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.
I dont think most people actually read the article. These women performed an abortion at 28 weeks, abortion that late in the game has always been illegal in every state.
Facebook offers a platform to send messages. Those messages are stored somewhere. They never claimed it was end to end encrypted. If they are served a warrant they must comply. If you dont like it use a service that is end to end encrypted like Sigal or Matrix.
And by the way, if you read the article again and again, you will understand that Facebook was asked for this information because the police were told about it. Facebook simply complied with a warrant.
I cant stand Facebokk as much as the next guy, but this is a terrible example of something to get out the pitchforks. These women used an unenecrypted platform to commit a crime that has never been legal in the US. And find me another country that allows you to abort a baby at 28 weeks for non medical reasons.
Actually there is no debate. It’s called a fetus until it is born. It doesn’t suddenly turn into a person with superior rights because some other person suddenly decides that now the woman lost the rights to her own body.
They are just complying with the law here. As much as I don’t think Meta are great people I’d rather that they follow the law than make their own decisions. Of course we should also consider fixing these laws, but that isn’t really Meta’s responsibility.
If law enforcement knocks on my door with a valid warrant I’m going to comply. It would be nice to have some legal assistance to help validate the warrant but at the end of the day in this case it was almost certainly valid.
If this was about a murder rather than abortion people would be applauding Meta for helping catch the murderer. I think what people are actually mad about is the law, and they are using Meta as a scapegoat.
But at the end of the day E2EE is the best solution here. Don’t give private data to others, they can’t be trusted because they can be compelled by the law.
If the oberstgruppenfuhrer of the schutsstaffel came to your house and asked where the juden were hiding and had a valid order, would you show them the attic?
(Also not a Lawyer) I’m not familiar with the laws in Nebraska, but they wouldn’t be able to get the messages from Meta. They would need to get on the devices, but it seemed like the people charged themselves tipped off about using Messenger to the police. The only other way to get E2EE message from a device without consent is with the use of force.
From the article:
However, campaigners note that Meta always has to comply with legal requests for data, and that the company can only change this if it stops collecting that data in the first place. In the case of Celeste and Jessica Burgess, this would have meant making end-to-end encryption (E2EE) the default in Facebook Messenger. This would have meant that police would have had to gain access to the pair’s phones directly to read their chats. (E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.)
(…)
However, private chat messages are only one component in a whole range of digital evidence that is likely to be used by police to prosecute illegal abortions in the United States. Investigators will be able to request access to many data sources, including digital health records, Google search history, text messages, and phone location data.
IANAL but it depends. In the US there is strong protection for the contents of your mind and self-incrimination. So if your keys were locked behind a strong password the legal system wouldn’t be able to access it. But if you had no password they would be able to seize the device and read the messages.
So basically if the messages are inaccessible other than a secret that you know them yes, they wouldn’t be forced to reveal it.
For the murder example, remember Apple being in the news for not providing the FBI access via a backdoor in the OS to the San Bernardino shooter’s phone? There were plenty of people on both sides of that argument saying they should or shouldn’t comply. That’s why it’s essential for E2EE to maintain privacy
And this is one thing that people don’t seem to understand about Lemmy et al. If you post messages (including DM’s) on any one host, that message will be duplicated to any federated hosts.
In most cases the only encryption would be in transit, so all it takes is for one of those hosts to be in a jurisdiction where the local authorities can seize the data, hackers can infiltrate poorly secured server, etc
If you are worried about the privacy/security of your data, it’s not really any safer here then on Reddit or Facebook etc. It may be more resistant to corporate influence but at the same time a kind citizen running a node is less likely to have money to fight legal action and warrants.
Look, I’m not making a morality judgement here, but this is greatly oversimplifying things. Fetuses are considered generally viable outside the womb at 24 weeks (5.5 months).
This abortion occurred at 7 months. This could have been a person if labor was induced or a c-section had been performed at the time instead of an abortion. I have a hard time believing that doesn’t or shouldn’t have an effect on the discussion.
Hard line, single sentence takes like yours or the comment you were responding to help no one. They offer no room for nuance, for consideration of unique situations, to fit in with the complex reality we all live in. They can’t convince anyone on the other side and don’t further depth of thought in those in agreement.
They offer a cheap dopemine hit for people already in agreement with you, further encourage polarization of opinions, and general tribalism. It’s useless preaching to the choir that only further entrenches hardline stances and decreases the likelyhood for discussion, compromise, or anything vital to surviving and interacting with others in reality.
Again, not making a judgement on fetuses, personhood, or abortion one way or another. My partner was born at 6 months and given up for adoption. Conversely I have a close friend who got pregnant from a one night stand nearly a decade ago, decided to keep it despite that being quite possibly the worst choice for her at the time, and her life has been in the shitter since with no signs towards improvement. I see both sides of this.
I just refuse the idea that anything as complicated as the question of “When does personhood begin?” can be broken down into asinine hot takes by either side.
The rights of the already birthed person (you know, the one who’s body you are trying to police) should have considerably more weight than the rights of an unborn fetus.
What else is there to add? The baby has been baking for 7 months. If you are okay with aborting babies 7 months into pregnancy there is something seriously fucked up with your head.
Chill, I’m not, but that’s not really relevant here.
People who think it’s a fetus and not a baby aren’t going to be convinced by you just being upset. If you look at most comments, 7 months vs 1 week is meaningless to anyone who hasn’t had a kid.
Spell it out more if you want any chance whatsoever of getting through to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you:
Fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks, roughly 5.5 months. This person could have had an abortion legally and safely at any point during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, but instead waited 8 weeks further and did it ad-hoc and unsafely.
Disagree. No one was hurt here. The fact that the baby could have lived means nothing. The mothers body is her own, and the choice was hers and only hers.
If the baby is capable of surviving outside of the womb then how is nobody hurt exactly? And she still gave birth to the thing, as it was a still birth. She killed it and then passed it. Literally the only thing she did here was kill the baby, all else is the same.
Not sure how this is in any way an America specific thing.
The abortion was at 28 weeks, fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks, and Nebraska allows abortions until 20 weeks. They waited two whole months past the point they could have taken care of this with no fuss, one month past the point of viability.
They didn’t do this through a doctor or any safe/proper way. The pregnant woman took medicine to kill the fetus, then delivered it as a stillbirth. Her and her mother then burned the stillborn and buried it on a farm.
The mother and daughter told police they discussed it in their facebook dms, police made a formal legal request for the dms to facebook and facebook complied. They didn’t follow the golden rule of “don’t talk to police”. On top of that, the court documents indicate that the dms were part of a bunch of evidence that made the case, not the single piece of evidence that convicted them.
Honestly asking, is there something I’m missing here that would have made this turn out differently in another country? America isn’t as great as its own patriotism claims, but I see this take very often in situations that don’t seem to have much at all to do with it happening in America.
I read the article at a glance, to be fair. Iirc the pair live in one of the many states where abortion itself is now criminalised, so there was no way to deal with this “without a fuss”.
The godawful changes with Roe v Wade happened after this incident, and you can’t be charged with breaking a law by actions taken before the law was in effect/changed. So at the time, they still could have done the abortion legally.
I live in a third world country with a crumbling infrastructure, shitloads of violence and crime, a rapidly rising cost of living, crap working opportunities and corrupt government.
Americans live in a first world country where it seems more and more like most of the problems I mentioned are somehow worse there and the ones they haven’t got yet are on the horizon.
I used to think it would be my future home. Now I’m looking for literally anything other than the US/China.
To the people shitting on the idea of a default defederation with Meta, how about we deferedate not because it will affect us as posters but because they are evil pieces of shit?
lemmy: we’ll give you a way to dm anyone on site, but please don’t use that, if you set up an app on this other open source service we’re not affiliated with (which is basically an encrypted discord) we’ll do our best to make it as seamless for you as possible. we’ll keep warning you for your own privacy.
meta/facebook: aggressively keeps you on-platform for spying purposes; literally killed xmpp a decade ago and they’ll fuckin do it again (if we let them)
The Lemmy DM is imo actually quite important.
