Sickening. If FB were to selectively refuse to comply with some state subpoenas, what would be the consequences? Banning of FB in Indiana? I think that would be more of a punishment for the Boomers of Indiana than for FB.
If there is a Subpoena or Search Warrant for FB messages, FB has no choice to hand them over. However, FB should have fought like hell in the courts to not hand those messages over.
Isn’t it usually: “your archivist is required to appear physically at this address: xxxx, with a physical copy of the following items: yyyy. As a courtesy to you, you can email them to Special Agent zzzz if they are in the proper format.”
So showing up (at thousands of courthouses a year) is the default. If you’re helpful (to the prosecution), we will let you do things by email.
They had a choice - they can tell their lawyers to fight the subpoena/warrant in court. Possibly a long, expensive, and futile exercise, but it would signal whose side they're on. And to the surprise of (hopefully) nobody, they're not on our side at all.
It is considered contempt of court, not sure what the punishment is in Nebraska, but that is usually something like a $500 fine and six months in jail.
Obviously you can't put FB in jail, so does that turn into a bigger fine?
Generally, there are just fines, but courts have put people from a company in contempt because they were the actual reason for contempt. For example, if the lawyers refused to produce files during discovery, the lawyers (despite working for the company) could be found in contempt and sanctioned.
They would get raided by the government and forced to comply. They literally can't refuse in this case. They could have fought it in court (and lost) but at the end they would have to produce the documents under threat of contempt and then criminal charges.
It is time to go back to treating the internet like it was scary and hostile, because it still is, except it now has a thick veneer of slick marketing to suggest otherwise. Young people should be counselled to stay anonymous online and shown examples like this, because zero good can come from giving personal, compromising information to a company along with your real name in this way.
I think this battle has been lost already. Pretty much all of the non-tech people I know firmly believe the "why do I need anonymity if I'm not doing anything wrong" line of thinking. The powers that be really don't like online anonymity, and the public at large just doesn't care enough to do anything. Maybe this will change some minds, but I'm doubtful it'll be enough.
I hold onto hope that an alternative system of privacy-protecting internet (e.g. Freenet) takes hold to a bigger tech-nerd audience, and then eventually bleeds out to mainstream just like the internet was doing in the early 90s. At which point, the government will be completely incapable of all the bullshit they do today, and will be as powerless over that system as they are over crypto.
> as powerless over that system as they are over crypto
I see this claim made a lot, and I don't understand it. When the canadian trucker protest (please don't make this discussion about that, I am not saying it was good or bad, I am just using it as an example) switched to crypto after the gov froze their bank accounts, the gov also froze those crypto wallets. That seems like the opposite of powerless.
I think it's really naive to think that the gov won't just be able to bully any type of new system into submission, like they always do. If there are people running the system, then those people can be coerced.
Those crypto wallets were custodial wallets stored on a centralized service operated by a private company. Cryptocurrency can't help you if you don't use it the way you're supposed to -- that is, keeping your wallet on your own hardware with your own keys.
> Cryptocurrency can't help you if you don't use it the way you're supposed to -- that is, keeping your wallet on your own hardware with your own keys.
So for most people this can just be shortened to "Cryptocurrency can't help you".
I agree, but it kinda sucks that we're about a decade into the Cryptocurrency Future and it's still too hard for random angry truckers to use it correctly
That's why we need to stop being purely defensive. Blocking trackers and personal data is not enough; browsers need to start providing "noise" to websites to render tracking/profiling results useless.
You can't use most popular online services without providing PII in the form of a phone number.
On some of the most popular ones, you can lose your account and all data/connections at any time that they demand your government ID and you refuse to provide it.
I don't use services like this, myself, but many people use these popular services as their exclusive destination on the internet.
The major services are heavily incentivized to de-anonymize and if the opposite ever became a problem, these governments would legislate to force their way through.
It would not be enough for the young to care about anonymization. They would need to care about it far in excess of their desire to interact with common platforms, celebrities, pop culture and their peers. It is an unreasonably high demand for kids.
