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The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

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Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#21
To repeat my comment on the earlier now-buried post:

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!

This does not entail that obeying the law is always immoral, or even that breaking it is always moral. You can come to the conclusion that it is okay for companies to break some laws but not others 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, and also because the court order may not inform Facebook what the case is about. 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 Celeste Burgess, the Nebraska teenager, nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case.

(originally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32402302, edited a bit)

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still really surprised. Surprised that a prosecution happened for a 17-year-old girl. And that Facebook gave that 17-year-old girl's private messages to the police to facilitate that prosecution.

I disagree with the entire idea of prosecution here, I think it's wrong, but I think we should recognize that Facebook was served with a lawful warrant for data here - surely we want facebook to obey the law in the countries they operate, and if a warrant is presented they should comply?

Yes, Facebook had to comply and because Facebook doesn't implement end-to-end encryption so that they can data mine their users' chat they had to provide the details. They could alternatively implement end-to-end encryption to protect themselves and their users from these warrants. Something like Signal where the service doesn't know what the messages are that are being sent between users so warrants for seizing that data have no impact on the users' privacy.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#24

This is an incredibly sad story all around. The saddest part, to me, was that for whatever reason they chose to wait rather than legally ending the pregnancy much earlier. The fetus aborted was 28 weeks, or 7 months, and almost certainly viable.

The saddest part to me is that two women are going to face prison time, effectively ruining their lives. Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Who could say. I can say for sure that two humans are experiencing something truly, truly awful and may be forced into enduring the awfulness for years to come.

> Could the fetus have survived? Who could say.

Can someone ELI5 why this is the standard? Shouldn't it be something more reasonable like "has a relatively developed brain", "can experience pain", "shows early signs of consciousness", "has major organs", "is a recognizably bipedal/human lifeform", etc? Every cutoff I've encountered seems to be entirely subjective and like it reduces down to "whatever I find politically expedient".

The very cynical side of me feels like the standard typically used was meant to buy as much time as possible for an abortion and not because it was grounded in anything scientific or morally conscionable.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#25

It was court ordered. Facebook didn't just give this information voluntarily to police.

My understanding is that a court order is not an immediate, absolute command with zero recourse or ability to have one's lawyers respond? Surely Facebook could have done something, even if it wasn't ultimately successful?

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#26

This is an incredibly sad story all around. The saddest part, to me, was that for whatever reason they chose to wait rather than legally ending the pregnancy much earlier. The fetus aborted was 28 weeks, or 7 months, and almost certainly viable.

The saddest part to me is that two women are going to face prison time, effectively ruining their lives. Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Who could say. I can say for sure that two humans are experiencing something truly, truly awful and may be forced into enduring the awfulness for years to come.

> Could the fetus have survived?

Much more likely than not at 28 weeks. ~50% viability is like a month earlier than that.

> Would the fetus have had a good quality of life?

Roughly even or better chances of lasting complications. Of course, some percentage of babies delivered at every stage of pregnancy have a chance of lasting complications. You could throw a "who could say" after anything you want.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#27
post #9

I'll preface this by saying that I am pro-choice, but 28 weeks is late, very late. > Survival rates for infants born at 28 weeks gestation is between 80-90 percent. Babies born at 28 weeks old only have a 10 percent chance of having long-term health problems.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this would be illegal almost everywhere. Most countries have some exceptions for abortions this late on if performed by a doctor under circumstances that make it medically necessary, but this ain't that. (The main places where an elective abortion this late on might actually be legal are actually in the more liberal parts of America, as far as I know.)

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#28

It was court ordered. Facebook didn't just give this information voluntarily to police.

My understanding is that a court order is not an immediate, absolute command with zero recourse or ability to have one's lawyers respond? Surely Facebook could have done something , even if it wasn't ultimately successful?

I fully believe abortion should be reasonably legal, and if it were more accessible it may have prevented a lot of the tragedy of this case. But given the details in this article, it seems like this case would be criminal even in that hypothetical world.

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#29

It was court ordered. Facebook didn't just give this information voluntarily to police.

I don't think the article is intended as a direct criticism of Facebook specifically. The purpose of the article is "to show in shocking detail how abortion could and will be prosecuted in the United States, and how tech companies will be enlisted by law enforcement to help prosecute their cases."

Re: The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

#30
post #27
post #9

I'll preface this by saying that I am pro-choice, but 28 weeks is late, very late. > Survival rates for infants born at 28 weeks gestation is between 80-90 percent. Babies born at 28 weeks old only have a 10 percent chance of having long-term health problems.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this would be illegal almost everywhere. Most countries have some exceptions for abortions this late on if performed by a doctor under circumstances that make it medically necessary, but this ain't that. (The main places where an elective abortion this late on might actually be legal are actually in the more liberal parts of America, as far as I know.)

>Yeah, I'm pretty sure this would be illegal almost everywhere.

Directly from the article:

>[28 weeks] is also later than Nebraska's 20-week abortion ban (abortion at 28 weeks is legal in about half the country; Nebraska's abortion laws have not changed since Roe v Wade was overturned).

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