If I want to get in touch with someone about a post, nothing more. It is an easy option, and serves a purpose.
It isn’t imo meant to be used for anything else.
yep, it’s important that we have this capability, but it’s also nice that unlike other platforms that do their best to lock you in, lemmy actively pushes you toward a safer alternative
Matrix, which is pretty much an encrypted and open-source Discord clone (at least in the same fashion as Lemmy would be a Reddit clone). I personally use Element to interact with it and have a matrix.org account, but Matrix is just like the fediverse, you can choose any instance or client you want, or even host an instance yourself. In your Lemmy settings you can set up your Matrix user, right below your email address as of 0.18.1, and if you do, a new buttons saying “send secure message” will show up on your profile, next to “send message”, which will redirect people trying to message you to Matrix.
How on earth did Meta kill XMPP, where is that even from lol. They didn’t even have a standalone messaging app until 2011, which is after Google Talk dropped support for XMPP.
Some game-of-telephone misinformation originating from this article - though it has gone from Google killed it (which this article states), to it was a protocol that allowed Facebook and Google to communicate and then got killed, to Facebook killed it.
I don’t even agree that Google killed it, because it’s simply a messaging protocol, it doesn’t “die”. Maybe you could try to argue that Google killed Jabber, but I used Jabber back in the early 00s, pretty much nobody else did lol, almost all IM communication was done over MSN Messenger. Google Talk brought XMPP “users” and they left when Google sunsetted Talk in favour of Hangouts. Facebook Messenger used XMPP for a time, so if anything they “revived” it (they didn’t, it was never dead), but, like all the other messaging apps, they moved to their own proprietary version to add their own features.
This is what XMPP was actually designed for, the X literally means “eXtensible”, whether it’s extended open source or into proprietary versions.
I feel like there’s a lot of anti-tech misinformation on Lemmy and it’s great to be skeptical, but honestly I think we waste a ton of time being easily ragebait’d into the wrong shit.
my understanding was that while google is the main culprit, facebook and google both played a big part in killing it. but since we’re discussing meta/facebook here, and they’re not blameless, i focused on that.
I think we should try to do better here and provide actual reasoning to our statements instead of unbridled rage, regardless of the topic, because this isn’t valuable content. I work in an adjacent industry and I believe that a lot of what people have said lately about this topic is overly sensationalized and I don’t mind discussing it, but “fuck Meta/Google because they’re evil” is subjective as hell and gets us nowhere except back to Reddit culture.
This discussion pyramid was a good post from the other day:
Saying distrust is an ad hominem is one of the takes ever, lol. And that’s what all of this boils down to, trust. Do we trust Meta with not exploiting all of our data, and turning it against us at the earliest opportunity? Do we trust Meta that they want to contribute to the fediverse, and not just hurt it because it’s a competitor?
By the same logic, blocking or banning a person instead of vetting every post and comment of theirs would also be an ad hominem. But at the end of the day, it’s just practical. Meta has a long and not so proud history of being extremely anti-consumer, and shoving that track record under the rug, trying to absolve them of responsibility and consequences for their actions, under the thought-terminating cliche of an ad hominem is neither productive nor practical.
Yes, people are mad at Meta, and yes, the distrust means their actions are scrutinized more than they otherwise would be, but that doesn’t mean that their actions aren’t actually massively anti-consumer, and that they aren’t a massive liability. In this particular case, you can make the argument that they had a legal obligation to hand over the data, had they not tried to build a walled garden with no privacy they wouldn’t have had the data to hand over to begin with.
(also, unrelated: you can embed images using the  syntax, and you can even add alt text in the brackets to help users with screen readers)
I think the simpler answer is more likely to be correct. The Fediverse isn’t big enough to really bother Meta, but ActivityPub is a convenient way to seem cool, so they’ll partially support it as long as it doesn’t cost them all that much. Once the marketing gimmick has run it’s course, they’ll drop it.
I think the same was true for XMPP. I don’t think they planned to kill XMPP and I don’t think they plan to kill ActivityPub. But they did kill XMPP, and they’ll probably kill ActivityPub by accident as well when they support it just well enough to pull people over.
So I’m not worried about some Meta conspiracy to kill ActivityPub, I’m worried about getting steamrolled on accident for a similar reason that people don’t want to share locations of where they took pictures: they don’t want the big mass of people coming to destroy something unique.
So my recommendation is to push for making everything E2E encrypted by default, and have every message cryptographically signed by the contributor. If there’s something ad companies hate it’s privacy, and that’s what we should be pursuing. I’m not sure how that works for Lemmy, but surely there’s a way for instances to manage who can decrypt messages.
Saying distrust is an ad hominem is one of the takes ever, lol.
It is literally ad hominem, that is the definition. We aren’t discussing whether we can trust Meta or not, we’re discussing a specific topic.
By the same logic, blocking or banning a person instead of vetting every post and comment of theirs would also be an ad hominem.
It definitely is, but again, we aren’t discussing a person or an entity, we’re discussing a topic related to that person or entity. This isn’t a discussion on whether Meta should be defederated or not, frankly that’s simple, just join an instance that defederates with Meta or don’t, or build your own! There’s a ton of freedom here.
And I’m not saying ad hominem arguments can’t be used, but when an argument is entirely made up of ad hominem points while discussing a specific topic it isn’t a good argument.
Also, side note, as for trust I definitely don’t think we can trust corporate entities, but I also don’t think we can entirely trust the Fediverse as it exists already. We know there’s been an influx of bot accounts, moderation tools aren’t great yet, and every platform attracts bad actors.
(also, unrelated: you can embed images using the  syntax, and you can even add alt text in the brackets to help users with screen readers)
Thanks for the tip! Haven’t been able to get that working well here, I think I was missing the exclamation mark.
Fine, their comments are nonsense that aren’t based in reality and the Fediverse and it’s communities will suffer the fate of every other echo chamber shithole social media if it’s moderators don’t take action and make a conscious decision to tackle misinformation, regardless of whether or not it fits their personal bias. Better?
Yeah Google is more to blame for that.
When they defedarated it was pretty much the end of XMPP.
From what I remember, Facebook used the protocol but never opened their service for federation.
correction: it was both! fedbook chat also supported xmpp at first, they never federated but you could at least use it with a jabber client. then when they had enough market share they killed it.
fun semi related fact is that whatsapp, at least a couple of years ago, was using modified ejabberd (ie an xmpp server) as the backend - so arguably they helped with EEE too.
google does seem to be the main culprit, but facebook still played a role as far as i’m aware. these two companies also colluded a lot so i wouldn’t trust either of them with anything federated
I totally agree with your sentiment… However they don’t have a choice. They are legally obligated to turn that information over if they are served a warrant. Doing anything less is obstruction at the very least and they could be shut down and put into receivership.
The fault here is with the two individuals trusting a corporation to keep data private and to put the individuals interests ahead of the corporation. Neither is a realistic expectation.
they could have made their shitty DM system end-to-end encrypt messages by default, instead of burying that feature[0] in chat settings
or, they could have used their MASSIVE wealth and lobbying power to directly fight the warrant in court (if there even was one, they have a long history of just requiring a form ostensibly signed by any cop to turn over private data)
or they could have just lied and said they couldn’t find the data
I don’t disagree that people shouldn’t trust Facebook but saying “they don’t have a choice” is absurd
What good is that bloated userbase if it’s just dead or abandoned accounts? If anything, they are more likely to just ctrl + C > ctrl + V their users as well as their privacy policy on their client, which doesn’t really help anyone. Besides, can facebook really be trusted to play by the rules?
That’s just straight up not true. Also I hope you are aware how Hot/Active/Top sort works. Let that decision be left up to the users instead of forcing your misinformation on to them.
yo by any chance do you got some stuff I could look into when it comes to how the fediverse works and how threads works as well? If I am wrong, I want to at least see why and also because Yeah to an extent I am kinda assuming stuff based on the comments I’m reading as well as what I personally think.
