cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
Just as an FYI, since it seems like a lot of folks are just reading the headline and not reading the article:
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This article was written almost one year ago, so this is not a new development.
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This alleged offense occurred before any changes to local abortion laws (Nebraska in this case) were made, meaning this is an incident that would have still been illegal under Roe.
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Meta was served a legal subpoena requiring them to turn over all the data they had. Whether that data should have been E2E encrypted is another debate entirely, but they didn’t voluntarily disclose anything.
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The charges were pressed as felonies, meaning that they were considered illegal at the federal level, and so state jurisdiction did not matter for the purposes of this subpoena. -
Even under California’s current sanctuary status (where Meta is headquartered) which protects out-of-state individuals seeking abortions, this was a late-term abortion at 28 weeks, which is still illegal under Californian law.
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To contextualize that for our friends in Europe, this would have been illegal in every EU country, too (short of it being needed as a life-saving intervention, as in most of the US), so this is not a US-exclusive problem.
While this is a mostly great post, I’d point out one error:
The charges were pressed as felonies, meaning that they were considered illegal at the federal level
Felonies exist at both the Federal and State level. Just because something is a felony, does not mean it moves to Federal jurisdiction. And this case appears to have been filed in the Madison County District Court which is part of the Nebraska Judicial Branch. The cases themselves can be found on the District Court’s Calendar though you have to put the details in yourself. The cases IDs are CR220000175 and CR220000132 against the woman and her mother respectively. Getting the court documents themselves appears to require paying a fee to do the search and I don’t care enough about a random comment on the internet to pay for it.
There seems to be one document uploaded here which shows the charges against the woman. And this shows the sections of Nebraska State law under which the woman is being charged. Of the three charges, only the first is a felony. Specifically it’s a Class IV felony under Section 28-1301 of Nebraska State Law. And that law concerns moving buried human remains. The other two charges are misdemeanors for concealing the death of another person and lying to a peace officer.
tl;dr - Felonies exist at both the State and Federal level and jurisdiction is dependent on which laws (State or Federal) are at issue.
Thanks, that was a gap in my knowledge. I’ve edited my post to redact that element.
I had meant to do that much earlier today when I first saw your comment, but the fallout from our instance’s recent oopsie appeared to have been preventing me from editing/writing comments. Hope late is better than never.
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How’s that end-to-end encryption working out?
Doesn’t matter if the company doing the e2e can get your messages.
That sounds more like e2e2e!
I’m pretty sure self-aborting and burying a stillborn baby is against the law regardless of the status of Roe.
This is 100% true, but also this is less of a Facebook bad issue and more of a state law issue.
Facebook was subpoenaed to provide this info, they didn’t willingly hand it over. I’d be interested to see how many lemmings here jumping down the meta bad rabbithole would have the stones to ignore a subpoena lmao.
Why would I compare myself to a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Someone somewhere along the chain of command would have to give the order to ignore the subpoena. That person would presumably be held responsible as an individual, just like you or me.
They could get contempt of court charges and spend time in jail, pretty much arbitrarily long - as long as judge feels
What? You think individuals in corporations are held accountable in the US?
It happens occasionally although you are more or less correct. My state’s old governor was the CEO of a company that committed at the time the largest healthcare fraud in US history.
Instead of going to jail he became the governor.
So ya I see your point. I would still of course be hesitant to push my luck and ignore a subpoena. Pushed hard enough, they will get ya. Look at how Epstein was eventually out in jail.
I suppose mainly it’s about money and power. It’s rare for someone really wealthy to suffer serious consequences. Before Epstein went to prison, he got a ridiculous deal from the guy who was later Trump’s Sec of Labor, Acosta, where he had to report to prison each night but was out for 12 hours a day or something… since, you know, his work is so important because he was wealthy.
I’m not sure about individuals, but a company can be sanctioned in various ways for ignoring a subpoena… usually something like being prohibited to operate in a state, or being dissolved. Fairly unlikely that would happen to a company the size of facebook. I guess I’m not sure whether a subpoena like the one in the article is addressed to a corporation in general, a department of the company, or an individual?
Well it could have been end to end encrypted leaving no way to turn anything over. It’s like turning over someones mail after it has been delivered because you made a copy of everything that came through.
Or, and I know Meta would find this absurd, but maybe don’t collect that data to begin with?!
How… do you think messaging platforms work?
For all of those saying Facebook was just complying with the law- there is absolutely no reason for Facebook to have access to its users’ private information. The company I work for can’t do anything with a customer’s account unless they give us the password. We can’t see anything they have saved there. All of the private stuff they have is private and even if a court ordered us to show it to them, we literally couldn’t comply.
We’re a small company and we can do it. A company the size of Meta can certainly do it.
Can’t you just look at the data in. The database though? No need to login as the user. Surely not every field is hashed
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That’s a good point and I don’t know the answer to that (my guess is encryption is involved), but as other people have pointed out, Facebook has an alternate encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, so Facebook is clearly capable of not being able to access its users’ messages.
Yeah, based on Signal’s protocol. Signal is the only messaging app I use.
You are the product. Are you paying money for the service? No? Zero expectation of privacy.
