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.
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?
yeah, the difference is pretty stark:
- 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)
They trust me. Dumb fucks.
- Mark Zuckerberg
(yes it sounds like satire but that’s a real quote)
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?
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.
A mail laden swallow.
I mean I agree with Zuck on that one.
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.
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
XMPP was never alive lol
literally killed xmpp a decade ago
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!
Video killed the radio star!
You bastards!
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.
they’re not blameless
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.
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.
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.
but “fuck Meta/Google because they’re evil” is subjective as hell and gets us nowhere except back to Reddit culture.
That’s true. A lot of Reddit culture is cringe as well
Abstraction is a cancer to society. Their comment was not ad hominem, yours however is hairsplitting to give rise to a conflict that never existed. If you are trying to correct misinformation, you do not really seem that articulate in conveying your word.
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.
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.
And even if what I do is relatively tame, I want others to be protected from the wolf at the door.
This. I don’t need to win, I just want Meta to lose.
General Hux!
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?
Do you have to run your lemmy instance in the US?
Maybe do it in a less backward place
Not disagreeing with you there.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Complying with the law is less of an issue than keeping that data accessible in the first place.
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.
I think we’re realizing more and more any corporate-operated platform is luring us in to sell to us and sell us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just yesterday here on Lemmy, I mentioned the dangers of violating privacy, and some commenters went on about “what dangers?” Implying there were none…
Is it not enough to gesture broadly?
No one has anything to hide, until they do
I once heard that “Anyone can be charged with a crime if they can be watched closely enough for long enough.”
I’m committing a crime right now, pairing this red wine with this halibut.
I remember that from Don’t Take to The Police. Since gotchas I can think of is touching an eagle feather lying on the ground (endangered animals plus a market for poachers). Point being, that it’s essentially impossible to say with certainty that you’ve broken no law.
I would like to quote a Hungarian movie classic from 1969 (it was sitting in a box for a decade until it somehow got past the censorship):
Mutasson nekem egyetlen embert ebben a tetves országban, akire ha kell, 5 perc alatt nem bizonyítom rá, hogy bűnös! Magára is, magamra is, mindenkire!
Show me a single person in this flea-ridden country who if needed, I can’t prove in 5 minutes that they are guilty! You, me, everyone!
Other great quotes from the same movie:
Ahol nem vagyunk mi, ott az ellenség.
Where we are not, there is the enemy.
Ezeken lovagol maga? Amit a vaksi szemével lát? A süket fülével hall? A tompa agyával gondol? Azt hiszi, fölér az a mi nagy céljaink igazságához?!
Are you hung up on these things? What you see with your blind eyes? What you hear with your deaf ears? What you think with your blunt mind? Do you believe these are comparable to the truth of our great cause?
Just if you thought that these people are not the same as the commies were way back when. Authoritarians tend to be alike.
At this point, they’ll just say “yeah, but these people did a crime. I don’t do crimes so I have nothing to worry about”. The problem with that mentality, I would hope, doesn’t need to be stated.
I stopped trying to change the world.
People are getting all upset at Facebook/Meta here but they were served a valid warrant. I don’t think there is much to get mad about them here. The takeaway I get is this:
Avoid giving data to others. No matter how trustworthy they are (not that Meta is) they can be legally compelled to release it. Trust only in cryptography.
There is of course the other question of if abortion being illegal is a policy that most people agree with…but that is a whole different kettle of fish that I won’t get into here.
Maybe just elect non fanatical nut jobs?
Good luck with that. The way voting works in the US basically guarantees a 2-party race. With only 2 parties you end up having policies grouped into these huge bundles, so making an actual decision on any particular issue is incredibly difficult. (Unless you are a billionaire and want to lobby a party for a law)
Completely right. This is an education issue.
There are several other issues how these two handled this situation.
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.
Don’t discuss this or involve anyone else.
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.
Why are they even talking to police? Lawyer up, even if the lawyer is free.
(E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.)
Facebook messenger and text message is the absolute worse way to discuss things like this. They should’ve at least turned on E2EE but they already admitted fault and their devices would’ve been taken away anyway.
They seem like they together. They should’ve just discussed this in person.
Granted, I’m lucky enough never to have been arrested or questioned about a crime. I don’t know how difficult and manipulative interrogations are outside of what I’ve seen on TV. Even still, I’m amazed by and critical of people who talk to the police without a lawyer present.
Even if you think (or know) you’re guilty, that doesn’t mean you should let the system have its way with you.
This is an older story, and 5 months later Meta announced that they’re rolling out full E2EE encryption to Messenger, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Are they doing it out of the goodness of their hearts? Probably not, they’re a corporation, but this does show that global backlash actually works for something.
Use end to end encrypted messaging apps, and, if you’re in a situation like this, know what they can be forced to share via court order. For example, while WhatsApp has full E2EE and messages can’t be turned over, IP addresses can, which can be used to track location, so don’t connect to an abortion clinic’s wifi for example. Probably just a good rule in general, as law enforcement could subpoena router logs if they have a suspicion.
Ideally use something that can hand over less metadata like Signal if you’re in this sort of situation, they don’t even keep IP address, but this is a lesser known app that also relies on the recipient using Signal.
On one hand - yes Meta followed the legal requirement, but the bigger picture is that people always say “so what it’s <insert deficiency> just don’t do anything illegal”. But that’s only fine when legality matches morality. And the disparity has been growing lately.
I understand what you are saying but I don’t think that having every company coming up with their own definition of morality is the right solution. The only goal of these companies is to create profit, and I doubt that their definition of morality will be overall beneficial.
Oh yeah I agree I didn’t mean it that way either. I just meant it as an argument for privacy/end to end encryption
They couldve opted to end 2 end encryption just like they do on whatsapp. Then the warrant can eat shit.