Well active and hot stuff shows new content and stuff that is being upvoted and commented on. They also tend to drop in time to be replaced by new content and so old content isn’t perpetually on the front page. So if it’s only active stuff showing up, dead accounts on threads would never show up or really affect anything, right? They’d just be buried in Meta’s huge database.
I vote to write this reasoning at the very top, on the sticked topics when it happens. Like, literally just write “Because Facebook is evil” and don’t elaborate.
Plus, if someone shows up being a concern troll on the point, they will laser focus on it, taking the bait, we can all just block the person, a world improved.
But also fuck these laws and the people passing them and the people voting for the people passing them. They’re the real evil.
We have to always assume rich corporations are going to do whatever serves their best interest. It’s nature. Like a mantis is gonna bite off her mate’s head when they’re done mating. It’s up to governing factors to keep them in check. On that note, +1 to defederate. They will cannibalize or however abuse Lemmy if it will make them a penny.
Are you saying that the individuals who run these servers and instances aren’t subject to the same laws? I read the article, and Facebook complied with a court order.
You don’t think anyone running Lemmy would do the same without access to lawyers and capital like Facebook has?
It’s not really possible as long as Lemmy is a website. E2EE works on Matrix because it’s an app, and therefore it can manage your encryption keys in ways a browser cannot do for you. (You can save things in the client, but not in a reliable enough way for something like the master key for every communication you ever had that if you lose you get locked out of all your chat history.) In the case of Lemmy, the signing keys for your federated actions are handled by the server, which is perfectly fine for 99% of what you use Lemmy for (public posts and comments), but it also means that even if they implemented E2EE for chats, the keys to decrypt the convo would be right on the same server.
That’s why Lemmy actively pushes you to set up a Matrix account, because Matrix makes better tradeoffs for the purposes of messaging, while Lemmy’s tradeoffs are more relevant to a link aggregator style social media.
Almost all countries have similar systems for obtaining evidence. These people were criminals, they broke the law and the legal system worked as designed to bring them to “justice”. Meta was just a pawn here with very little influence.
If this story was about a murder rather than an abortion people would think that Meta did the right thing to bring the murderer to justice. As I see it the problem is that people disagree with the law and are using Meta as a scapegoat. But you don’t fix stupid laws by having corporations go vigilante. I’d rather not have billionaires coming up with their own set of laws, that is a recipe for disaster. I think we need to fix the laws, which will fix the root cause of this issue.
Also use E2EE for all private information, cryptography can’t be compelled to reveal your private data by a court order.
Because they use what you say to tagert ads and keep a record of who you are. That’s how they make money.
Which goes back to… You’re just a product. Stop using large platforms for personal shit. That’s their business model, how is it evil if most people know these companies rely on stealing as much information from you as they legally can AND they still use them.
This is what I can agree with. We could blame Meta for encouraging people to give them data. Messenger does actually have E2EE encryption (apparently) but it is quite hidden and limited in functionality. If they made it the default this wouldn’t have been a position they ended up in, and they could have responded to the warrant with “We have no information matching this request.”
And how can we be sure that all the instances federated with any instance we participate on aren’t run by law enforcement themselves? I’d be surprised if there aren’t running instances by every major investigative agency themselves.
This is why everyone should take steps to protect their privacy. You don’t have to go 0-100 overnight. Just audit yourself and do a few things now. Keep those habits up. Then audit and add a few more things, repeat.
Every interaction on Lemmy is copied to all other federated instances. There are instances all over the world with a copy of yours and my comment. They can track and use those comments for any purpose. Its both a blessing and a curse of an open federated structure.
they can also scrape them. that’s not really the point.
people can dm on lemmy, and only the two instances that host the people on either end of the dm (which may even be the same instance) store that dm. that instance may actually receive a subpoena. but all of this is heavily discouraged by the lemmy interface itself, instead prompting people to set up a matrix account instead, and matrix chats are end-to-end encrypted.
If some fuckstick from Nebraska asked me to snitch on my users for something which isn’t a crime in my state, I would simply tell them to fuck themselves, go ahead, and try to have me extradited. If my instance were bordering on a trillion dollars market cap, I’d hire a fucking lawyer.
Also to the “well he only snitched on evil Stalinists” Radlibs, that’s not even true. He snitched on social democrats like you. He was never a friend of the proletariat.
However, private chat messages are only one component in a whole range of digital evidence that is likely to be used by police to prosecute illegal abortions in the United States. Investigators will be able to request access to many data sources, including digital health records, Google search history, text messages, and phone location data.
She was 7 months pregnant. That baby is viable outside the womb in many scenarios. It’s disgusting to abort a child at that point. The local law allows abortions up to 5 months into the pregnancy (20 weeks). That’s plenty of time to make a decision, and a pretty liberal allowance. Prosecution of this mother and daughter is justified and there is nothing wrong with Meta complying with the info request.
It’s not your decision and should not be the government’s. Only the pregnant person and their doctor matter. Possible input from their parents and/or other potential-parent of the fetus.
You’re giving away your right wingery too easily. When you call a fetus a baby, red flag, but sometimes people just use that (if the fetus is an intended pregnancy and the parent(s) plan to actually have a child, usually). So, in the interest of debate-bro “good faith,” ok.
Referring to abortion as disgusting. Well, that pretty much just ruined anything else you had to say. I bet open heart surgery or getting your arm reset after breaking can be pretty disgusting to most of us who aren’t used to such things. They’re all still medical procedures and their disgustingness or not is completely irrelevant to outsiders to the procedure. And if you’re simply disgusted at the idea of the procedure being done, that meaning, well one choose better words and two, yeah, that’s just reactionary mindset creeping in and spewing out your little fingers. At the end of the day whatever little nuggets of shit were implanted into YOUR brain as a child (such as “abortions are only valid until X arbitrarily decided date”) are irrelevant to the world and to this completely other human being seeking a medical procedure. Long story short: it’s none of your fucking business. A fetus is NOT a baby or a child and you’re purposely wrongly using the word to conflate the two. Again… right wingery…
Prosecution is not warrant for a seeking to obtain medical procedures. This isn’t the year 1647. Please fucking stop.
If you were discussing a purely rhetorical topic on “the moral and ethics of abortions and when they’re done” maybe you’d have some valid points and perhaps, because my brain was also rotted by arbitrary religious deadlines growing up, I’d be inclined to agree with hypothetical “if it were MY gf/wife, I’d want…” whatever to happen. But at the end of the day this isn’t our partner, it wasn’t our body, we aren’t doctors involved in the decision, we aren’t the person’s parent(s), we aren’t fucking Jesus or whatever. It’s not our decision to make, it’s no one’s but the person with the fetus under the care of a qualified physician. Who, btw, very well might be, and I’d assume probably was, advising towards birth and then surrendering for adoption. But it’s not their decision either. Just one single person gets that right with some important advisors along the way. We are none of those people, so, we and the government should probably fuck off forever.
And Zuck can completely fuck himself. Not even going to rant on that because corporations bending over and spreading fully for the government at the slightest hint of a request for private data has been happening for decades. They’re morally bankrupt cowards. Even protected from personal legal liability (by their corporations, which do provide that, unfortunately in most cases) they won’t even attempt to stand up for privacy rights if nothing else. Gross.
7 months is entirely viable and no doctor would recommend an abortion at 7 months barring some painful fatal disease in the fetus (am a physician myself) that’s why it was an illegal sketchy abortion. Even if the life of the mother were in danger it’d be an early delivery that would get performed, not an abortion.
This is the kind of case that the anti abortion rights folks will point to as a reason why abortion should be illegal so for so many people here to support this particular case is wild, you’re doing more harm than good.
You’re not a physician because no physician worth a grain of shit would be concerned about the fetus and not the insane overreach of government forcing the endangerment of the pregnant person’s life.