You can do it because you’re a small company. Get enough attention, and the FBI will force you to decrypt on demand. They’ve done it before and the supreme court backed them up. Do it over seas and expect your US traffic to get blocked, if they don’t raid your offices.
E2EE is what prevents this, which is why the TLAs hate it and legislators are trying to prohibit it.
WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram don’t have that issue.
Signal yes, WhatsApp yes but not the meta data, telegram only if explicitly set to encrypted otherwise no.
Because they have a back door due to cloud storage.
That is untrue. The FBI tried to get Apple to decrypt a shooter’s iPhone in Florida a few years back and they wouldn’t budge.
This isn’t quite right…
Apple didn’t have the means to decrypt the information, but it was within their ability to do (by writing code to do so.)
But asking a company for the unencrypted data, and forcing a company to produce a new application, are completely different things.
Apple didn’t have the means to decrypt the information, but it was within their ability to do (by writing code to do so.)
Happen to have a source for that? That’s nigh impossible for most encryption
I don’t particularly like Facebook but…
If a country makes it legal to criminally prosecute girls who seek an abortion, and the same country makes it legal to allow police enforcement to demand tech companies to handover their data, maybe the problem is the country and its laws, more than Facebook.
Both can be wrong. The law can be bad and the people under orders (as if one of the worlds biggest corporation can be ordered to do anything by a small town judge) can also be bad.
It’s complicated. Yes, the country is going to shit, but it is also due to meta’s “Big brother-like” data collection in the name of profit margins.
As mentioned in the article, Facebook could remove itself from this problem by not collecting data that could possibly incriminate people. The reason why they were able to hand over the data is because they were collecting their private messages.
You’re not wrong, but Facebook made no effort to fight the issue and simply handed over data they never should have.
I really don’t blame Facebook for not jumping into the abortion debate and martyring themselves. If people don’t like the abortion law, or the law that compels facebook to give this information to law enforcement, they need to make that known by voting for representatives that feel the same. Facebook taking a fat lawsuit to the face isn’t what’s going to change things there - it’s women realizing it could happen to them, it’s men realizing it could happen to their wife/girlfriend/daughter.
they need to make that known by voting for representativea that feel the same
Be nice if it was that simple, but the democratic system itself is broken. We have presidents that come in power while losing the popular vote. We have states that gerrymander their districts to reduce the value of certain demographic’s vote. We have supreme court justices with life terms that are interpretting laws with political bias. Unfortunately, it is getting less and less likely that America is going to improve by working within it’s systems because the system is clearly stacked against us.
Why should they make an effort to break the laws of countries they do business in? If they don’t like the laws, they shouldn’t do business there.
Welp! So much for using facebook
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Don’t ever admit to anything illegal online. Never.
Here is a interesting statistics problem:
Let’s say 50% of your state wants abortion to be legal. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/state/nebraska/views-about-abortion/
Lets say 10% wants it legal, but will vote to convict someone that committed an abortion. So, 40% will vote to acquit since they don’t see it as a crime. Lets say that of the remaining, 10% of those with obvious views of jury nullification will be kept off of the jury by the prosecution.
Twelve people. Each person will vote to convict 70% of the time and 30% will never vote to convict. What is the chance of a conviction? 70%, right? No, in civil trials you need a majority and in criminal trials you need a unanimous vote. So to get all 12, you will have a (0.7)^12 = 1.3% chance of conviction. Lets say the jury pool reflected Nebraska, 0.5^12= 0.02%. What about if only 10% would vote to block? 0.9^12=28%. Remember, ~10% believe the moon landings were faked. You can get 10% to basically believe anything. Even with the worst case scenario, you have under a 1 in 3 chance of being convicted.
That is why all post-roe laws target doctors and not (directly) women. Much easier to remove someones medical license then to get an abortion conviction.
This the same company that owns WhatsApp and is so dead against unencrypting messages on that platform? 🤔
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What a rotten way to die.
The two women told detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division that they’d discussed the matter on Facebook Messenger, which prompted the state to issue Meta with a search warrant for their chat history and data including log-in timestamps and photos.
Also don’t talk about crimes you commit via any messaging app ever.
Isn’t this just “Facebook complied with court order”? I dislike their data hoarding like everyone else, but I also think Facebook doesn’t get to decide to ignore court orders.
Yeah, there are plenty of things to be outraged with post Dobbs but this isn’t one; Lemmy really just seems to be in a “let me show off that I’m more liberal than you” growing phase.
It was at 22 weeks beyond most states pre-Dobbs limit (and all but 2 places in Europe), her mother illegally procured and provided abortion pills without medical consultation or supervision and then they tried to burn and dispose of the stillborn fetus. Abortion is safe when done properly, this wasn’t done properly and the idiot mother legitimately put her daughter in danger. They also openly told police they planned it on messenger, in direct violation of “shut the fuck up friday” and did not use messengers “private” mode which would have rendered Meta unable to comply with the properly issued court order. The bottom line is this is the extremely rare case that gives any shred of credibility to the pro-life crowd and should be denounced by all.
“Company follows laws in the country it operates in.” More at 11.
