don't give a shit! I also struggle to understand how anyone can look at the current social media landscape, where seemingly everyone has accounts on multiple platforms and uses them to post/message about their personal lives, and not think the us government/law enforcement is involved somehow. Does anyone really think the microphones we all willingly put inside our homes that are controlled by one of the largest corporations in the entire world aren't readily available for intelligence agencies? I admit I am very cynical, but it's very difficult not to be. It feels like every month we hear about how some massive platform was actually lying about handling data that they totally promised they were keeping safe and private, which is followed up some new expansion of their ability to collect said data. But we all continue to give them the benefit of the doubt, and act surprised when things like this happen.
- engineer_22 4y ago
  I think a lot of people are still pretty naive about it. Most people probably believe their messages are private. Dear kids: if it could embarrass you or get you in trouble, don't send it with a messaging app. Kind of like "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"... except it doesn't roll off the tongue.

typomatic 4y ago

So Facebook's point here is that their legal team is so utterly clownshoes that when receiving a warrant about burning a stillbirth they couldn't clue in that it might be about abortion. Their press release is designed to convince us that a local NE PD completely snowed this international corporate powerhouse.

nimbius 4y ago
a read the piece as a barking tantrum. that they, a company so magnanimously capable of eschewing everything from taxation to even cursory efforts at regulation could be tricked into delivering a very public, very negative publicity event by not a nation, but a middling state that generates less GDP than the annual revenue of meta. It also felt like a shot across the bow for Nebraska that a correction was mentioned at all, and so tersely as im sure legislators in the state of two million were expecting business as usual. either way this is a 117bn company that owns the eyes and ears of nearly the entire planet. piss in their cheerios and 'the algorythm' might make your next re-election a lost cause.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jmyeet 4y ago

I'm not sure what people are expecting from Facebook/Meta here. I mean they have to comply with legal warrants and the laws of the land. The only unanswered question here is could Facebook have fought this search warrant? We still don't know that. But would any other company have done anything different? The only thing you, as a user, can really do is use a messaging service that has end-to-end encryption so the company doesn't have that ability. But do they really not have that ability? It's harder to say. Signal? WhatsApp? Telegram?

barbazoo 4y ago

Great of FB to correct the record on this. I hope they correct the record on millions of instances of misinformation spread on their platform as well. They didn't seem too eager to do that in the past.

draw_down 4y ago

harshitaneja 4y ago

Everyone talking about not having E2EE in messenger, am I missing something? How would one implement E2EE on a web application? How would the key sharing work on such a transient platform?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
aftbit 4y ago
Well, there _is_ E2EE in messenger, it is just off by default. I am not sure how they manage key sharing, but likely in some way that would allow them to add another device to your session relatively transparently, which means that they could always bypass it in that way. Of course, they could also bypass it by shipping a targeted software update to force your app to resubmit all the messages unencrypted.
- ahahahahah 4y ago
  And of course, all those ways to bypass e2ee are properties of e2ee itself (or of common features required for usable e2ee like being able to add devices), not properties of facebook or facebook's implementation. e2ee generally should not be considered to be protecting you from a malicious messaging service.

einpoklum 4y ago

This is the first I'm hearing about this case. Taking FB's text at face value, I would say: My comments: > We received valid legal warrants from local law enforcement ... investigating the alleged illegal burning and burial of a stillborn infant. Law enforcement should not be investigating this IMHO; and the availability of people's Facebook interactions record lets the police access additional information they would not otherwise have had in their misplaced investigation. > The warrants were accompanied by non-disclosure orders, which prevented us from sharing information about them. That's just dandy, the government will order large corporations to keep everything secret from you, and of course Facebook is a law-abiding corporation, so of course they will hide this from you. Secret investigations, constant mass surveillance used in secret investigations, extremely carcerally-minded legal system, and a trigger-happy police in case you somehow get the wrong idea about resisting anything. Verily, the USA is the land of the free.