More right wingery.
If you are concerned with the fetus here in any fashion, sorry to be the first to break the news, but you have a reactionary take on this topic. I’ve been incredibly generous even (which many purists would roast us both alive for) and given that YOU can hold whatever opinions you want on birth and abortion and whatever- but you cannot apply your perceived morality around a medical procedure to other humans. You can say that makes whoever “look bad” all you want, ok, you think I give a fuck about the opinions of reactionaries who support forcing women to birth babies on top of the wars they want to send that future-kid to so that kid can shoot some random poor person in some far off land to enrich aforementioned reactionaries? I’m supposed to bow down to their opinions and their thoughts on me? No. That’s not how any of this works. Now you’ve been informed of what you support and going forward will never have the excuse of ignorance again. I’d suggest you do a little reflection. And stop lying about being a doctor online. No one cares. I’m Jesus Christ btw.
It’s not a “dunk” you debate pervert. It’s informing the uninformed in a generalized fashion.
Reading is hard. School was hard. I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault. Someone failed you along the way. I’m sorry that happened to you. If you keep reading and think really really hard, though, it might get better. I can’t promise anything 😔
I had yet to read the article when commenting, here’s more details:
The article:
Court and police records show that police began investigating 17-year-old Celeste Burgess and her mother Jessica Burgess after receiving a tip-off that the pair had illegally buried a stillborn child given birth to prematurely by Celeste. The two women told detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division that they’d discussed the matter on Facebook Messenger, which prompted the state to issue Meta with a search warrant for their chat history and data including log-in timestamps and photos.
From Motherboard (where you also can read court documents):
The state’s case relies on evidence from the teenager’s private Facebook messages, obtained directly from Facebook by court order, which show the mother and daughter allegedly bought medication to induce abortion online, and then disposed of the body of the fetus.
According to court records, Celeste Burgess, 17, and her mother, Jessica Burgess, bought medication called Pregnot designed to end pregnancy. Pregnot is a kit of mifepristone and misoprostol, which is often used to safely end pregnancy in the first trimester. In this case, Burgess was 28-weeks pregnant, which is later in pregnancy than mifepristone and misoprostol are recommended for use. It’s also later than Nebraska’s 20-week post-fertilization abortion ban, which makes allowances only if the pregnant person is at risk of death or “serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” (Nebraska’s abortion laws have not changed since Roe v Wade was overturned).
Yes, I’m not arguing or anything, I forgot to mention I appreciated the added context you provided. Just wanted to further expand on it for those wanting to get more context, as it seems to be a lot of people in the thread that didn’t read the article
The morality of having children at all is a separate point entirely. There are countless ways this could have ended or been prevented long before the fetus was viable outside the womb.
Pregnancy can never be 100 % prevented. Unless you sterilise someone. And you do not know the reasons for why this girl didn’t go through abortion earlier.
Thanks for adding some nuance that people might miss if they just read the headline. This girl broke some long established abortion laws by aborting at 7 months like you said. She is definitely in the wrong here.
At the same time, I don’t like meta for violating people’s privacy and working with law enforcement. Make law enforcement do their own jobs.
Still, I don’t feel sorry for them. These women definitely dug their own hole. You think it would be obvious to people by now to not talk about illegal things on any social media, especially meta.
I’m trying, but it seems that unfortunately Lemmy is yet another platform chock full of people so hard left that they downvote an opinion that 7 months pregnant is a bit too far along to have an abortion… it’s insane to me that 7 months is even a debate. I’m pro-abortion up to a point. That point starts to become concerning after the first trimester. This baby was in the third trimester…
You would want to force a 17 year old (or any person) to go through pregnancy and childbirth because you personally feel that’s the right thing to do? What about her rights? Does she lose them by getting impregnated? Because that’s what you are wanting to enforce.
No not at all. Just don’t get an abortion at 7 months. Literally doctors won’t do it because it’s unethical at that point. Did you even read the article? Like she took a bunch of drugs illegally to abort a fetus that could just about live outside the womb.
I am extremely pro choice, but we have a cutoff point for it that science has established to prevent cruelty.
But why is that a choice society makes for her body? I have asked that elsewhere but never get an answer from people who feel women should be forced to childbirth at a certain point: do you think people should be forced to donate organs?
I don’t know why you are bringing up forced childbirth. I already said I was pro choice, and I am even antinatalist.
She made the choice to not abort until 7 months. Thats the problem here. At a certain point the fetus is considered a human and you cross the line into murder. Medical science has determined that point to be around 5- 6 months. I believe women should have every right to abort before the point the fetus is considered conscious.
When someone is pregnant, at a certain point they have made a human, and you cant just get rid of it like that. There are other options like adoption at that point. I don’t know why you can’t see the nuance here.
It is still forced childbirth, obviously, because what else are you suggesting?
You think after a certain point in pregnancy a woman should have to birth the child so others can adopt it. After a certain point you think the woman loses the right to chose for her own and now society has the right to dictate that she has to continue being pregnant and birth the child. I think it is important to fully realize that this is the consequence of your reasoning.
The baby was nearly fully formed with a face, hands, feet, and a heartbeat that could have survived outside the womb. I implore you to go look up some photos of a 28 week fetus and I guarantee you’ll be surprised how much it looks like a normal baby.
She carried the baby to nearly full term. It had a face, hands, feet, and a heartbeat. It was a living being that could have survived outside the womb. Then she took abortion medication that wasn’t meant for pregnancies that far along. I’m not even religious and have always been pro-abortion, but there needs to be a reasonable cut-off point. In 2 and half more months she could have given it up for adoption.
You cannot be convicted for an action that was made illegal after you comitted it.
This is just Facebook sucking data and making money off others’ misfortune. I am sure that they didn’t hand over the chat logs for free.
“I got nothing to hide” is exactly the reason Meta is a multi-billion company. Your agenda should be “I have nothing to gain from sharing my life with them”.
You cannot be convicted for an action that was made illegal after you comitted it.
That was not my point. The point is, if the tech for mass surveillance is already in place and the laws change to more authoritarian or even just more dumb, it will be harder to escape those.
“I have nothing to gain from sharing my life with them”.
That is obvious not true, otherwise people would not be using social media.
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Yes, lets give Meta and Zuck te benefit of the doubt.
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I dont think most people actually read the article. These women performed an abortion at 28 weeks, abortion that late in the game has always been illegal in every state.
I don’t think it’s Facebook’s business, nor in its best interest or ours to store those messages, either way.
Read the article again and again, and then eventually understand the meta-issue here.
Facebook offers a platform to send messages. Those messages are stored somewhere. They never claimed it was end to end encrypted. If they are served a warrant they must comply. If you dont like it use a service that is end to end encrypted like Sigal or Matrix.
And by the way, if you read the article again and again, you will understand that Facebook was asked for this information because the police were told about it. Facebook simply complied with a warrant.
I cant stand Facebokk as much as the next guy, but this is a terrible example of something to get out the pitchforks. These women used an unenecrypted platform to commit a crime that has never been legal in the US. And find me another country that allows you to abort a baby at 28 weeks for non medical reasons.
Why is 28 any different than 2? Tf does it matter?
In short: Fetuses are viable outside the womb by that point, and no US state has ever allowed abortions that late into pregnancy.
Well at some point the fetus becomes a human and abortion becomes murder. There is a lot of debate where that line is.
Actually there is no debate. It’s called a fetus until it is born. It doesn’t suddenly turn into a person with superior rights because some other person suddenly decides that now the woman lost the rights to her own body.
Yeah, that sounds pretty on-brand for Meta
They are just complying with the law here. As much as I don’t think Meta are great people I’d rather that they follow the law than make their own decisions. Of course we should also consider fixing these laws, but that isn’t really Meta’s responsibility.
Law enforcement will knock on the doors of Fediverse servers and there will need to be some monetary fund for legal fees.
