Someone reading this may disagree with abortion. But if we can separate the controversy of the topic at hand from the fact a state government requested data from a private company for what is not universally considered a crime it could lead to a pragmatic discussion into data requests and privacy (i.e questionable practice of 'emergency data requests' that function outside the normal process of a subpoena[1])
The battle to get large tech companies to respect user privacy has been fought and lost (at least in the US). Systems are explicitly built that provide portals for the government to look into people's "private" data, often without any active oversight by employees of the company itself.
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.
I think putting this story as an argument for abortion and arguing that this is not “universally crime” is hurting “pro-choice” movement since this type of abortion will not be legal even in California.
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.
What do you mean "universally considered a crime"? Would that universe just be the state that Facebook is incorporated? It seemed probable that a crime that broke Nebraska state law was committed, and that is what the Nebraska police were looking into.
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.
The real issue I have is that Facebook keeps an unencrypted copy of everyone's DMs stored and just waiting to be handed to the government. I understand it's how they make money, and that they've done it forever, but man, I guess using Signal has spoiled me. It's so weird to me that most people are completely unaware or unworried that their "private" conversations aren't private in the slightest.
Genuine question: At any point, Signal could slip some code into their App Store or Google Play app which lets their servers ask for your DMs in plaintext. For all we know, they have already done so. It seems like the threat model is to assume the client is 100% trustworthy but the servers are potentially untrustworthy; why does this model make sense? Shouldn't we assume that the clients are also untrustworthy unless we have built them from source ourselves or gotten the binaries from a trusted party?
Honestly, encrypted communications for the average person, being a relatively recent development, is much weirder. Email isn't traditionally encrypted (don't bring up the mess that is PGP); IRC wasn't; neither was AIM, ICQ, or MSN; Twitter DMs aren't; XMPP isn't; before the Internet, phone calls could be wiretapped by the government. Physical mail, while not encrypted, could be considered an exception, seeing as it's illegal to open in the majority of cases.
"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.
Google also has a bunch of WhatsApp backups in Google Drive, and Apple has hundreds of millions of iCloud Backups (non-e2e, by design, preserved as an iMessage encryption backdoor for the FBI) containing everyone's iMessages (or realtime iMessage sync private keys).
> 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.
While this case involved a search warrant, Facebook also gives information to police departments without a warrant for any case that they determine to be an "emergency". Here is the portal where the information is requested and provided:
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.
Information you post to Facebook is essentially public. Best we teach our kids that. The "privacy" safeguards are BS.
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).
Need to get more people onboard with end to end encryption and obfuscating every possible piece of data online. As other commenters have stated, the corporations that run the internet are not your friends.
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.
Because of "terrorism" etc., text messages and the like will always be subpoenable. Meta would not be able to quash a bog-standard request like this. It's only even newsworthy because it involves the rescinded right to abortion.
The lesson here is don't use unencrypted services to discuss your crimes.
I think the pressures and incentives in play right now are going to generally push big tech companies in that direction, arguably already have quite a bit. I expect to see a lot more of it unfortunately.
This is the exact reason why that bit was going around. These corporations are not your friends, they have no obligation to preserve your privacy, and any data you've passed along their servers now belongs to them.
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.
That is not as farfetched as it may first appear. Recall, if you will, how every MSM outlet started extolling the abhorrence of "stealthing"(1), in unison, not long before the US reversed course and called Assange an enemy of the state and the UK police entered the embassy to grab him? Social Engineering 101.
(1)Of course, removing a condom w/o consent is abhorrent.
Presumably a warrant is signed by an actual judge. I'm not sure I want every company launching their own investigation into the underlying evidence behind a search warrant in order to determine if they should comply or not.
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.
It is time to go back to treating the internet like it was scary and hostile, because it still is, except it now has a thick veneer of slick marketing to suggest otherwise. Young people should be counselled to stay anonymous online and shown examples like this, because zero good can come from giving personal, compromising information to a company along with your real name in this way.
I think this battle has been lost already. Pretty much all of the non-tech people I know firmly believe the "why do I need anonymity if I'm not doing anything wrong" line of thinking. The powers that be really don't like online anonymity, and the public at large just doesn't care enough to do anything. Maybe this will change some minds, but I'm doubtful it'll be enough.
You can't use most popular online services without providing PII in the form of a phone number.
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.
The major services are heavily incentivized to de-anonymize and if the opposite ever became a problem, these governments would legislate to force their way through.
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.
Just a reminder, in the USA all emails older than six-months old can be read by virtually any law enforcement agency without a warrant.
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.
This isn't really a good case to build sympathy on. She didn't abort with a doctor's assistance, it was fairly late, and she hid the remains. This would have been illegal across most of the US.
This is tragic. Women should have access to abortion, and 23 weeks is plenty, but miscarrying and burying it in the backyard needs an investigation. Just to make sure we have all the facts.
Merits of this particular case aside, as it seems like it would be a generous good faith assumption, given your general statement, in your ideal world when do we start harbouring criminal suspicions on a process that happens to between one and two thirds of all women?
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".
According to the article, Nebraska currently allows abortion up to 20 weeks. So for a valid criminal case, this one either had to take place after 20 weeks or be done in violation of other regulations, like taking place at a licensed medical provider. The article mentions mother and daughter burying fetus in backyard after trying to burn it. This implies fairly large fetus that would normally be subject to medical rather than chemical abortion. All in all, this makes the situation less shocking. I may oppose criminal prosecution of cocaine users, yet I wouldn't be that shocked if Facebook provided state law enforcement with DMs between a user and a dealer.
Sickening. If FB were to selectively refuse to comply with some state subpoenas, what would be the consequences? Banning of FB in Indiana? I think that would be more of a punishment for the Boomers of Indiana than for FB.
If there is a Subpoena or Search Warrant for FB messages, FB has no choice to hand them over. However, FB should have fought like hell in the courts to not hand those messages over.
They would get raided by the government and forced to comply. They literally can't refuse in this case. They could have fought it in court (and lost) but at the end they would have to produce the documents under threat of contempt and then criminal charges.
It is considered contempt of court, not sure what the punishment is in Nebraska, but that is usually something like a $500 fine and six months in jail.
Obviously you can't put FB in jail, so does that turn into a bigger fine?
[+] [-] omegacharlie|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/hackers-gaining-power-of...
[+] [-] scarmig|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tlogan|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] googlryas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cato_the_elder|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] mkaic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mort96|3 years ago|reply
This always confused me with all the E2EE hype.
[+] [-] ronsor|3 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] sneak|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] kodah|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commoner|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] r00fus|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] klawcode|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nathanaldensr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zuminator|3 years ago|reply
The lesson here is don't use unencrypted services to discuss your crimes.
[+] [-] raxxorraxor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crmd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giraffe_lady|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tunap|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyuser583|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bena|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nisegami|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tunap|3 years ago|reply
(1)Of course, removing a condom w/o consent is abhorrent.
[+] [-] SpaceManNabs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dutchbrit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
If we are unhappy with the warrants, we should address that at the judicial level.
[+] [-] saxonww|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] superchroma|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colpabar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anonymousab|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ck2|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] micromacrofoot|3 years ago|reply
And for Nebraska to put this 17 year old on trial as an adult is doubly cruel.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] languageserver|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Overtonwindow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hallucinaut|3 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cat_plus_plus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smt88|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lscdlscd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mullen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CircleSpokes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonemetal12|3 years ago|reply
Obviously you can't put FB in jail, so does that turn into a bigger fine?
[+] [-] aaomidi|3 years ago|reply