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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

This is the important part:

> A Nebraska teenager is facing criminal charges alleging she aborted a fetus in violation of state law, after authorities obtained 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.

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To answer your question breaking laws designed to help people versus laws designed to persecute people are very different things. It’s all very well being in favour of the rule of law, but unjust laws are tyranny. When companies assist with tyranny, they can and should get bad press, whether that tyrrany happens in China, Russia or America. They choose where to trade, where to be registered and where to employ people.

Many, many people do not agree with your insinuation that abortion laws are "tyrrany;" that's why laws are passed in states whose populations have determined to various degrees that abortion must not be allowed.

Even in those states, abortion enjoys wide popular support (See: The Kansas referendum), it's just that they've been gerrymandered to the point that their governments are not remotely representative of the wishes of most of their constituents.

Uber provides services at a lower cost to the consumer and lowered barriers of entry for millions of drivers compared to taxi companies entrenched by state monopolies. How is that not helping people?

A paternalistic state is as much a tyranny as a persecutory one. The only only difference is in the overt methods. The motives and thinking behind the two are the same. If you're of the view that certain laws are inherently unjust, by whom or by what standards should that distinction be made? Who watches the watchers?

Why would you think a country that dictates with whom or how one can form an economic contract would leave alone the right to bodily integrity? Individual human beings, whether representing companies or themselves, choose where to trade, register, and employ (or be employed by) people. Human beings are the ones decide to create companies, governments, and tyrannies.

You give companies far too much agency when you want to pin them as enablers of tyranny but deny them any in their contributions to personal liberty, whether political or economic. You can't have it both ways.

> It's not reasonable or logical to believe that it's ok for companies to break some laws but not others.

"One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." Martin Luther King Jr.

I don't think we want Facebook to decide which laws are unjust.

Nobody is asking Facebook to decide; Facebook is being told which laws are unjust.

Facebook are being told which laws are unjust by multiple different groups (not just on the topic of abortion) who disagree about everything other than that Facebook is pure evil for allowing the other lot to say anything.

This is not a normative statement: I'm not saying which group Facebook should listen to. Only that everybody (except for Facebook themselves) agrees that Facebook should not be making the decision.

I am asking that Facebook takes a principled stand.

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

> I am asking that Facebook takes a principled stand.

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.

Real people without expensive teams of lawyers and wealth to fall back on risked jail, beating, and lynching to sit at a lunch counter. I'm sorry that the officers of Meta are men of little courage and worth.

This kind of moral posturing may feel satisfying but that kind of reasoning is literally why in Germany we're 80 years later still cleaning up the mess of companies benefitting from forced labor under entirely legal-at-the-time public-private partnerships.

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.

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

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...

Considering the people who support the bombing of abortion clinics are the ones currently making these laws and are in control because they have used the law to disenfranchise and suppress voters to be able to do so with only the support of a minority of actual legal subjects and considering that the only other party has spent the past decades sitting on its hands in malicious compliance while using civil rights as a dangling carrot for the remaining voters, maybe the US legal system is so broken this issue can't be solved by bowing down to authority? And even if it can, maybe the time frames involved to do so are so long mere submission will cost many lives and harm many more.

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.

Hey I love the quote love the idea but we are actually asking not for the law to be laid flat as it were but mere civil disobedience to unjust law and acceptance of the consequences. Put up a fight.

Disobeying a couple specifically chosen laws is very different from discarding the entire legal system.

I think the argument could be read that breaking one law would undermine all other laws as well. But I believe the essence of that dialogue is more that the ends do not justify the means instead of being a refutation of the previous idea.

Well then it's a good thing that breaking a targeted law is not "ends justify the means".

There is a difference as you might not need to compromise your ethics or your conscience if you just break the law.

That logic cuts both ways.

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.

> should they start using that as an excuse to punish people who legally obtained abortions, blockade clinics, etc.?

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 believe abortion (or laws against abortion, for that matter) to be unjust, while also laws against vigilante violence to be just, and thus refrain from that kind of action.

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.

> 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.

No, it's not a silly question. It is the reason we need to have laws.

