cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
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We need to be clear here. Don’t hate Meta/Facebook for complying with a legal search warrant. That’s the law. Hate Meta/Facebook for having the ability to hand over private chat messages at all. End-to-End Encryption is the only answer. It’s not about trust, it’s about the ability.
End-to-End Encryption is the only answer.
With OpenSource, audited, and user-controlled software.
Any software that could be ordered by a third party (like Meta) to send the E2E keys to the server, while sending all the encrypted messaged through the same server, is not to be trusted.
This would be bigger news had they broken WA E2EE. Indeed, the officials might prefer not to disclose the capability if they had it and this wouldn’t have happened. (Except, maybe, via parallel construction.)
That’s the law.
Yeah, I don’t buy that, not when you have the obscene money and power that Meta has. They could have fought it and resisted, but they didn’t. This is the same company that literally just stole a trademark and absolutely nothing meaningful happened to them because of it.
You don’t buy that it’s the law?
not when you have the obscene money and power that Meta has. They could have fought it and resisted,
What you’re saying is because Meta is rich, they don’t have to obey the law?
What you’re saying is because Meta is rich, they don’t have to obey the law?
Anyone who’s rich in America doesn’t have to obey the law. That’s not a matter of opinion. There’s a clear and observable imbalance between the rich and poor in regard to the outcomes experienced in the American justice system.
Yes, that is what is happening. But that’s not what I’m asking. I know there’s imbalance between the rich and the poor in the justice system. What I’m asking is, is that how it should be?
You’ve accepted that as an acceptable thing that rich people/companies don’t have to obey the law, and that rich people/companies obeying the law is a bad thing? Because what you’ve said above is that because Meta is rich, so they shouldn’t obey the law.
is that how it should be?
No, you’ve accepted that rich people/companies don’t have to obey the law. (Or, at least, that’s the tenor of your commentary.)
Therefore it needed to said that, no, they don’t have to obey the law. They’re complicit in the corruption that’s forcing this young woman to account for an abortion that should already be legal, at least in a just society.
They could have said okay here you g… oooops jeez it’s gone. Wow how did that happen. Oh well.
They’re a branch of the government at this point. Call it investing in avoiding the kind of scrutiny they should have been under the moment they started psychological experiments on the public.
They admitted to it but I don’t see Zuck the fuck in jail do you?
I’m sure there were plenty of strategies, but we all know that the justice system for a mega-corporation in America is way, way different than the justice system for a poor or middle class individual, so it’s laughable to me that anyone would look at this scenario, shrug, and pretend that Meta didn’t have any recourse in order to do the right thing.
Yeah it’s not even a discussion whether they could fight something like a subpoena, and even companies that would like to sometimes can’t afford to do it. But Facebook practically works for them, they seem to have some kind of arrangement behind the scenes - if not an out and out partnership. They are glad and willing always to provide the government with everything they ask for.
Maybe this is how Zuck the schmuck has stayed out of jail for the shit he’s done; maybe he’s worth far more being their espionage tool.
Between them and Amazon just collecting data and handing it over to any TLA that wants it.
Facebook supports E2E encrypted chats but you have to enable it, similar to Telegram. Whatsapp uses E2EE by default.
Hate american legislative / politics instead? Don’t hate the player, hate the game?
You’re right. e2ee is a good thing.
I get very frustrated with the people who side with the govt here because it was a 7 month foetus. Just because it is 7 months rather than 5 or 6 doesn’t suddenly mean the government should be able to coerce the use of someone’s body as an incubator against their will.
Feels like people just don’t give a shit about bodily autonomy and such :/ nya
I think the argument is that at 7 months that’s a viable human and it has rights on its own.
It doesn’t have rights until it slides out of the vagina or cesarean section. Until that moment it’s none of anyone’s business but the mother.
And it’s not the government or Facebook or any fucking one else’s place to criminalize this, or to presume to have a right to have any say in the matter.
I’m a male white democrat but I don’t even lean as far left as many fellow liberals. I’m close to left center. Nevertheless, it astounds me how many people put a line where the baby “could” potentially survive. So what? It’s still in the mother’s body it’s still part of her body. And it’s nobody else’s right to have any say about it whatsoever - except arguably a minor vote to the father, a little bit. But ultimately this whole criminalization is not about life at all, but about politics and economics.
