this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605

A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.

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[–] m88youngling@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I noticed the article me tioned that the women told the police that they communicated over Facebook Messenger. I wonder what prompted them to spill the beans, or if they were unaware of the implications of telling them how they communicated about the situation. If this is true, it doesn't sound like the police is sending warrants for everyone online to request their data, but it still makes me very cautious about unencrypted messaging

[–] Stovetop@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Just as an FYI, since it seems like a lot of folks are just reading the headline and not reading the article:

  • This article was written almost one year ago, so this is not a new development.

  • This alleged offense occurred before any changes to local abortion laws (Nebraska in this case) were made, meaning this is an incident that would have still been illegal under Roe.

  • Meta was served a legal subpoena requiring them to turn over all the data they had. Whether that data should have been E2E encrypted is another debate entirely, but they didn't voluntarily disclose anything.

  • ~~The charges were pressed as felonies, meaning that they were considered illegal at the federal level, and so state jurisdiction did not matter for the purposes of this subpoena.~~

  • Even under California's current sanctuary status (where Meta is headquartered) which protects out-of-state individuals seeking abortions, this was a late-term abortion at 28 weeks, which is still illegal under Californian law.

  • To contextualize that for our friends in Europe, this would have been illegal in every EU country, too (short of it being needed as a life-saving intervention, as in most of the US), so this is not a US-exclusive problem.

[–] sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

While this is a mostly great post, I'd point out one error:

The charges were pressed as felonies, meaning that they were considered illegal at the federal level

Felonies exist at both the Federal and State level. Just because something is a felony, does not mean it moves to Federal jurisdiction. And this case appears to have been filed in the Madison County District Court which is part of the Nebraska Judicial Branch. The cases themselves can be found on the District Court's Calendar though you have to put the details in yourself. The cases IDs are CR220000175 and CR220000132 against the woman and her mother respectively. Getting the court documents themselves appears to require paying a fee to do the search and I don't care enough about a random comment on the internet to pay for it.

There seems to be one document uploaded here which shows the charges against the woman. And this shows the sections of Nebraska State law under which the woman is being charged. Of the three charges, only the first is a felony. Specifically it's a Class IV felony under Section 28-1301 of Nebraska State Law. And that law concerns moving buried human remains. The other two charges are misdemeanors for concealing the death of another person and lying to a peace officer.

tl;dr - Felonies exist at both the State and Federal level and jurisdiction is dependent on which laws (State or Federal) are at issue.

[–] Rhoeri@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I’m pretty sure self-aborting and burying a stillborn baby is against the law regardless of the status of Roe.

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[–] silverbax@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How's that end-to-end encryption working out?

Doesn't matter if the company doing the e2e can get your messages.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

but fb messenger is not e2e encrypted at all. If the company is doing e2e then they can't read your messages

[–] Tekkip20@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is true, FB messenger is as open as it will get with seeing your messages, WhatsApp is dubious too so either Signal or Session are best e2e messenger apps imo.

[–] Legendsofanus@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have never heard of them, are they social media apps?

[–] Tekkip20@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

The two apps I've mentioned are exclusively messenger apps. Think of Facebooks messenger but more secure with no big company servers looking at your chat and messages.

[–] theherk@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is if you enable secret messages for a conversation, I believe, but not the default chat mode. In either case people should use other apps.

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