Facebook Gave Police Teenager's DMs in Abortion Prosecution
forbes.com
forbes.com
[1]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/hackers-gaining-power-of...
I'd be the first to line up to support some kind of action to change that, but at this point every large company is so closely intertwined with the State that it's a lost cause. Building out new systems that respect privacy and users is the action item here, not raging at Facebook for Facebooking.
While abortion is the hot topic, other religious purity tests will be coming, like if you have ever visited LGBQ topics. Get yourself out of the cloud. If you are minority likely to be targeted by American Christian Nationalists, do it sooner than later. Many states still have sodomy laws that haven't been just enforced.
Not sure I follow. In the case we are discussing here, Police had a warrant. Are there known cases of firms handing over personal communications without a warrant?
are they reviewed by humans? is it enough to upload a blank PDF? or there is simply a checkbox with the label "i have a warrant, sure, sure"?
because in practice it could be any of these. then if there is something in the data, then law enforcement gets a warrant after the fact. how would we know?
In my opinion we need to scrap any exemptions to state surveillance attempts. Authorities don't act responsibly here and it is very likely that former and current governments also leverage these mechanisms for political prosecution. To provide security classical investigations remain as a tool. Access to data is convenient, but protecting this data serves a higher purpose and provides security itself. The privacy <-> security dichotomy is bad propaganda and FUD.
That doesn't make a difference for me, and most likely for many other people who are against late-stage abortions too. Not all of us are globalists.
If you consider the concrete facts of this particular case [1] (instead of framing it as an abstract privacy or healthcare issue), I think you'd have some sympathy with people who don't find it acceptable.
[1]: https://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/nebraska/nor...
If a person is accused of a crime in Georgia, and the person had a safe deposit box in Maine, the Maine bank doesn't have to immediately give Georgia police their possessions.
But even if not, because Facebook has a physical presence in Nebraska, it is subject to Nebraska law.
Firstly, Facebook clearly operates in Nebraska, and is thus subject to its jurisdiction.
Incorporation (in Delaware) is for corporate covernance, not for dodging local laws.
Let’s focus on real problem: this poor kid needed to wait for 22 weeks. She was probably scared, intimidated, abused, and nobody was there to help. And sure Facebook is guilty here.
It's not just Facebook that's guilty of this.
EDIT: Here's the substantiation requested: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
First, no, it's not "everyone's iMessages". There has been a lot of very public discussion of this. If you don't back up your Messages to iCloud, which a lot of informed people don't do anymore, then Apple does not have that unencrypted copy.
Second, unless you have support that Apple did this "for the FBI", specifically for that reason, as opposed to it being a mix of reasons, and also involving user-support reasons, as has been widely reported, please stop repeating that unsupported claim.
And lastly, until Apple commits an offense of the nature under discussion here, let's not tar them with the same broad brush as we are justly using to tar Facebook.
This is false. Apple will still have the unencrypted copies (actually, the effectively-unencrypted sync keys, as "Messages in iCloud" cross-device sync keys are the thing at issue here) because the people you iMessage with will be providing them to Apple. iCloud Backup is on by default, so approximately everyone you talk to using iMessage is escrowing their private keys to Apple.
Turning off iCloud Backup on your device does not protect your iMessages, as the backdoor exists on the devices of both conversation participants.
It's sort of like switching email providers to get away from Gmail; if everyone you send or receive emails to/from is using Gmail, Google is still getting a copy of all of your correspondence.
> Second, unless you have support that Apple did this "for the FBI", specifically for that reason, as opposed to it being a mix of reasons, and also involving user-support reasons, as has been widely reported, please stop repeating that unsupported claim.
I updated the comment with the link to the Reuters article that says they did this specifically for the FBI.
From the article:
> More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee.
> Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order.
> In private talks with Apple soon after, representatives of the FBI’s cyber crime agents and its operational technology division objected to the plan, arguing it would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against iPhone-using suspects, the government sources said.
> When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to the six sources. Reuters could not determine why exactly Apple dropped the plan.
> “Legal killed it, for reasons you can imagine,” another former Apple employee said he was told, without any specific mention of why the plan was dropped or if the FBI was a factor in the decision.
This always confused me with all the E2EE hype.
This is why Signal's client codebases is open source. In principle, a qualified engineer can review it and confirm (to some degree of confidence) that Signal is not lying about its E2EE claims.