That’s a separate discussion on its own as for some 1 second old human is one with their own rights. But then in Belarus there is a lot of things that are illegal and we consider normal, like saying your leader is corrupt. Should META comply just because it is local law?
At the end of the day it seems we just can not trust anything that isn’t encrypted.
Jumping in here to say that I don’t feel like the Technology community is the right place to have the debate on the gestational limits for abortion. Let’s keep the focus on technology please.
That’s true but that’s the problem with technology where law is involved is always the same, law is made by people and their opinions, gestation limit is just secondary thing here really and I wasn’t interested in discussing that (I’m strongly pro-choice but as someone said… “We live in a society”).
Facebook will also open and hand out your private messages in many other cases, I remember this case about drugs and whatnot: https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/warrant-for-encrypted-facebook-messages-causes-privacy-worry.html but I don’t know how this specific case ended.
What is worth to note is at the start they give the justification as fight against cartels, exploiters and terrorists but if that is their concern the law should be pointing out these 3 specific things and not used to catch teenagers smoking weed. And also how words like “encryption” and “security” and “private” turn out to be nothing more than marketing buzzwords.
Funny how abuse of power by the state makes normal people move to the apps used by “shaddy people” for extra privacy only to get in fact the normal level of privacy a normal person would expect to get.
I think we should first change the law and using end-to-end encryption is only stopgap measure.
In Poland Pegasus was simply used by ruling party to hack phones of the people they don’t like: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/polish-mayor-targeted-by-pegasus-spyware-media-2023-03-03/
How you can even defend yourself against this? From thechnological standpoint we can try this or that but encroaching legislative changes will sooner or later push us against the wall. At the end of the day if law allows they will phisically take your device and phisically make you give them access and even if you install killswitch they simply will make it illegal and give you 5 years just for having it on your device.
If someone attached themselves to your body transfusion-like, and used your organs, do you think they have the right to do that against your will if they would die by being detached from your body? I.E do you think the state should have the right to lock you in a cell to prevent you from detaching your transfusion tube from that person?
Generally the logic is that once the fetus has reached viability (i.e. capable of being removed and continuing life without the mother), then acts that result in death of the fetus are no longer necessary nor morally valid. It is reasonable to expect the fetus to be removed from the mother and provided life support at that stage.
The elimination of Roe has brought many states back to the stone ages…
For all we know these girl could have been raped by a family member, or other bad actor and the mother was just helping the only way she knew how.
I am sure this was extremely scarring and emotional for the mother and daughter, and now the state wants to charge them for murder…
The state this happened in didn’t change their abortion policy when roe v wade was appealed though.
I’m pro abortion, but not at 28 weeks. A baby can survive at 28 weeks. Not only did they cause an abortion, they then illegally disposed of a dead body.
I’m for abortion in emergencies, such as any time an expectant mother feels like it’s necessary. Women are not mindless incubators and shouldn’t be treated like them under the law.
No one is saying they’re “mindless incubators”, but “I want to fit in my jeans again” isn’t an “emergency” and doesn’t give them the right to take drugs to abort a baby that could survive out in the world at its age.
Just so we’re on the same page here - you feel that a woman should be able to abort a 39 week old baby?
Just so we’re on the same page here - you feel that a woman should be able to abort a 39 week old baby?
I support abortion in all circumstances. The rights of the woman supersede that of the fetus, period.
And yes, when you infringe on a person’s right to abortion, you are relegating them to the status of a mindless incubator rather than a person. I find that much more uncomfortable than aborting an unwanted fetus.
Fuck Meta
This quote should be higher. Everyone defending Meta, Elon, or Google obviously has a financial interest in doing so. These companies and individuals are sub human trash
This is an infuriating story for sure, but I just want to clarify for anybody just seeing it for the first time that it happened in 2022.
I knew it sounded familiar. I remember this.
Honestly though, if anything things have only gotten worse not better.
