1y ago

Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges

www.theverge.com Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges

Unencrypted chat history is a prime target for police

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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589 comments

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.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/d-7o9xYp7eE
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
  
  Good bot!
  
  Found the quote:
  The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just what particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.
  Stephen G. Breyer, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent
  It's used around 4:40 in the Don't Take To The Police video.
  
  And there are so many laws that it is impossible to know all the laws that apply in any given moment. Basically, you always have -something- to hide.
  
  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.
  
  This is the perfect example of why you should be worried. Because your government can turn into a fascist dictatorship at any time and you ain't getting that data back.
  
  How is this an example of the government turning into a "fascist dictatorship"?
  
  Reading comprehension is hard, so I'll help you out.
  This [event mentioned on the news] is the perfect example of why you should be worried. Because your government can [i.e. has the potential to] turn into a fascist dictatorship at any time [which is unrelated to this specific piece of news, being a hypothetical scenario] and you ain’t getting that data back.
  
  I can read just fine, I'm just wondering how you correlate this with the possibility of the government turning into a fascist dictatorship. They're 2 completely unrelated things, that's why I'm confused to why you put them together. You even literally say it's unrelated to this piece of news.....
  
  Are you serious, or being a pitiful basement troll?
  Action is not illegal → Service provider has unprivateable data on action → Action becomes illegal → You now have confessed to your crime
  Can't make it much more obvious
  
  I thought ex post facto laws were forbidden.
  
  People won't all stop doing something they did just because it became illegal. I wouldn't stop eating bread if it became illegal, for instance. Much easier to justify a search and witch hunt if there's evidence of previous action.
  
  Are you being serious, or just being a pitiful basement troll yourself?
  You're saying because they did thing A it means you should be wary because thing Z might happen, even though things A and Z have literally nothing to do with each other nor does A happening give any likelihood of Z happening.
  
  Got it, you're a pitiful troll. I don't care that your time is worthless, stop wasting mine.
  
  I agree that these people did a crime.
  I just don't think their crime should be illegal.
  If this was about murdering a full-grown adult and not aborting a fetus, nobody would be talking about privacy concerns. Guaranteed.
  
  How do you know they committed a crime. After reading the article I don’t know. It looks totally as if it’s possible that she just had a miscarriage.
  Maybe there’s just a prosecutor eager for convictions.
  Maybe she was trying do avoid exactly this kind of trouble.
  
  She took abortion drugs.....
  
  We'd still be talking about the privacy part because it'd be still more concerning than the death of one random dude.
  
  Would you be ok with someone aborting a 39 week old fetus? What about a 40 week old fetus? What about during labour?
  
  Slippery slope fallacy detected
  
  For what it's worth, the fetus was viable outside the womb 4 weeks before they did this. Viable at 24 weeks, aborted at 28. Pretty fucked up imo
  
  Also, there's no general agreement or scientific pointing of where life and consciousness is started on a fetus so, if the government job is to conserve the life of a individual, a fetus life still matters and shouldn't be taken by neither the parents or anyone else.
  Brazil (ironically enough) has a good constitution about about abortion where's it is strictly prohibited unless some cases apply like: the baby has developed no brain, the baby has originated from a sexual assault case or the process of giving birth or the pregnancy itself represents a risk of death for the mother. It is simple, states that life's have the same values as well as showing the individual rights matter.
  
  Why do you think a life created by sexual assault is less valuable than a life created otherwise? Isn’t the resulting life the same?
  Thinking this through might help you understand the tradeoffs behind most abortions. Pregnancy is dangerous, childbirth is dangerous, parenting is incredibly difficult.
  A child could push a family into poverty and devastate siblings’ futures. How do you evaluate the harm caused by that against the harm caused by being forced to carry a child produced by sexual assault?
  
  A child could push a family into poverty and devastate siblings’ futures.
  A child can also be put up for adoption btw.
  
  Which often means shoving them into massively underfunded institutions, that are full of corruption and abuse, making it a less than ideal alternative.
  
  Less ideal than being dead?
  
  If you care so much, go ahead and adopt a child.
  
  Nah I'm ok. If she wanted an abortion she should have gotten one in the 20 weeks where she's legally allowed to. Doesn't seem like a hard thing to do.
  
  But you seem oh so worried about the children. What's stopping you?
  
  You know this is a stupid argument, right? I'm not looking to adopt a kid. Many, many, many people are.
  
  It's easy to force a woman to act as a living incubator when you're not impacted by it.
  
  It is not less valuable but the way it was created was against the individual rights of the mother.
  I agree abortion laws are about trade-offs as I showed in my example and that's why abortion shouldn't be legal in the cases I stated. Abortion shouldn't be legal for anyone cause, if it was in a consensual relationship, the mother assumed the risk of pregnancy.
  The only lives that are less valuable are those which deliberately risk or take way the others' lives.
  Also, thanks for being respectful.
  
  The only lives that are less valuable are those which deliberately risk or take way the others’ lives.
  By choosing to be alive, you're impacting all present and future generations, causing the deaths of potentially billions of humans and countless other animals. Do you see how your attempted distinction doesn't actually exist?
  
  I guess you don't know much about numbers.
  
  Wow, great argument. Superb insight.
  
  "Billions must die."
  
  You're joking, right? First, abortions aren't mentioned in the Brazilian constitution - you'd have to look at specific legal codices, such as the Civil Code or the Penal Code. Second, that's the bare minimum, not "pretty good".
  
  The objective is supposed to be to find the situations where abortion would be fair a fair trade-off of lives and rights, not to try to speedrun the abortion rank; it makes no sense you're saying it is bare minimum when the objective is to reduce it as it is inherently bad.
  
  I agree with you, but I don't think I could explicitly state what's wrong with that mentality. Can you humor me and state it?
  Edit: can someone else take a shot at it? Tge parent comment is essentially saying "people will counter with X, but everyone knows that doesn't make sense". It's clear that something is wrong with that mentality, but it obviously would have a very real benefit of stating it's flaws since the whole premise of this is that some people don't know what's wrong with that mentality.
  
  The obvious, unspoken part is: what is legal now isn't guaranteed to be legal two seconds in the future, and likewise to what is illegal. The law gives you no guarantee of being ethical nor moral, it's simply a collection of behaviors either sanctioned or unsanctioned by the State.
  As a clear example, you may tell me how much you love breathing in fresh air. If, tomorrow, breathing fresh air is made illegal, you've just shared with me a confession to a crime.
  
  Thank you for actually doing this.
  I guess that can also be extended to things that can accidentally be suspicious. Imagine if Colonel Mustard, who "doesn't have anything to hide", let the police search their trunk and found a broken candle stick. Even though he wasn't being searched for that in particular, now he's a suspect in Mrs. Peacock's murder at the gazebo (Clue reference).

589 comments