The next step is trusting the compiled version of the program. In the abstract, you have no reason to do this, except that you also have no reason to trust any third party (including random third-party-store builds). You don't have any particular reason to trust your own builds either, thanks to RoTT[1]. In practice this makes the official build the most trustworthy, since they're the only party that's actually officially claiming properties about the client in an official capacity (and therefore potentially liable if those claims are false).
The "formal" solution is maybe something like Binary Transparency[2], or verifiable builds. But the end-user ergonomics of those solutions are still being worked out.
[1]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
[2]: https://developers.google.com/android/binary_transparency
The RoTT thing isn't that relevant IMO; if we're under an RoTT-style attack, everything is off. But crucially, that's a different threat model; I can trust my compiler independently from Signal. I don't feel like I can trust Signal's client independently from Signal's server; either Signal as a whole is trustworthy, or they're not.
Now I agree that if we had some kind of verifiable or reproducible builds, E2EE would make sense. If anyone could download Signal's source code, build it, and verify that the binary is identical, we would have the "normal" FOSS defenses, where we could assume that some security researcher would do that now and then.
It's a fine point, but I'd argue that Signal's promises are still "worth more" than a competitor who merely promises to not log without any technical backing: the latter is a purely social promise, while the latter is a social promise rooted in a cryptographic claim that, with the right skills, you could verify.
The RoTT threat model (which I agree is extreme!) is really not that far off: when you download the official Signal app, you're trusting, modulo the integrity of the app store, that Signal has either backdoored everyone or nobody. In other words: they would need to deliver the weakness to all users, increasing the risk of discovery, or to none of them. Binary transparency makes that gamble riskier still, by forcing Signal (or the app store) to publish signatures for each build before clients accept them for installation.
Computers will never perfectly eliminate the latent social trust required when running someone else's code, which we all do even when we run any code at all (even our own). But Signal's current model is about as good as it gets for laypeople: you can verify the source, and the parts you can't verify require significant malicious investment and/or exposure risk. For the more (potentially rightfully?) paranoid among us, building from source and comparing the binaries is about as good as it gets for now.
How would one do that? Do you mean if you literally decompiled the binary and read through the machine code and built up a solid understanding of what everything does (and did this after every app update)? Or is there something more practical you're referring to?
> when you download the official Signal app, you're trusting, modulo the integrity of the app store, that Signal has either backdoored everyone or nobody
The way I imagine this attack working, Signal would have code in everyone's app which lets the server ask for DMs, but the server would only ask for DMs when there's a reason to do so (such as when a government requests it). That way, yes, everyone is backdoored, but there's no suspicious network traffic or anything which would give it away. I'd say Signal can be pretty confident that nobody will read through the machine code and make a solid enough mental model of how the entire system works to notice such a backdoor.
I would probably compile the reference source and use BinDiff[1] (or a handful of other tools) to compare it with the official binary. I've used BinDiff successfully for similar purposes in the past; it's also a popular tool for finding N-days after patches go out.
Signal could patch in that kind of backdoor, sure. But it's still globally disclosed in that case: you're revealing your backdoor to every prospective reverse engineer (there's a lot of them!), even if you only selectively enable it. Signal can probably be about as confident that nobody is reading their machine code as Chrome can, which is to say not confident.
And note: you don't need a solid enough mental model of how the system works at the machine level. You only need a differential understanding of what the public code says and what the machine code does, which is much easier.
Is it possible? Sure. But it's much, much higher risk and visibility than every other technique available to nation-state adversaries.
Yes, on iOS you'll need a jailbroken device to do it but it was doable.
(Writing in past tense since I haven't checked lately.)
Edit:
unlike WhatsApp, Telegram never was caught pants down uploading unencrypted data to Google with a wink wink, nudge nudge agreement.
And they never got caught uploading data to Facebook directly" from the endpoint "for security before sending it end-to-end encrypted between endpoints.
Oh, and they never got caught sending unencrypted data over the https port. (When normally extremely pedantic HN-ers write that Telegram sends data unencrypted, it means it is not end-to-end encrypted, not that it is plain text. Again contrary to what WhatsApp was caught doing.)
Disclaimer: I use Telegram myself, recommend Signal short term and I'm actively looking for a better solution for the future. Current bets: Matrix for group chats and I am also (probably too) excited about nostr for future social networking.
"Private" communications have never really been that private, unless you're speaking face to face alone in a room or passing notes to each other. Not to say I'm in favor of it being that way, but that's what people have long adjusted to.