It terrifies me! This news was shocking for about three days. Now, a year later, we know law enforcement is buying info from data brokers and google has gone back on their “promise” to delete sensitive location data for people who visit abortion clinics. And it’s just crickets from lawmakers, nothing from regulators, except that maybe we should ban one specific app. I knew the fourth amendment wasn’t real anymore after prism but dear god it just keeps escalating with every year of my adulthood. Panopticon ass country.
If only people could be united to sacrifice one giant company make an example of them. But you couldn’t get ten Americans to fart in synchronicity unless you were paying them and their streaming services were offline. “Revolutionary changes for the better to our economy? Nah, I’m good.”
I actually disagree a bit - I think there’s very little incentive (regardless of what americans might want) for government bodies to ever truly regulate any of these companies because they give them so much more power to surveil and prevent dissent and, essentially, do things that our government is not supposed to be able to do, but “legally” through loopholes. Maybe I’m an optimist, but i do think a majority of people want revolutionary changes for the better to our economy- and accountability from corporations (who are currently acting almost in the capacity of unelected governments in many cases), and data privacy. But the people who would have the power to regulate meta and google and the rest just…don’t wanna. People come together, or try to, people lobby and make phone calls and protest, movements do exist, but lawmakers with sufficient power to change things are just deliberately unresponsive, because they work for capital, not us. We definitely have a low degree of fart synchronization here, but I don’t think it’s our only problem when it comes to things like meta. Meta has as much power as congress, but we can’t vote them out.
One of the many, many, many reasons to keep Meta out of the Fediverse if it can be managed.
How do we know that Fediverse will be any different? After all if it is a law and you get a legal subponae, you comply with it.
It probably wouldn’t be.
The thing is, Meta has the money and power to fight against injustices like this, but instead, they’re complicit, and I’d prefer their corrupting influence stay far, far away from the fediverse.
Dude it’s not really called complicit anymore they’re effectively a subsidiary of the government.
Agree. People like to act like Lemmy is a utopia where privacy is always protected and what not. The fact is when it comes down to it, the admins have to comply with the law. If a warrant shows up at their door, they got no choice but to give up information.
From an opsec standpoint, certainly. Or they’ll kick in your door like the Kolektiva admin. Definitely best to use end to end encryption if you have any need to protect yourself from state actors. But also fuck meta
I work for an agency that works with victims of crime. State and federal laws allow for privileged, confidential communication. We have had people ask for help via social media. This is very concerning.
I would honestly hope you bring it up to your agency to start offering chat channels that are end to end encrypted and have all history wiped clean after certain period of time.
I shared the article this morning and we have all been discussing this. One option is to request they immediately switch to Whatsapp and delete the FB message. The good part, is that our state coalition is already looking into this.
I’m sure this is completely fine.
Facebook is a den of depravity and malice. And Nebraska. Thank God I’m not living there, what a waste of taxpayer dollars. They’re gonna throw the mom and kid in jail in with the actual rapists, murderers, convicted priests, and anyone else unlucky enough to have had a miscarriage in a backwards state.
If you have the funds, move to a different state like I did. And delete Facebook like I did in November 2016.
This is a tough one. Let’s replace abortion with a crime, robbery? If someone stole your grand pappys rolex and talked about it on Meta, I think most would agree that it was proper. If people talked about assaulting someone, most would agree that it’s proper as well. Add a late term abortion into the conversation, it becomes controversial.
Edit*
Others are correct the tech page isn’t the place to debate medical stuff.
I think if a crime is committed via the law, Facebook should comply. If there wasn’t political component, this wouldn’t even be a conversation.
Stupid to talk about anything on Facebook.
If it had been phone company turning over text messages then I’d be livid. But seriously who fucking trusts Facebook with that kind of thing? After everything they’ve done that’s been proven why would anyone trust them with an iota of private information?
Not that I’m cool with this, or that awareness isn’t good, but has there really been no new developments and nothing new to say about this in 11 months? Did they get charged? Convicted? Has anyone else faced this issue since then? Facebook hasn’t had a comment since then?
The daughter plead guilty, scheduled to Jul 20th for sentencing. The mother is going to trial on the 14th. If convicted, she’ll get another sentencing hearing.
The two women told detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division that they’d discussed the matter on Facebook Messenger
… why would they do that?