If law enforcement knocks on my door with a valid warrant I’m going to comply. It would be nice to have some legal assistance to help validate the warrant but at the end of the day in this case it was almost certainly valid.
If this was about a murder rather than abortion people would be applauding Meta for helping catch the murderer. I think what people are actually mad about is the law, and they are using Meta as a scapegoat.
But at the end of the day E2EE is the best solution here. Don’t give private data to others, they can’t be trusted because they can be compelled by the law.
If the oberstgruppenfuhrer of the schutsstaffel came to your house and asked where the juden were hiding and had a valid order, would you show them the attic?
Just wondering (INAL): if these women would have been using e2ee, could the police not legally require them to let them read it
Edit: I mean would the women not be required to let the police read the e2ee?
(Also not a Lawyer) I’m not familiar with the laws in Nebraska, but they wouldn’t be able to get the messages from Meta. They would need to get on the devices, but it seemed like the people charged themselves tipped off about using Messenger to the police. The only other way to get E2EE message from a device without consent is with the use of force.
From the article:
(…)
IANAL but it depends. In the US there is strong protection for the contents of your mind and self-incrimination. So if your keys were locked behind a strong password the legal system wouldn’t be able to access it. But if you had no password they would be able to seize the device and read the messages.
So basically if the messages are inaccessible other than a secret that you know them yes, they wouldn’t be forced to reveal it.
For the murder example, remember Apple being in the news for not providing the FBI access via a backdoor in the OS to the San Bernardino shooter’s phone? There were plenty of people on both sides of that argument saying they should or shouldn’t comply. That’s why it’s essential for E2EE to maintain privacy
And this is one thing that people don’t seem to understand about Lemmy et al. If you post messages (including DM’s) on any one host, that message will be duplicated to any federated hosts. In most cases the only encryption would be in transit, so all it takes is for one of those hosts to be in a jurisdiction where the local authorities can seize the data, hackers can infiltrate poorly secured server, etc
If you are worried about the privacy/security of your data, it’s not really any safer here then on Reddit or Facebook etc. It may be more resistant to corporate influence but at the same time a kind citizen running a node is less likely to have money to fight legal action and warrants.
Yes. You really should treat anything you post on Lemmy (or anywhere else that isn’t E2E Encrypted) as public.
This is also why Lemmy recommends against using Lemmy direct messages and recommends Matrix with E2EE instead.
She was 7 months pregnant. It was a murder.
A fetus isn’t a person, it was an abortion.
At 7 months it isn’t a fetus…
Yes it is. It is called and considered a fetus up until birth.
Look, I’m not making a morality judgement here, but this is greatly oversimplifying things. Fetuses are considered generally viable outside the womb at 24 weeks (5.5 months).
This abortion occurred at 7 months. This could have been a person if labor was induced or a c-section had been performed at the time instead of an abortion. I have a hard time believing that doesn’t or shouldn’t have an effect on the discussion.
Hard line, single sentence takes like yours or the comment you were responding to help no one. They offer no room for nuance, for consideration of unique situations, to fit in with the complex reality we all live in. They can’t convince anyone on the other side and don’t further depth of thought in those in agreement.
They offer a cheap dopemine hit for people already in agreement with you, further encourage polarization of opinions, and general tribalism. It’s useless preaching to the choir that only further entrenches hardline stances and decreases the likelyhood for discussion, compromise, or anything vital to surviving and interacting with others in reality.
Again, not making a judgement on fetuses, personhood, or abortion one way or another. My partner was born at 6 months and given up for adoption. Conversely I have a close friend who got pregnant from a one night stand nearly a decade ago, decided to keep it despite that being quite possibly the worst choice for her at the time, and her life has been in the shitter since with no signs towards improvement. I see both sides of this.
I just refuse the idea that anything as complicated as the question of “When does personhood begin?” can be broken down into asinine hot takes by either side.
The rights of the already birthed person (you know, the one who’s body you are trying to police) should have considerably more weight than the rights of an unborn fetus.
Single sentence “hot takes” like this help no one. They only serve as dopamine hits for people who agree with your statement already.
What else is there to add? The baby has been baking for 7 months. If you are okay with aborting babies 7 months into pregnancy there is something seriously fucked up with your head.
Chill, I’m not, but that’s not really relevant here.
People who think it’s a fetus and not a baby aren’t going to be convinced by you just being upset. If you look at most comments, 7 months vs 1 week is meaningless to anyone who hasn’t had a kid.
Spell it out more if you want any chance whatsoever of getting through to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you:
Fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks, roughly 5.5 months. This person could have had an abortion legally and safely at any point during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, but instead waited 8 weeks further and did it ad-hoc and unsafely.
Disagree. No one was hurt here. The fact that the baby could have lived means nothing. The mothers body is her own, and the choice was hers and only hers.
If the baby is capable of surviving outside of the womb then how is nobody hurt exactly? And she still gave birth to the thing, as it was a still birth. She killed it and then passed it. Literally the only thing she did here was kill the baby, all else is the same.
It is her body not yours. Just because a woman carries a foetus she doesn’t suddenly lose rights towards her own body.
deleted by creator
Jesus Christ, we really do already live in hell don’t we
Read the article guys, don’t fall into the headline trap. Facebook is definitely a bad guy, but it’s not the bad guy here.
💀
The trouple Meta-GOP-Elon.
That’s messed up
Jesus Christ, America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK87AKIPyZY
^this slaps
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=GK87AKIPyZY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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Not sure how this is in any way an America specific thing.
The abortion was at 28 weeks, fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks, and Nebraska allows abortions until 20 weeks. They waited two whole months past the point they could have taken care of this with no fuss, one month past the point of viability.
They didn’t do this through a doctor or any safe/proper way. The pregnant woman took medicine to kill the fetus, then delivered it as a stillbirth. Her and her mother then burned the stillborn and buried it on a farm.
The mother and daughter told police they discussed it in their facebook dms, police made a formal legal request for the dms to facebook and facebook complied. They didn’t follow the golden rule of “don’t talk to police”. On top of that, the court documents indicate that the dms were part of a bunch of evidence that made the case, not the single piece of evidence that convicted them.
Honestly asking, is there something I’m missing here that would have made this turn out differently in another country? America isn’t as great as its own patriotism claims, but I see this take very often in situations that don’t seem to have much at all to do with it happening in America.
I read the article at a glance, to be fair. Iirc the pair live in one of the many states where abortion itself is now criminalised, so there was no way to deal with this “without a fuss”.
The godawful changes with Roe v Wade happened after this incident, and you can’t be charged with breaking a law by actions taken before the law was in effect/changed. So at the time, they still could have done the abortion legally.
I can’t remember the last time I saw anything that made me think “I would like to go to America”.
These days it’s just another thing to add to the ever increasing list of reasons NOT to go there.
I live in a third world country with a crumbling infrastructure, shitloads of violence and crime, a rapidly rising cost of living, crap working opportunities and corrupt government.
Americans live in a first world country where it seems more and more like most of the problems I mentioned are somehow worse there and the ones they haven’t got yet are on the horizon.
I used to think it would be my future home. Now I’m looking for literally anything other than the US/China.
To the people shitting on the idea of a default defederation with Meta, how about we deferedate not because it will affect us as posters but because they are evil pieces of shit?
I think we’re realizing more and more any corporate-operated platform is luring us in to sell to us and sell us.
yeah, the difference is pretty stark:
- Mark Zuckerberg
(yes it sounds like satire but that’s a real quote)
I mean I agree with Zuck on that one.
The Lemmy DM is imo actually quite important. If I want to get in touch with someone about a post, nothing more. It is an easy option, and serves a purpose. It isn’t imo meant to be used for anything else.
yep, it’s important that we have this capability, but it’s also nice that unlike other platforms that do their best to lock you in, lemmy actively pushes you toward a safer alternative
What’s the name of that safer alternative?
A mail laden swallow.