Not at all. For nearly all of human history, privacy of communication was the norm with a few understood exceptions.
If you had a conversation with someone it was just about always private forever. Unless the location was bugged with microphones, but that wouldn't be the case unless you were already under investigation. Most importantly, it wasn't possible to go back in time and bug the room for a conversation last week.
Phone lines could be tapped but not all phone lines were recorded all the time, wasn't yet technically possible. So again you'd be private unless already under investigation and the tap couldn't happen retroactively.
It's only now that reality has changed dramatically and all messaged are recorded (e.g. here by facebook) and are available retroactively and across the whole population (i.e. they don't need to target someone specific, just run a query for phrases and see who pops up).
> When an investigator interviewed the teen, she allegedly confirmed that she had a miscarriage after midnight on April 22, and said that she and her mother placed the fetus in a bag in the back of their van, according to the court papers.
> Jessica and Celeste also said that Barnhill, whose relationship to the two women has not been revealed, later helped them bury the fetus on his property.
> Police were led to the makeshift gravesite and unearthed the corpse, which was found to show signs of “thermal injuries,” the documents stated.
> Barnhill reportedly confirmed to the investigators that the mother and daughter had attempted to burn the fetus before putting it in the ground.
My opinion might be a bit contrarian, but I was always taught that Roe v Wade was because abortions had become so unsafe without a proper place to do them. I imagine in this case we're missing some details, because the actual abortion involved sourcing some pills that are specifically used for abortion. I don't imagine sourcing those was quick. My read on this set of circumstances is that if you put arbitrary blockers on something that someone really wants to do, it course corrects them into a very unhealthy path. In this case, the details are shocking, but not incongruent with what I have been told was the reasoning for Roe v Wade and true to other harm reduction logic.
It's awful easy to argue post-facto that she could just have given birth, but I think that ignores a lot of changes and sacrifices a woman at 17-18 years old will have to endure.
also, the requirements for an abortion:
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/state-facts-about-abor...
There's three clinics total in the entire state and quite a number of hurdles. Including one that a patient must wait 24 hours after a consultation to have the procedure performed. If a patient has to travel to the clinic, and odds are she did, that's at minimum two days but maximally four. Then there's the cost, 2-3 nights at a hotel, plus abortions can't be paid by insurance - they're now looking at several hundred dollars of out of pocket cost in a state like Nebraska. If this young woman waited to tell her mother until she was showing (or didn't know until she was showing - which at 23 weeks, and a few weeks prior, she would be) then I can see this putting them in a weird place.
My point here isn't to reason about the things that happened after the abortion, but rather to say I think the more arbitrary hurdles that are introduced the more zany the outcomes will be.
https://www.facebook.com/records
Back when I used to have a Facebook account, Facebook provided private information from my account to a police department without a warrant for a situation that they deemed an "emergency", but that I did not. I no longer use Facebook.
Also I think that the Nebraska law is a symptom of toxic, fascist mindset that's pervading the country - and that's more concerning to me than Facebook so easily folding (which I expected).
(Although I agree that the premise in a broader sense of trusting a Chinese company over an American one is flawed.)
Maybe still safer than a US company having the data, but not great.
Any other belief regarding the privacy of them is flawed and incorrect.
And yes, it's well known that Zuck did abuse God-mode back in the day.
No, it's not. People should treat unencrypted centralized service DMs as public.
TFA is the proof.
There is a large number of people in the US who are authoritarian and can't help but try to get involved in other people's business to the maximum degree. They won't stop at any boundary, they are religious zealots.
Alternative varieties merely want to steal as many resources as possible, beyond that they don't care about the actions of others.
> There are plenty of other ones, but religious ones are the only people who truly obsess over the actions of others.
Sorry, no. I don't know how anyone could come to believe something so incorrect. For instance, the Chinese Communist Party is 1) authoritarian, 2) atheist, and 3) very obsessed over the actions of others (as shown by the massive surveillance and control apparatus it's built).
The lesson here is don't use unencrypted services to discuss your crimes.
So many people, including folks who should know better (professors, etc) were freaking out.
I wonder if it was dreamed up in FBs PR department as a distraction.
People were told to delete tracking apps to stop giving those companies data. So that data can't be used against you. This girl gave Facebook data. Facebook then turned that data over to the police. That data was used against her. Exactly how people said it would be.