If so, how is that any different from Uber breaking various laws?

The pursuit of private profit vs the defense of someone else's private liberty.

You might think rule of law subsumes both considerations, or something else, but if so you should say that. Asking a rhetorical question whose answer is blindingly obvious is more of a conversational gambit for Socratic authority than a sincere inquiry.

> Asking a rhetorical question whose answer is blindingly obvious

You are either disingenuous or naive if you think this is true.

It is an extremely complex question both ethically and practically.

I was able to summarize the difference in 12 words. The ramifications can be complex but the question as asked was simple.

Regardless, asking capital for justice is foolish and damning Facebook to hell is impossible.

Yeah, the only real civil rights question I see here that relates to Facebook and social media is how are courts looking at warrants for social media accounts. If the police suspect you of a crime they can't just ask for warrants to acquire the letters you may have written to anyone you've ever corresponded with. They have to be more specific. But if they can request a broad swath of your messages simply because you have a social media account then that's a bit like requesting papers from someone simply because they own a filing cabinet.

It's not even an access to abortion issue. Abortion is legal in that state. 23 weeks is really late, an abortion that late would be illegal in most of europe.

AFAIK 23 weeks would be illegal in the majority of the US as well. Though there is some ambiguity as a number of states just say 'fetal viability' which can be as late as 24 weeks depending on who you ask.

This would have been illegal in states like New York. The people who are blindly defending this should consider that situations have nuance, and that the child that was born probably also looked like a small newborn instead of a meat bean.

Not exactly. European laws have restrictions on when it's available "upon request", but if there are any medical concerns around the fetus or the mother they can and are performed much later.

This is likely more of a side-effect of having government sponsored healthcare wanting to limit the number of elective procedures rather than any sort of moral issue like its viewed in countries like the United States.

In most of Europe what happened in this particular case would still have been illegal (although it's fair to ask whether the individual in question would have had a legal abortion at an earlier point in time in Europe). The linked article leaves out a lot of relevant contextual details; there's more here: https://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/nebraska/nor...

Would it? There's always been an open question in the US around whether or not you charge mothers who seek illegal abortions vs the doctors. How have European courts typically sentenced women who sought to terminate pregnancies passed the gestational term limits?

The teenager ("mother") isn't being prosecuted for getting the abortion. She's being charged for concealing or abandoning a dead human body, concealing the death of another person, and false reporting. It's the teenager's own mother who's being charged with the abortion-related offences (performing or attempting an abortion on a pregnancy at more than 20 weeks, and performing an abortion as a non-licensed doctor).

> She's being charged for concealing or abandoning a dead human body, concealing the death of another person, and false reporting.

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.

I see that perspective, but the rules around reporting and disposing of bodies have purposes independent of the abortion debate, e.g., to protect the rights of live-born disabled babies from intentional euthanasia.

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.

In the US that question is actually less a legal or moral question and more of a political one. Politicians are generally afraid of the public opinion reaction to punishing mothers (especially if they happen to be 10 year old victims of rape[1]) - that is of course what all of these restriction laws do, they punish mothers, but silently executing an action and announcing that action out loud are two different things.

1. https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/jul/21/could-10-year...

Why do you or Europe get to define late? This was legal until a month ago.

Social media search warrants for abortion law enforcement is the issue.

The legality of 23rd-week abortions in parts of Europe is not an issue.

What an absolute failure of the health care in her world.

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.

> after authorities obtained her Facebook messages using a search warrant.

The fact that it was obtained using a search warrant is an very important part of the story. Right now, the headline is designed to create an outrage against Facebook. Forbes is being very misleading here.

23 weeks might be illegal even in California. In California, there is no strict cut-off date as to when a pregnancy may be terminated. But absent special circumstances, abortion cannot be performed once the fetus becomes viable. Hospitals will resuscitate and actively treat babies born in the 22nd week of pregnancy.

> abortion cannot be performed once the fetus becomes viable

I don't think that's universally true. That would depend upon the state. The Roe decision protected women from government intervention before the fetus was vaible but now that Roe is gone that does not mean the inverse is true.