While whatsapp is using e2e encryption it is still owned by meta, as such I trust it just as much as plain facebook messenger. Signal ftw.
A valid warrant that was only possible to get information from because of Meta’s policy of “opt-in” for encrypted messages. They are still at fault imho
The problem is that private messages should be private, meaning Meta should’ve had no ability whatsoever to share those messages even if served a warrant. Those messages should be E2E encrypted.
Fwiw, Messeger does have e2e encryption, just opt in only afaik. Whether or not you trust meta with that is another matter, but it is there.
I haven’t trusted Meta since they IPO’d. I deleted my account sometime back in 2015 or so, had to recreate it when I went on-site as a contractor for a week, and promptly deleted it again.
But it’s good that they have E2E, it should be on by default and not able to be disabled. Regardless, they probably have anything encrypted indexed anyway so they don’t lose that little bit of info about you.
America is a terrifying church with guns. I pity the citizens.
Every country has the anti-abortion cancer movement and it wouldn’t surprise me if the shit gets more serious here in Europe too with the rise of far right parties. As a matter of fact you have only to look at Poland.
We’ll keep saying that can’t happen here right up until it happens
Y’all better be careful
Ms Smith goes to Washington?
Women’s reproductive rights are strongly supported in Canada, but that doesn’t stop one of the main national parties playing coy with a commitment to not reopen the debate.
To be fair, it seems most Americans support women’s reproductive rights as well, with a referendum in Kansas passing with 59%.
It’s gerrymandering and the Supreme Court that are changing things down there.
This isn’t purely anti-abortion pearl clutching in this instance. Where this occurred it is perfectly legal to have an abortion into the 20th week of pregnancy.
Fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks.
They killed the fetus with meds at 28 weeks, the pregnant 17 year old still went through labor (with no medical supervision due to how they chose to do this), they burned he remains, and then buried them on a farm.
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That’s a massive oversimplification of things. Intentionally removing nuance doesn’t help people.
More response in my other reply to your similar message
I cannot feel any less hopeless for my country
“Less hopeful”, maybe?
Regardless of what you think about abortion laws people just gotta come to terms with the fact that your phone and computer are not reliable partners in crime
They should be? I mean, not just for the crime, but in general privacy should be the default.
I mean yeah it should but you gotta follow the old saying “don’t write when you can speak, don’t speak when you can nod, don’t nod if you can wink” or whatever. You have an expectation of privacy when sending physical mail for example, but it’s still a bad idea to put a crime in writing if you don’t have to. Even if it can’t legally be used as evidence it can be read. We’ve seen that with ‘parallel construction’ from law enforcement
I’ve actually never heard that saying. I like it a lot.
It’s one of those quotes with a lot of different versions floating around I think it’s generally attributed to this guy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Lomasney
Wait, lemme write that down
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I’m taking notes, Jim. I just can’t write any faster!
Wicked. A nod is as good as a wink to a blind bat
The Klingons of Star Trek also have a saying: If you do not wish a thing heard, do not say it.
It should be, I fully agree, unfortunately we live in a digital panopticon.
You can always use something like PGP to encrypt your communication.
True, sadly not many people show up for my key signing parties, even if I serve three kinds of chips.
Only if you trust the device your decrypting on. Wouldn’t trust windows or Mac with information that could put me in jail.
Except in france.
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Sorry, i don’t find it anymore in all the white noise about france being anti encryption. It was about a group of teens being detained on the grounds of mere suspection for using and promoting encrypted messaging, online privacy, using tor and so on, painting that fact as a crime.
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Madcow – While you are not wrong, we are talking about the unwashed masses here who are not necessarily savvy. “Private chat” really should have been.
TIL the of the word Panopticon. Thanks stranger
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.
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.
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?
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.
(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.
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
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?
She was 7 months pregnant. It was a murder.
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.
A fetus isn’t a person, it was an abortion.
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.
At 7 months it isn’t a fetus…
Yes it is. It is called and considered a fetus up until birth.
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.
I’m almost certain that if something like this happened to any fediverse instance - that a local police enforcement would contact the admin and asked for user’s data, which they are required by law to provide or they would go to jail/get a hefty fine and possibly a criminal record, they would do that too. That’s also why E2E is required, to prevent such problems for instance admins - but then again, there’s really nothing you can do against local law, and if it requires that you have to be able to cooperate, well… Then there’s not much the admin can do, without putting himself in a real risk of prosecution, because he is breaking the law by have E2E.
That’s also a good reason to be careful when selecting your home instance, and making sure that you choose one in a country that has all right laws in that regard.
Of course, that’s assuming the police makes contact. I don’t suppose that the admins would be searching through the DMs of people to snitch on them. And if Meta is doing that preemtively and is actively snitching on people - that’s downright evil.
What year is it
1984
1984 indeed…
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.
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.
Social democrats like you
wha? ok?
Not you, the hypothetical person I quoted.
understandable
1684
This is what “Freedom & Family” means, apparently!
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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 😔
qualified physician
yeah you clearly still haven’t read the article.
This feels like satire. There’s no way someone could actually write this without laughing at how absurd it is.
Only the pregnant person and their doctor matter.
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.
And y’all thought China having your data was something to be afraid of.
Remember folks, when subverting a theocratic hellscape, use something encrypted.
“I gUeSs IlL use ThReAdS. WhAts ThE hArM” /s
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”.
It’s like “don’t talk to cops, it will not help you”.
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.
I am sure that they didn’t hand over the chat logs for free
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.
“private chat history” on Facebook…
When you oppose the left-wing, you’re defending this.
Gonna Re-Share this resource… PLEASE forward to individuals who may need it! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/digital-security-and-privacy-tips-those-involved-abortion-access