It's not just that they have no obligation they are legally required to comply with subpoena requests and provide any and all data that an independent judge has deemed necessary.
You can't have realistically have a situation where the entire management team goes to jail for refusing to comply with them. Nor is it necessarily wrong for them to choose to respect the law even if it's a bad law.
But that's not what it was. The same people who were trying to get people to delete tracking apps would have also said "Don't talk about this through Meta apps" also.
It's a bit outside of what Facebook did, whether they should have complied or risked consequences, etc.
As an aside, Signal people. If you want to chat discreetly, Signal.
The idea that Twitter is a threat doesn’t go down well with the Twitter crowd.
Same is true for FB, etc.
I personally had to explain to a number of people, face to face, that whatever threat is posed by menstrual tracking apps is nothing compared to FB, Twitter, and Google.
People seemed especially suprised that Twitter was a problem.
I have, for north of a decade, not understood why this sort of thing hasn't triggered the exact same alarms that outright government-run mass data collection and spying would—if the government can pay for the data, can strong-arm to get the data, and can subpoena the data, it's barely better that a private company is collecting it, than the government, if your concern is government mis-use of data. No one should be allowed to collect and hoard information about people the way big tech companies (and some others, like CC companies and banks) do, for exactly the same reasons that we don't want the government doing that itself.
Governments can kill you, and brag about it publicly.
(1)Of course, removing a condom w/o consent is abhorrent.
If we are unhappy with the warrants, we should address that at the judicial level.
In the US, at least in my state, search warrants have to be specific about what is being searched for, where to search for it, and when the search should occur. So I think the warrant would likely have mentioned what sorts of messages they were looking for between dates X and Y, not just that Meta was ordered to turn over the entire message history for a user.
I see this claim made a lot, and I don't understand it. When the canadian trucker protest (please don't make this discussion about that, I am not saying it was good or bad, I am just using it as an example) switched to crypto after the gov froze their bank accounts, the gov also froze those crypto wallets. That seems like the opposite of powerless.
I think it's really naive to think that the gov won't just be able to bully any type of new system into submission, like they always do. If there are people running the system, then those people can be coerced.
So for most people this can just be shortened to "Cryptocurrency can't help you".
These people didn't do anything wrong either:
"They Told Their Therapists Everything. Hackers Leaked It All"
A mental health startup built its business on easy-to-use technology. Patients joined in droves. Then came a catastrophic data breach.
https://www.wired.com/story/vastaamo-psychotherapy-patients-...
On some of the most popular ones, you can lose your account and all data/connections at any time that they demand your government ID and you refuse to provide it.
I don't use services like this, myself, but many people use these popular services as their exclusive destination on the internet.
It would not be enough for the young to care about anonymization. They would need to care about it far in excess of their desire to interact with common platforms, celebrities, pop culture and their peers. It is an unreasonably high demand for kids.
This is why there was a server in the basement and everyone probably should have a server in the basement. Spam management made that almost impossible for the end-user though. We could have put spammers in prison but oddly lawmakers never decided that was a problem.
And for Nebraska to put this 17 year old on trial as an adult is doubly cruel.
Yes, I've witnessed a birth.
Most babies born go on to live normal lives. Do you really think I was implying I was a mindreader, and I know the baby would have a normal life, rather than just saying the odds are good?
You interpreted my comment 100% in bad faith which is pretty lame for HN. You might feel more comfortable on reddit.
But to put her on trial as an adult seems more like vengeance than justice.
[0] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg...
That's certainly not a recipe for making good decisions, and now since she's being tried as an adult she not only has to live with a criminal record, but her name being blasted all over the place while living in an abortion-hostile state.
Also, there are three Planned Parenthood clinics in Omaha, Nebraska, less than two hours from Madison County. This young woman was less than a year from being legally an adult. I'd give it good odds that my 11 year old daughter could figure out she should talk to a doctor in this situation, and I sure as hell hope that by 17 she's definitely figured that out.
- Only 3 clinics in the state, all 2 hours away
- Only 1 clinic performs abortion at 20 weeks
- Requires a 24 hour wait period by law
- Requires parental consent under 18
- Between 16-20 weeks, costs $2500-$5000
No comment on the general issue of abortion. Question remains for those who push this line as to which body part is that? A fetus is clearly an organism growing inside of someone's body but it is not a "body part" of another organism.
Human pregnancy is absolutely bizarre and quite dangerous. Some weird facts:
- Fertilization doesn't even happen until the 2nd or 3rd week.