Yes - but let’s not use this instance as “abortion” story. This story can also be used by anti-abortion people to show how abortion is about killing babies.

In short, if you ask any nurse or doctor they will tell you that rules are to try to save any baby which is more than 22 weeks.

Or Hatebook could decide that this law is unjust and block all users from Nebraska from accessing their platform as a protest. This would do more to get the law changed than a letter writing campaign, etc. Twitter and the other social platforms could follow suit. And sure the company has a responsibility to share holders but that shouldn't override all else. A stance of "we don't want to get involved in politics" is a political statement in and of itself and these companies donate millions to campaigns. Look at all the CA stuff that got abused in a previous election.

Or they can say that "they are just following the law" while they collect all the ad $$$. They have the power to morally affect this issue. They can very trivially put out a statement that they will no longer continue operate in states and countries that violate the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But we see the big players chasing money over humanity and democracy and even decency. And it isn't just Hatebook, look at the concessions Apple and Google and others have made to get access to markets in China and other totalitarian regimes.

Everybody seems to be reading and answering this from the assumption that the writer of this article wants you to believe Facebook is bad for complying with this warrant, but I can't see where that is the case. I read the article and she's just reporting what happened. There is no statement saying this is bad, anyone should be outraged, or that they should ignore and/or break laws. Presumably, part of the reason for writing articles like this is just to inform people who might think of breaking the law not to engage in their conspiracies to break laws using Facebook private messages as the communications medium. Drug dealers and terrorists are well aware by now, but people who weren't breaking the law a few weeks ago need to know.

>this article wants you to believe Facebook is bad for complying with this warrant, but I can't see where that is the case.

That's probably due the headline missing vital context that turns this from arguments on backdoors(a topic FB has often got into trouble with) to one of "can you issue search warrants on digital media?"

But I understand writers don't often write the headline in larger publications. Maybe the writer wanted to be impartial but some higher power wanted to maximize engagement

> Should companies disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant from a state government in the United States?

a) Yes, they should

b) At minimum they should fight the warrant and advocate for their users

c) They should protect that data such that they can't turn it over

It's ok to break some laws and not others. Breaking the law, and following the litigation to have the law struck down through courts is part of the rule of law.

That mechanism is built into the system, just as much as democratic change is

Facebook shouldn't have had access to this access this data in the first place. Sure, they have to (within some framework) cooperate with law enforcement, but their entire platform is optimized to be a data vacuum for advertising from the jump. The fact that mass surveillance for the state is a side effect is just piling unacceptable effect onto unacceptable cause. Fuck facebook all day long.

We would expect individuals to disobey fugitive slave laws and refuse to return slaves to bondage. We also would expect people not to turn in jews in nazi occupied states.

It is curious if we were to expect civil disobedience by individuals risking everything but also expect companies who risk little to turn in little Anne Frank at the first opportunity without even diminishing our respect.

Yes companies and people should disobey the law more often, we should all strive to minimize the effects of government control and coercion enabling us to lead our lives as we see fit for the short time we're on earth.

For me, I'm happy Uber is around today, most likely because the flouted the law. Win/Win for me and them IMO.

You do realize your cheap transportation is partially built on the backs of hundreds of rape cases,[1] right?

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62158976

I'm not really sure I agree Uber was "built" by cab drivers, but for the sake of argument, sure, but what's the alternative? The subway has way more crime.

We live in a culture saturated with rape.

In which "justifying rape" is only recently (I am getting old. Last decades) gone out of fashion.

Some call it a "rape culture", with some justification.

Uber is a part of that culture, and it is an open question just where on the spectrum of "angelic operator" to "dangerous predation" they lie. But the claim: "cheap transportation is partially built on the backs of hundreds of rape cases" is only true because of "partially". I think it is a weak claim.

Facebook selectively complies in what could charitably be viewed as a profit-focused strategy and less charitably as nakedly partisan. Case in point, ongoing violation of Washington State campaign finance laws.

> Should companies disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant from a state government in the United States?