Matrix, which is pretty much an encrypted and open-source Discord clone (at least in the same fashion as Lemmy would be a Reddit clone). I personally use Element to interact with it and have a matrix.org account, but Matrix is just like the fediverse, you can choose any instance or client you want, or even host an instance yourself. In your Lemmy settings you can set up your Matrix user, right below your email address as of 0.18.1, and if you do, a new buttons saying “send secure message” will show up on your profile, next to “send message”, which will redirect people trying to message you to Matrix.
https://matrix.org/
That was a quote from 13 years ago when he didn’t know how massive his enterprise would become. People change.
As for him, he became more evil.
People change, but the Zuck clearly isn’t people. My money is on time-traveling robot.
I bet lizard man personally, he just feels slimy a reptilian.
This was Google/Alphabet.
How on earth did Meta kill XMPP, where is that even from lol. They didn’t even have a standalone messaging app until 2011, which is after Google Talk dropped support for XMPP.
Some game-of-telephone misinformation originating from this article - though it has gone from Google killed it (which this article states), to it was a protocol that allowed Facebook and Google to communicate and then got killed, to Facebook killed it.
I don’t even agree that Google killed it, because it’s simply a messaging protocol, it doesn’t “die”. Maybe you could try to argue that Google killed Jabber, but I used Jabber back in the early 00s, pretty much nobody else did lol, almost all IM communication was done over MSN Messenger. Google Talk brought XMPP “users” and they left when Google sunsetted Talk in favour of Hangouts. Facebook Messenger used XMPP for a time, so if anything they “revived” it (they didn’t, it was never dead), but, like all the other messaging apps, they moved to their own proprietary version to add their own features.
This is what XMPP was actually designed for, the X literally means “eXtensible”, whether it’s extended open source or into proprietary versions.
I feel like there’s a lot of anti-tech misinformation on Lemmy and it’s great to be skeptical, but honestly I think we waste a ton of time being easily ragebait’d into the wrong shit.
Discord killed Compuserve!
You bastards!
Video killed the radio star!
my understanding was that while google is the main culprit, facebook and google both played a big part in killing it. but since we’re discussing meta/facebook here, and they’re not blameless, i focused on that.
but yeah, fuck google too.
I think we should try to do better here and provide actual reasoning to our statements instead of unbridled rage, regardless of the topic, because this isn’t valuable content. I work in an adjacent industry and I believe that a lot of what people have said lately about this topic is overly sensationalized and I don’t mind discussing it, but “fuck Meta/Google because they’re evil” is subjective as hell and gets us nowhere except back to Reddit culture.
This discussion pyramid was a good post from the other day:
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b48a0a91-c7a3-4cc5-a117-6deceedde205.png
Your comments are “ad hominem” at best.
That’s true. A lot of Reddit culture is cringe as well
Saying distrust is an ad hominem is one of the takes ever, lol. And that’s what all of this boils down to, trust. Do we trust Meta with not exploiting all of our data, and turning it against us at the earliest opportunity? Do we trust Meta that they want to contribute to the fediverse, and not just hurt it because it’s a competitor?
By the same logic, blocking or banning a person instead of vetting every post and comment of theirs would also be an ad hominem. But at the end of the day, it’s just practical. Meta has a long and not so proud history of being extremely anti-consumer, and shoving that track record under the rug, trying to absolve them of responsibility and consequences for their actions, under the thought-terminating cliche of an ad hominem is neither productive nor practical.
Yes, people are mad at Meta, and yes, the distrust means their actions are scrutinized more than they otherwise would be, but that doesn’t mean that their actions aren’t actually massively anti-consumer, and that they aren’t a massive liability. In this particular case, you can make the argument that they had a legal obligation to hand over the data, had they not tried to build a walled garden with no privacy they wouldn’t have had the data to hand over to begin with.
(also, unrelated: you can embed images using the
syntax, and you can even add alt text in the brackets to help users with screen readers)I think the simpler answer is more likely to be correct. The Fediverse isn’t big enough to really bother Meta, but ActivityPub is a convenient way to seem cool, so they’ll partially support it as long as it doesn’t cost them all that much. Once the marketing gimmick has run it’s course, they’ll drop it.
I think the same was true for XMPP. I don’t think they planned to kill XMPP and I don’t think they plan to kill ActivityPub. But they did kill XMPP, and they’ll probably kill ActivityPub by accident as well when they support it just well enough to pull people over.
So I’m not worried about some Meta conspiracy to kill ActivityPub, I’m worried about getting steamrolled on accident for a similar reason that people don’t want to share locations of where they took pictures: they don’t want the big mass of people coming to destroy something unique.
So my recommendation is to push for making everything E2E encrypted by default, and have every message cryptographically signed by the contributor. If there’s something ad companies hate it’s privacy, and that’s what we should be pursuing. I’m not sure how that works for Lemmy, but surely there’s a way for instances to manage who can decrypt messages.
It is literally ad hominem, that is the definition. We aren’t discussing whether we can trust Meta or not, we’re discussing a specific topic.
It definitely is, but again, we aren’t discussing a person or an entity, we’re discussing a topic related to that person or entity. This isn’t a discussion on whether Meta should be defederated or not, frankly that’s simple, just join an instance that defederates with Meta or don’t, or build your own! There’s a ton of freedom here.
And I’m not saying ad hominem arguments can’t be used, but when an argument is entirely made up of ad hominem points while discussing a specific topic it isn’t a good argument.
Also, side note, as for trust I definitely don’t think we can trust corporate entities, but I also don’t think we can entirely trust the Fediverse as it exists already. We know there’s been an influx of bot accounts, moderation tools aren’t great yet, and every platform attracts bad actors.
Thanks for the tip! Haven’t been able to get that working well here, I think I was missing the exclamation mark.
in a thread where we’re discussing how meta helped religiofascists violate someone’s human rights “meta is evil” is a summary, not an ad hominem
That’s literally nowhere in this chain of comments.
removed by mod
Fine, their comments are nonsense that aren’t based in reality and the Fediverse and it’s communities will suffer the fate of every other echo chamber shithole social media if it’s moderators don’t take action and make a conscious decision to tackle misinformation, regardless of whether or not it fits their personal bias. Better?
Yeah Google is more to blame for that. When they defedarated it was pretty much the end of XMPP. From what I remember, Facebook used the protocol but never opened their service for federation.
Was it Facebook that killed xmpp or Google? Legitimately asking because I’ve always seen that blamed on Google.
It was Google, they Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished it with Google Chat. Then they killed that themselves.
correction: it was both! fedbook chat also supported xmpp at first, they never federated but you could at least use it with a jabber client. then when they had enough market share they killed it.
fun semi related fact is that whatsapp, at least a couple of years ago, was using modified ejabberd (ie an xmpp server) as the backend - so arguably they helped with EEE too.
XMPP was never alive lol
google does seem to be the main culprit, but facebook still played a role as far as i’m aware. these two companies also colluded a lot so i wouldn’t trust either of them with anything federated
Yeah they can both get fucked. Cheers
And even if what I do is relatively tame, I want others to be protected from the wolf at the door.
Ya. That’s fucked. Just ruin someone’s life like that. Holy fuck.
I totally agree with your sentiment… However they don’t have a choice. They are legally obligated to turn that information over if they are served a warrant. Doing anything less is obstruction at the very least and they could be shut down and put into receivership.
The fault here is with the two individuals trusting a corporation to keep data private and to put the individuals interests ahead of the corporation. Neither is a realistic expectation.
they could have made their shitty DM system end-to-end encrypt messages by default, instead of burying that feature[0] in chat settings
or, they could have used their MASSIVE wealth and lobbying power to directly fight the warrant in court (if there even was one, they have a long history of just requiring a form ostensibly signed by any cop to turn over private data)
or they could have just lied and said they couldn’t find the data
I don’t disagree that people shouldn’t trust Facebook but saying “they don’t have a choice” is absurd
[0] https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/786613221989782
You’re exactly right. They are legally required to turn it over when compelled. Let’s keep that mess away from the federation. It will only get worse.