- Pregnancy can occur outside of the uterus, which quickly leads to ruptured organs and death for the mother.
- 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage.
- The fetus's cells float freely in the mother's blood plasma, which makes the mother a chimera.
- A mother's blood can develop antibodies to rhesus antigens in the baby's blood, identifying the baby as a foreign invader.
- A fetus's "coating" has genes that inhibit T-cells in the mother, which is the only way the mother's body doesn't destroy the fetus (which is an alien parasite to the mother/host).
- Fetal stem cells can travel throughout the mother to repair things - or create an immune disorder.
- Women grow an extra organ (the placenta) during pregnancy.
- During development, a female fetus develops all the eggs the adult form will carry throughout its lifetime.
- Amniotic fluid is fetus pee.
- A fetus can't survive outside the uterus before 23-25 weeks.
Is the umbilical part of the mother's body? "The umbilical cord develops from and contains remnants of the yolk sac and allantois. It forms by the fifth week of development, replacing the yolk sac as the source of nutrients for the embryo" per wiki. The process definitely reminds of parasitical organisms, in parts.
> Human pregnancy is absolutely bizarre
Honestly I still am having problems wrapping my head around the basic fact of existence. Reality is bizarre.
23 weeks is the size of a grapefruit. 12 weeks is the size of the lime; is that small enough for you that you wouldn't put a woman going through the trauma of a miscarriage (or abortion) through criminal investigation?
Do we need to automatically assume that when a woman wants to not just flush it down the toilet like waste that is reason for suspicion?
May you never have a partner who has a miscarriage and then has to decide whether to put themselves at the mercy of the criminal system whether they go through "proper channels".
23 weeks is also more or less the borderline for where we have standardized national practices for saving an extreme premature delivery. I've read studies that put viability in the NICU at week 23 anywhere from 10% on the extreme low end, to 50% on the extreme high. By week 24 that jumps to ~30-75%.
They made a decision not to.
So showing up (at thousands of courthouses a year) is the default. If you’re helpful (to the prosecution), we will let you do things by email.
Obviously you can't put FB in jail, so does that turn into a bigger fine?
> A Nebraska teenager is facing criminal charges alleging she aborted a fetus in violation of state law, after authorities obtained her Facebook messages using a search warrant.
Should companies disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant from a state government in the United States?
If so, how is that any different from Uber breaking various laws?
I happen to believe that access to abortion is important (although quite a lot of people don't), but the rule of law matters too. It's not reasonable or logical to believe that it's ok for companies to break some laws but not others. So, I can't really be mad at Facebook for doing this.
That wouldn’t be breaking the law. It would actually be following the law.
Even if they tried, they could have still been required to turn over the data.
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.
I would like to see FB challenge it and get a ruling.
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.
"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."
> 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.
Only in America has the continuous rhetoric actually forced the idea that abortions are murder out of the fringe crowd and into the common understanding. That is truly sad.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7868372/coronavirus-covid-pandemi...
Canada's abortion laws are more restrictive than what was under Casey.
Even if you are pro-choice, comparing an unborn child to a disease that kills millions is a poor move.
Texas let the genie out of the bottle, and you can't put it back in.
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.
> 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.
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.
Those crimes don't make sense if they're following an abortion. That looks to me like a flimsy cover for prosecuting getting an abortion.
Here, the police laid the first set of three charges before there was any allegation of anything other than miscarriage/stillbirth, so it's hard to argue that the police were trying to punish the teenager for abortion in this particular case.
1. https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/jul/21/could-10-year...
The legality of 23rd-week abortions in parts of Europe is not an issue.
How did this get to 20 weeks?
Who in any position of power was watching out for this child?
Now those in power will use it to crush her.
How sad. How bad. How mad.
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.
But it's debatable whether Facebook Messenger is a "telecommunications service" under US law.
"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.
Judging from the reaction of Meta they realise that it was a mistake not to enable the "host proof" encryption protocols - like Signal, and what Whats APp was supposed to be (is it still?) - across the communication tools
They have exposed themselves to this - being complicate in what is starting to look like an organised campaign against women - they deserve our condemnation
It would be interesting to see it play out, but a company refusing to comply with a search warrant will likely result in really bad stuff for the company. Like officers in prison and conviction of crimes like Arthur Anderson during the Enron scandal.
I don’t see an opportunity here for Facebook to “take a stand” unless Zuck wanted to burn the company down.