Yes

Hopefully we can see blue states pass abortion bounty bounty laws, where anyone aiding and abetting this sort of behavior is at least civilly, but maybe even criminally liable.

Texas let the genie out of the bottle, and you can't put it back in.

Texas has a bounty on people helping residents across the boarder to seek care AFAICT - that's an action that happens within the state. Passing a law restricting actions in another state is either 1) super illegal or 2) creates a really awful situation legally in the states.

If Texas can say "Hey, Massachusetts, it's illegal for teachers in your state to teach evolution" then we've essentially destroyed any ability to have laws in the US.

Facebook's data centers and personnel might well be located within the jurisdiction of a blue state. Perhaps this will incentivize it to not retain this information, so that it can't be requested by hostile law enforcement or authoritarian regimes.

> creates a really awful situation legally in the states.

You are correct, it's a pretty awful situation, but it's one that we currently live in.

Also, it's rather common for sovereign states to sanction people for committing crimes in other jurisdictions. Meng Wanzhou was arrested for breaking US laws regarding trade with Iran in China.

Well, also this:

"Still, Meta has remained largely silent on how it will moderate abortion content in general. However, users recently noticed that Instagram and Facebook posts about acquiring abortion pills such as mifepristone were being systematically removed. At the same time, Meta continued to earn revenue from anti-abortion advertisements containing dangerous misinformation, Media Matters found. An investigation by the Markup discovered that Facebook was collecting data from users interacting with abortion services websites, and subequently made that information available to anti-abortion groups."

They have to comply with the law, and there's nothing wrong with anti-abortion ads. Facebook doesn't have an obligation to only sell ads to Democrats.

> subequently made that information available to anti-abortion groups

That part is probably misleading, I'm assuming they didn't give them any kind of information, they just allowed demographic targeting like they do for most kinds of ads.

But there's also no law against posts providing information on "acquiring abortion pills such as mifepristone"; Facebook is choosing to remove such posts.

There's also no law restricting guides on how to turn any rifle into an automatic machine gun... but Facebook chooses to remove those too.

There is no equating healthcare to gun rights - one of these is used to make lives better and the other is used to destroy them.

I'm 100% pro-abortion-rights but I can still accept that abortion is an act of destroying a life. Even in the case of taking abortion pills. But obviously most of us consider there to be a huge difference in ethical significance between destroying the life of an embryo and that of a fully grown independent human.

I think this is the tragedy of America - in Canada abortion is enshrined as a human right that helps to protect the lives of young people who have made a mistake instead of dooming them to a life of misery (and their future children with them).

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.

Canada sends people to the US for abortions:

https://globalnews.ca/news/7868372/coronavirus-covid-pandemi...

Canada's abortion laws are more restrictive than what was under Casey.

No more than excising a cancer is, before the age of viability. Early on, it's just cells.

Cancers don't become cooing babies if left alone to grow.

Even if you are pro-choice, comparing an unborn child to a disease that kills millions is a poor move.

It's part of the rhetoric--the rationalization.

I don't think cancer qualifies as "a life" at all sorry. Taking anti-biotics to kill a bacterial infection might be a better comparison.

Later on, it's also just cells. That kind of naive reductionism leads us to reducing a human being to cancer.

I don't think a comparison between an abortion pill that terminates fetuses and a firearm are that different. Both can be used for good or bad.

I don't think he's equating them as identical situations. He's using analogy to explain that Facebook's acceptable ad policies are not exactly the same as US law - and that Facebook doesn't get selective solely in the area of abortion.

That's called "misinformation" now. If you disagree, join the club.

Not explicitly, but there are laws against providing illicit access to abortion, and this can be reasonably interpreted as such.

Facebook could have legally gone to court to block this.

That wouldn’t be breaking the law. It would actually be following the law.

They could have tried -- and how do you know they did not?

Even if they tried, they could have still been required to turn over the data.

No they could have won, at the very least this would go to the SC over if they have the right to subpoena over a crime outside the state, that isn't illegal in that state.

> if they have the right to subpoena over a crime outside the state, that isn't illegal in that state

Yes. This goes back to the fugitive slave act days.