Any instance owner operating out of similar jurisdiction is under the same situation.
Because it will bring more people to the fedi while bringing a ton more content, support and development. How are people this blind still?
Give the choice to the users and don’t decide what you think is best for them.
What good is that bloated userbase if it’s just dead or abandoned accounts? If anything, they are more likely to just ctrl + C > ctrl + V their users as well as their privacy policy on their client, which doesn’t really help anyone. Besides, can facebook really be trusted to play by the rules?
That’s just straight up not true. Also I hope you are aware how Hot/Active/Top sort works. Let that decision be left up to the users instead of forcing your misinformation on to them.
yo by any chance do you got some stuff I could look into when it comes to how the fediverse works and how threads works as well? If I am wrong, I want to at least see why and also because Yeah to an extent I am kinda assuming stuff based on the comments I’m reading as well as what I personally think.
Well active and hot stuff shows new content and stuff that is being upvoted and commented on. They also tend to drop in time to be replaced by new content and so old content isn’t perpetually on the front page. So if it’s only active stuff showing up, dead accounts on threads would never show up or really affect anything, right? They’d just be buried in Meta’s huge database.
I vote to write this reasoning at the very top, on the sticked topics when it happens. Like, literally just write “Because Facebook is evil” and don’t elaborate.
Plus, if someone shows up being a concern troll on the point, they will laser focus on it, taking the bait, we can all just block the person, a world improved.
But also fuck these laws and the people passing them and the people voting for the people passing them. They’re the real evil.
We have to always assume rich corporations are going to do whatever serves their best interest. It’s nature. Like a mantis is gonna bite off her mate’s head when they’re done mating. It’s up to governing factors to keep them in check. On that note, +1 to defederate. They will cannibalize or however abuse Lemmy if it will make them a penny.
Are you saying that the individuals who run these servers and instances aren’t subject to the same laws? I read the article, and Facebook complied with a court order.
You don’t think anyone running Lemmy would do the same without access to lawyers and capital like Facebook has?
Lemmy promotes using Matrix, which is a separate service, so instance admins don’t need to be in the business of hosting private conversations.
Matrix is end-to-end encrypted so even the admins of your Matrix server could not provide your chats to law enforcement.
I wish Lemmy was as well. Ah well.
It’s not really possible as long as Lemmy is a website. E2EE works on Matrix because it’s an app, and therefore it can manage your encryption keys in ways a browser cannot do for you. (You can save things in the client, but not in a reliable enough way for something like the master key for every communication you ever had that if you lose you get locked out of all your chat history.) In the case of Lemmy, the signing keys for your federated actions are handled by the server, which is perfectly fine for 99% of what you use Lemmy for (public posts and comments), but it also means that even if they implemented E2EE for chats, the keys to decrypt the convo would be right on the same server.
That’s why Lemmy actively pushes you to set up a Matrix account, because Matrix makes better tradeoffs for the purposes of messaging, while Lemmy’s tradeoffs are more relevant to a link aggregator style social media.
Do you have to run your lemmy instance in the US?
Maybe do it in a less backward place
Not disagreeing with you there.
Almost all countries have similar systems for obtaining evidence. These people were criminals, they broke the law and the legal system worked as designed to bring them to “justice”. Meta was just a pawn here with very little influence.
If this story was about a murder rather than an abortion people would think that Meta did the right thing to bring the murderer to justice. As I see it the problem is that people disagree with the law and are using Meta as a scapegoat. But you don’t fix stupid laws by having corporations go vigilante. I’d rather not have billionaires coming up with their own set of laws, that is a recipe for disaster. I think we need to fix the laws, which will fix the root cause of this issue.
Also use E2EE for all private information, cryptography can’t be compelled to reveal your private data by a court order.
Do you think people who collaborated with dictatorial regimes should be excused? Because they followed the law?
Why didnt Meta implant E2EE on their private chat service then?
Because they use what you say to tagert ads and keep a record of who you are. That’s how they make money.
Which goes back to… You’re just a product. Stop using large platforms for personal shit. That’s their business model, how is it evil if most people know these companies rely on stealing as much information from you as they legally can AND they still use them.
This is what I can agree with. We could blame Meta for encouraging people to give them data. Messenger does actually have E2EE encryption (apparently) but it is quite hidden and limited in functionality. If they made it the default this wouldn’t have been a position they ended up in, and they could have responded to the warrant with “We have no information matching this request.”
If they truly encrypted all chats, they would lose their value to them since its unreadable to meta as well.
And how can we be sure that all the instances federated with any instance we participate on aren’t run by law enforcement themselves? I’d be surprised if there aren’t running instances by every major investigative agency themselves.
This is why everyone should take steps to protect their privacy. You don’t have to go 0-100 overnight. Just audit yourself and do a few things now. Keep those habits up. Then audit and add a few more things, repeat.
I need to do this myself, I’ve been slipping
Every interaction on Lemmy is copied to all other federated instances. There are instances all over the world with a copy of yours and my comment. They can track and use those comments for any purpose. Its both a blessing and a curse of an open federated structure.
they can also scrape them. that’s not really the point.
people can dm on lemmy, and only the two instances that host the people on either end of the dm (which may even be the same instance) store that dm. that instance may actually receive a subpoena. but all of this is heavily discouraged by the lemmy interface itself, instead prompting people to set up a matrix account instead, and matrix chats are end-to-end encrypted.
Its a social platfrom. Dont use it for personal communications.
Complying with the law is less of an issue than keeping that data accessible in the first place.
This. I don’t need to win, I just want Meta to lose.
General Hux!
Any Lemmy instance would have given over the same information in this case. Meta was complying with a valid, legal search warrant.
If some fuckstick from Nebraska asked me to snitch on my users for something which isn’t a crime in my state, I would simply tell them to fuck themselves, go ahead, and try to have me extradited. If my instance were bordering on a trillion dollars market cap, I’d hire a fucking lawyer.
You sound tough.
No you wouldn’t.
What year is it
This is what “Freedom & Family” means, apparently!
1984
Obligatory:
A racist, a snitch, a plagiarist and a rapist walk into a bar. The bartender asks: “How’s the new book coming mr. Orwell?”
Also to the “well he only snitched on evil Stalinists” Radlibs, that’s not even true. He snitched on social democrats like you. He was never a friend of the proletariat.
wha? ok?
Not you, the hypothetical person I quoted.
understandable
1684
1984 indeed…
She was 7 months pregnant. That baby is viable outside the womb in many scenarios. It’s disgusting to abort a child at that point. The local law allows abortions up to 5 months into the pregnancy (20 weeks). That’s plenty of time to make a decision, and a pretty liberal allowance. Prosecution of this mother and daughter is justified and there is nothing wrong with Meta complying with the info request.
It’s not your decision and should not be the government’s. Only the pregnant person and their doctor matter. Possible input from their parents and/or other potential-parent of the fetus.
You’re giving away your right wingery too easily. When you call a fetus a baby, red flag, but sometimes people just use that (if the fetus is an intended pregnancy and the parent(s) plan to actually have a child, usually). So, in the interest of debate-bro “good faith,” ok.
Referring to abortion as disgusting. Well, that pretty much just ruined anything else you had to say. I bet open heart surgery or getting your arm reset after breaking can be pretty disgusting to most of us who aren’t used to such things. They’re all still medical procedures and their disgustingness or not is completely irrelevant to outsiders to the procedure. And if you’re simply disgusted at the idea of the procedure being done, that meaning, well one choose better words and two, yeah, that’s just reactionary mindset creeping in and spewing out your little fingers. At the end of the day whatever little nuggets of shit were implanted into YOUR brain as a child (such as “abortions are only valid until X arbitrarily decided date”) are irrelevant to the world and to this completely other human being seeking a medical procedure. Long story short: it’s none of your fucking business. A fetus is NOT a baby or a child and you’re purposely wrongly using the word to conflate the two. Again… right wingery…
Prosecution is not warrant for a seeking to obtain medical procedures. This isn’t the year 1647. Please fucking stop.