That’s not realistic. And I think calling for companies to act illegally is a slippery slope I don’t want to get onto.
Facebook doesn't get to decide which laws are unjust. But Facebook gets to decide which laws it considers unjust and how it wants to deal with them. If big corporations can decide they consider tax laws unjust and want to avoid them as much as possible, they can also consider laws unjust that impact other people.
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
- Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7515521-william-roper-so-no...
In particular, I'm fairly sure everyone who bombs abortion clinics[0] tells themselves that the laws they break are the unjust ones, because who sees themselves as the villains of their own stories?
[0] https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9827886/abortion-clinic-attack...
A wolf and a sheep can't find a mutually satisfactory agreement when it comes to whether the sheep should be eaten by the wolf. Having irreconcilable differences is all fine and dandy in a democracy as long as those differences aren't resolved against you in a way that has life-altering consequences for you.
If you value order over justice, I'm sorry but there's a name for a system like that.
There are a lot of people in this country who genuinely believe that abortion is murder, and that's why we are in this mess in the first place. Those people believe laws that permit abortion are unjust and deeply immoral -- should they start using that as an excuse to punish people who legally obtained abortions, blockade clinics, etc.?
In a country with widely divergent religious and political views, we would end up with anarchy if everyone started disobeying laws they believed were unjust.
That is exactly what many are doing.
The logic doe cut both ways. We need to protect people wherever we find them.
The rule of law is a good thing, but to pretend that it is an absolute thing is to be a party to tyranny
One can also believe vigilante violence against people given abortions to be just, and thus justify such actions against them. In which case, the question is, "What should someone whose moral code is opposed to yours do?" Which in my opinion is a silly question.
For this to lead to anarchy, it must be the case that a significant number of people avoid causing anarchy for the sole reason of following the law for its own sake, without consideration for any punishment for violating the law.
No, it's not a silly question. It is the reason we need to have laws.
That mechanism is built into the system, just as much as democratic change is
For me, I'm happy Uber is around today, most likely because the flouted the law. Win/Win for me and them IMO.
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.
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.
You are either disingenuous or naive if you think this is true.
It is an extremely complex question both ethically and practically.
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.
Everyone has different morals. That's why laws exist.
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.
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* 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.
It is unfortunate that you think you are contributing to the conversation by posting a one-line statement that simply repeats conventional beliefs.
What evidences can you give for the existence of the law that cannot also be given for Santa Claus? Or could not be given for Zeus, if we were in Classical Greece?
But for the fun of it:
The law is written down, codified in a formal way that is consistent across writing.
The law is backed up by police thugs.
The law has formal processes of creation and destruction.
Santa Claus has none of these things.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yes
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.
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.
It's not your fucking business. It's a private health matter. Period. You don't get to go on a fishing expedition "to get to the bottom" of anything after the fact with zero evidence of any wrong doing.
The really important part is: when you decide to break an unjust law, don't talk about it on surveilled platforms, they're complicit and will hand your ass in. Don't bring your smartphone with you either.
Edit: yes I understand the laws themselves are sexist, but HN users didn't write the laws, and the "all you men" fingerpointing isn't really productive. Why the men here? You have much easier and more significant targets than male HN users.
I just want to say for the record that this comment briefly had a positive score before I got dogpiled.
I do agree that it's more productive when the conversation is civil and polite - but sexism is firmly in the middle of this particular topic.
So I for one actually applaud parent for calling it out.
You have one legal mechanism for enforcing good behavior upon capital, democracy.
Such nonsense. Corporations are a legal entity, they exist on paper. Facebook is people. People make decisions. People are not amoral.
If you think there is sufficient historical precedent to believe that shaming corporations into good behavior is an effective long term way to protect individuals then we simply disagree. I think you're wrong and believe that law is the only mechanism to ensure their behavior is pro-social.
To me, complaining about the bad behavior of capital is like being angry at the sun for burning you. IMO, you're only real option is to protect yourself.
-stop them from poisoning people
-stop them from lying to people
-stop them from endangering workers
-stop them from endangering their customers
-stop them from exploiting ecosystems unto failure
-stop them from manipulating workers
-stop them from extorting workers
-stop them from enslaving people
I'm very curious to know what the percentage of those people self-identify as libertarians and have "don't tread on me" decals on their vehicles.
Which folks are pretty hard core libertarians?