That said, they should have fought. They should always fight. There might be novel case law. And it sets the right precedent.

Shameful.

As we have learned, laws don't mean what they used to, just takes a judge changing it when you appeal.

What you're describing is a common law system, which is basically what the US has[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

Ya that is my point :)

I would like to see FB challenge it and get a ruling.

> at the very least this would go to the SC

Supreme Court chooses what cases to look at.

And since it has swung to being much more conservative are more interested in cases which reinforce the originalism doctrine for interpreting the constitution.

Yes, companies definitely should disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant in cases where someone is being prosecuted for having an abortion. Obeying the law in this case is clearly immoral!

There is nothing unreasonable or illogical about believing that it is okay for companies to break some laws but not others. You can come to that conclusion in at least two perfectly reasonable ways: you can believe that breaking laws is not in itself a bad thing (but that actions that break some law may be bad for some other reason, such as harming people), or that it is a bad thing but in some cases the lesser of two evils.

However, in practice it may be difficult for a company to organize such disobedience, particularly since, for example, Facebook cannot avoid hiring employees from religious groups who are in favor of these laws. So, a more practical approach is to avoid being in the position of surveilling people's private communications in the first place, so that no employees at the company have access to the information the police seek. End-to-end encryption is a crucial structural protection against this kind of pervasive surveillance, because it prevents intermediaries from having the private information in the first place. Pseudonymity is another one: the teenager should never have given Facebook her legal name, but unfortunately Facebook has extensive policies in place to extort legal names from its users, making them vulnerable to such abuses.

Of course talking about encryption always brings out the knuckledraggers who link to XKCD 538 and talk about hitting people with $5 wrenches. Hopefully this example clarifies why encryption sometimes defeats a $5 wrench: neither the Nebraska teenager nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case.

> Obeying the law in this case is clearly immoral

Everyone has different morals. That's why laws exist.

People have different beliefs about many different things, not just morals. For example, some people believe that the Earth was created 6000 years ago. I'm not claiming my beliefs are infallible, just explaining what they are and, in some cases, why I hold them.

It's difficult to tell from your one-line comment, but it sounds like one of your beliefs is moral relativism: that there is no objective reality of what is good and bad, only "different morals" held by different people. That belief is false.*

Laws exist only in the same sense that Zeus or Santa Claus exists, which I think is the sense you believe that morals exist: they are collections of ideas that are passed from mind to mind, but there is no sense in which it can be objectively true or false to say, "The law forbids [such and such]." There is only, at best, a social consensus.

______

* Of course, my belief that goodness and badness exist objectively is fallible, but even if it is as incorrect as the belief that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, its veracity is still an objective question; it could be true, false, or partly true, but not meaningless.

The law has more existence than Santa Clause

Mere assertion does not constitute an argument.

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?

Doe it matter? It is obvious.

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.

The law is immoral according to many of us and people will be breaking it.

Facebook could have refused on the grounds that they aren't based out Nebraska and not subject to their jurisdiction. They could have used some of their extensive legal budget to challenge the warrant on those grounds.

> grounds that they aren't based out Nebraska and not subject to their jurisdiction

This isn’t how jurisdiction works. Facebook had a customer in Nebraska who allegedly did a crime in Nebraska under Nebraska law. That creates a legal nexus for them there.

Facebook almost surely does have a jurisdictional nexus in Nebraska, but not merely because they have a customer there.

One can argue that Facebook users aren't customers either.

This is a good point.

That's the only interesting point in this thread. "We don't have any advertisers from Nebraska so no customers" would be an interesting case.

Not only is it not sufficient to have customers in a jurisdiction to have a jurisdictional nexus there, it also is not necessary.

Operating a telecommunications service doesn't automatically make you subject to every state's jurisdiction. Interstate communication is subject to federal control. States can't willy-nilly act like they can reach outside their boundaries.

For "telecommunications services" in the US I think having customers in a state is sufficient to establish nexus: https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2016/01/commun...

But it's debatable whether Facebook Messenger is a "telecommunications service" under US law.

They don't want to establish a history of noncompliance with the big dogs.

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