If you were discussing a purely rhetorical topic on “the moral and ethics of abortions and when they’re done” maybe you’d have some valid points and perhaps, because my brain was also rotted by arbitrary religious deadlines growing up, I’d be inclined to agree with hypothetical “if it were MY gf/wife, I’d want…” whatever to happen. But at the end of the day this isn’t our partner, it wasn’t our body, we aren’t doctors involved in the decision, we aren’t the person’s parent(s), we aren’t fucking Jesus or whatever. It’s not our decision to make, it’s no one’s but the person with the fetus under the care of a qualified physician. Who, btw, very well might be, and I’d assume probably was, advising towards birth and then surrendering for adoption. But it’s not their decision either. Just one single person gets that right with some important advisors along the way. We are none of those people, so, we and the government should probably fuck off forever.
And Zuck can completely fuck himself. Not even going to rant on that because corporations bending over and spreading fully for the government at the slightest hint of a request for private data has been happening for decades. They’re morally bankrupt cowards. Even protected from personal legal liability (by their corporations, which do provide that, unfortunately in most cases) they won’t even attempt to stand up for privacy rights if nothing else. Gross.
7 months is entirely viable and no doctor would recommend an abortion at 7 months barring some painful fatal disease in the fetus (am a physician myself) that’s why it was an illegal sketchy abortion. Even if the life of the mother were in danger it’d be an early delivery that would get performed, not an abortion.
This is the kind of case that the anti abortion rights folks will point to as a reason why abortion should be illegal so for so many people here to support this particular case is wild, you’re doing more harm than good.
You’re not a physician because no physician worth a grain of shit would be concerned about the fetus and not the insane overreach of government forcing the endangerment of the pregnant person’s life.
More right wingery.
If you are concerned with the fetus here in any fashion, sorry to be the first to break the news, but you have a reactionary take on this topic. I’ve been incredibly generous even (which many purists would roast us both alive for) and given that YOU can hold whatever opinions you want on birth and abortion and whatever- but you cannot apply your perceived morality around a medical procedure to other humans. You can say that makes whoever “look bad” all you want, ok, you think I give a fuck about the opinions of reactionaries who support forcing women to birth babies on top of the wars they want to send that future-kid to so that kid can shoot some random poor person in some far off land to enrich aforementioned reactionaries? I’m supposed to bow down to their opinions and their thoughts on me? No. That’s not how any of this works. Now you’ve been informed of what you support and going forward will never have the excuse of ignorance again. I’d suggest you do a little reflection. And stop lying about being a doctor online. No one cares. I’m Jesus Christ btw.
I can’t believe you wrote this long a response and tried to dunk on someone without reading the article.
It’s not a “dunk” you debate pervert. It’s informing the uninformed in a generalized fashion.
Reading is hard. School was hard. I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault. Someone failed you along the way. I’m sorry that happened to you. If you keep reading and think really really hard, though, it might get better. I can’t promise anything 😔
This feels like satire. There’s no way someone could actually write this without laughing at how absurd it is.
yeah you clearly still haven’t read the article.
They avoided going to a hospital because they didn’t want the child, so they gave birth elsewhere. There was no doctor present to give medical advice.
The baby didn’t make it because of their negligence, so they burned and buried it.
How in the world could you defend something as gruesome as that? They’re monsters.
I had yet to read the article when commenting, here’s more details:
The article:
From Motherboard (where you also can read court documents):
Right, which is exactly what I said…
Yes, I’m not arguing or anything, I forgot to mention I appreciated the added context you provided. Just wanted to further expand on it for those wanting to get more context, as it seems to be a lot of people in the thread that didn’t read the article
Why should we continue birthing children when we already have so many that are insufficiently cared for?
If you, personally, would assume responsibility for this child, great, but otherwise leave it up to the individual.
The morality of having children at all is a separate point entirely. There are countless ways this could have ended or been prevented long before the fetus was viable outside the womb.
Pregnancy can never be 100 % prevented. Unless you sterilise someone. And you do not know the reasons for why this girl didn’t go through abortion earlier.
Thanks for adding some nuance that people might miss if they just read the headline. This girl broke some long established abortion laws by aborting at 7 months like you said. She is definitely in the wrong here.
At the same time, I don’t like meta for violating people’s privacy and working with law enforcement. Make law enforcement do their own jobs.
Still, I don’t feel sorry for them. These women definitely dug their own hole. You think it would be obvious to people by now to not talk about illegal things on any social media, especially meta.
I’m trying, but it seems that unfortunately Lemmy is yet another platform chock full of people so hard left that they downvote an opinion that 7 months pregnant is a bit too far along to have an abortion… it’s insane to me that 7 months is even a debate. I’m pro-abortion up to a point. That point starts to become concerning after the first trimester. This baby was in the third trimester…
You would want to force a 17 year old (or any person) to go through pregnancy and childbirth because you personally feel that’s the right thing to do? What about her rights? Does she lose them by getting impregnated? Because that’s what you are wanting to enforce.
No not at all. Just don’t get an abortion at 7 months. Literally doctors won’t do it because it’s unethical at that point. Did you even read the article? Like she took a bunch of drugs illegally to abort a fetus that could just about live outside the womb.
I am extremely pro choice, but we have a cutoff point for it that science has established to prevent cruelty.
But why is that a choice society makes for her body? I have asked that elsewhere but never get an answer from people who feel women should be forced to childbirth at a certain point: do you think people should be forced to donate organs?
I don’t know why you are bringing up forced childbirth. I already said I was pro choice, and I am even antinatalist.
She made the choice to not abort until 7 months. Thats the problem here. At a certain point the fetus is considered a human and you cross the line into murder. Medical science has determined that point to be around 5- 6 months. I believe women should have every right to abort before the point the fetus is considered conscious.
When someone is pregnant, at a certain point they have made a human, and you cant just get rid of it like that. There are other options like adoption at that point. I don’t know why you can’t see the nuance here.
It is still forced childbirth, obviously, because what else are you suggesting? You think after a certain point in pregnancy a woman should have to birth the child so others can adopt it. After a certain point you think the woman loses the right to chose for her own and now society has the right to dictate that she has to continue being pregnant and birth the child. I think it is important to fully realize that this is the consequence of your reasoning.
The baby was nearly fully formed with a face, hands, feet, and a heartbeat that could have survived outside the womb. I implore you to go look up some photos of a 28 week fetus and I guarantee you’ll be surprised how much it looks like a normal baby.
Also, meta was served a search warrant. They were required by law to comply.
It’s disgusting to wish on women that they should lose the rights to their own bodies that easily.
She carried the baby to nearly full term. It had a face, hands, feet, and a heartbeat. It was a living being that could have survived outside the womb. Then she took abortion medication that wasn’t meant for pregnancies that far along. I’m not even religious and have always been pro-abortion, but there needs to be a reasonable cut-off point. In 2 and half more months she could have given it up for adoption.
Well this bodes well for Threads.
Damn these seem like trustworthy people who we should definitely federate with.
Any and every Lemmy instance owner would hand over your DMs to law enforcement as well btw.
If you have nothing to hide… but then they just change the laws, now you are a criminal and they already have handy tools in place to convict you.
You cannot be convicted for an action that was made illegal after you comitted it. This is just Facebook sucking data and making money off others’ misfortune. I am sure that they didn’t hand over the chat logs for free. “I got nothing to hide” is exactly the reason Meta is a multi-billion company. Your agenda should be “I have nothing to gain from sharing my life with them”.
They handed over the chat logs in response to a court order to do so. The gov’t didn’t pay them. They forced them.
That was not my point. The point is, if the tech for mass surveillance is already in place and the laws change to more authoritarian or even just more dumb, it will be harder to escape those.
That is obvious not true, otherwise people would not be using social media.
Facebook doesn’t use e2e.
There is a private chat e2e feature, but then your chats don’t show up on PC.