Plenty of silicon valley companies resist laws with much larger consequences freely and mostly with impunity.
Some of the same people will be saying uber was a hero for breaking taxi laws around the world (more before it became fashionable to hate uber)
It's not like a Nebraska sheriff can hop over to California or wherever Facebook data centers are and start seizing computers until they found this girl's messages (so much of that process would be absurd).
Just look to Trump to observe what obstructing a court order looks like.
I am not, of course, a corporate lawyer. One would know appropriate procedures to delaying, opposing, or otherwise objecting and appealing an order like this.
But it's Facebook. A half a trillion dollar company can resist an overzealous prosecutor going after a single teenager by just ignoring it and ignoring the consequences of ignoring it. It is approximately equivalent to a billionare not paying a parking meter. Sure, they "have to", but nothing of consequence actually happens if they don't.
Facebook should have fought the search warrant if it, say, wanted to hold on to its most valuable demographic.
But the amount that you can be outraged at Facebook for complying with a court order is limited, rule of law (and not just rule of your opinion on what the law should be) is important. You definitely don't want people who have opposite opinions to be making up what they think the law should be.
I believe that companies should be zealous advocates for their users, just as lawyers are for their clients. Facebook was not any kind of advocate here.
Up to what point? Are you saying that someone should be allowed to abort their baby one day before it would be born on its own? That would actually be a pretty extreme opinion, and would put you in a fairly small minority. Most people recognize that somewhere along the line a fetus becomes a child with a set of basic human rights just like the rest of us. The definition of that point is the entire reason we argue incessantly about it.
No matter how many times I say this someone always jumps in with "what about". Let me stop you right there. It's not your business. It's a private health matter. Period.
There's a reason we don't count unborn fetuses until they are actually born as people. Mainly the fact that so much can go wrong between those two points in time.
> Let me stop you right there. It's not your business. It's a private health matter. Period
That's literally the heart of the discussion. A lot of people don't view it to be a private health manner if you kill a fetus that would be perfectly fine on the outside world, but just hasn't made that transition yet. You're just saying "Stop talking. I'm right". Good for you in having confidence in your convictions I guess, but don't expect to convince anyone.
> There's a reason we don't count unborn fetuses until they are actually born as people. Mainly the fact that so much can go wrong between those two points in time.
Yes, and already born humans can die from natural or unnatural causes. The system is fairly good at detecting if someone died from natural or unnatural causes though, and then looking into the unnatural causes a bit deeper if it seems appropriate. How would you be able to tell if this woman (1) had an abortion(natural or unnatural), and then burned the body and buried her, or (2) gave birth at 6 months to a viable baby, and then killed her shortly after it was born?
It's pretty clearly mostly men making these comments cause there's a distinct lack of awareness about how female anatomy actually works.
There is no taking of organs. It would be merely removing the parasite from the body of the host.
And from a practical perspective, how exactly are you getting rid of a 40 week old fetus? You need to effectively give birth to get rid of it, regardless of whether you kill it or let it live.
Bodily autonomy is one of the fundamental human rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodily_integrity
Because there isn’t a huge difference when it comes to complying with subpoenas.
FB learned a long time ago that defending unpopular criminals’ communications isn’t worth the political cost.
Some might choose to focus on why the defendant chose to get an abortion. I don't see any details of that here. Personally, I don't care. If she wants one, she should be able to get one.
Investigating this case at all is both unexpected and psychotic. Trying her as an adult is the next level of psychotic.
That all aside, as for Facebook, again this is light on detail regarding the cooperation given. Did they fight the subpoena? Did they have any grounds to? What steps were made to protect that user's privacy? We simply don't know.
As an aside, it seems like you have better privacy by using regular SMS than any form of IM. Law enforcement can get metadata but that's not so useful. Getting the actual messages from any IM service seems to be much easier. Perhaps WhatsApp would be better? I don't know how accessible WA messages currently are.
As for Facebook removing posts supplying at-home abortion medication, here I'm somewhat sympathetic just because Facebook does have to follow the law (even if that law is psychotic and unjustifiable). It's no different to supplying medical marijuana to people in places where it's illegal. Or supplying much cheaper medications from Canada or Mexico. These are all technically illegal so any company is going to have to try and enforce that.
Remember the political forces behind this under the guise of being "pro-life" go to every effort to restrict access to affordable medical care, recently voted against child tax credit (in the IRA) and fight efforts to allow people to fight a living wage.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...