They shouldn't have had access to the users private communications to begin with. It's an intentional product choice that they do, and if they chose otherwise they wouldn't have had any private messages to turn over.
Data has to be stored somewhere. You can end-to-end encrypt it, but that has constraints and adds clunkiness for the user so it's not even obviously a feature. The easy access to the web interface for messenger over whatsapp or signal if a feature of a sort, depending on your point of view. If you don't want a company to have access to the data you store with them you have to keep the encryption key yourself. If you do that, you risk losing access to the data you store with the company. That's a big downside.
So yes, it's a product choice, but it's not a product choice out of some strange effort for the company to have access to your data, but because it provides the right product mix.
You might as well argue that your bank having access to your account records to hand over is a product choice. Yes, there are ways to work around that. Maybe some blockchain variant will give that level of privacy. It will not do it without significant tradeoffs.
The primary choice there is that loss of your password doesn't mean losing your private messages. There are even ways around that, but lose your password lose your private messages isn't a terrible tradeoff particularly given that these platforms are fundamentally unable to provide the level of privacy the users casually expect. Especially since direct messages are usually used as a replacement for completely ephemeral communications (like phone calls or watercooler talk) that historically would have left not persistent record of their content at all.
If the private messaging were encrypted by default it would also be easy to offer an opt in feature that would preserve recovery (e.g. by the users software encrypting a copy of their encryption key over to the platform). I expect relatively few users would opt into it.
Imagine that back in the 80s when people regularly communicated by letters in the post if the post office offered an option to open, copy and archive all your letters, just in case you lost them. ... how many people would have opted into it? with the obvious invasion of privacy, vs just taking care to not lose whatever they intended to keep... Not zero, I suppose, but not many. And today these platforms archive and hand over communications far more casual and ephemeral than letters.
> A Nebraska teenager is facing criminal charges alleging she aborted a fetus in violation of state law, after authorities obtained her Facebook messages using a search warrant.
Should companies disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant from a state government in the United States?
If so, how is that any different from Uber breaking various laws?
I happen to believe that access to abortion is important (although quite a lot of people don't), but the rule of law matters too. It's not reasonable or logical to believe that it's ok for companies to break some laws but not others. So, I can't really be mad at Facebook for doing this.
No they could have won, at the very least this would go to the SC over if they have the right to subpoena over a crime outside the state, that isn't illegal in that state.
And since it has swung to being much more conservative are more interested in cases which reinforce the originalism doctrine for interpreting the constitution.
"Still, Meta has remained largely silent on how it will moderate abortion content in general. However, users recently noticed that Instagram and Facebook posts about acquiring abortion pills such as mifepristone were being systematically removed. At the same time, Meta continued to earn revenue from anti-abortion advertisements containing dangerous misinformation, Media Matters found. An investigation by the Markup discovered that Facebook was collecting data from users interacting with abortion services websites, and subequently made that information available to anti-abortion groups."
They have to comply with the law, and there's nothing wrong with anti-abortion ads. Facebook doesn't have an obligation to only sell ads to Democrats.
> subequently made that information available to anti-abortion groups
That part is probably misleading, I'm assuming they didn't give them any kind of information, they just allowed demographic targeting like they do for most kinds of ads.
But there's also no law against posts providing information on "acquiring abortion pills such as mifepristone"; Facebook is choosing to remove such posts.
I'm 100% pro-abortion-rights but I can still accept that abortion is an act of destroying a life. Even in the case of taking abortion pills. But obviously most of us consider there to be a huge difference in ethical significance between destroying the life of an embryo and that of a fully grown independent human.
I think this is the tragedy of America - in Canada abortion is enshrined as a human right that helps to protect the lives of young people who have made a mistake instead of dooming them to a life of misery (and their future children with them).
Only in America has the continuous rhetoric actually forced the idea that abortions are murder out of the fringe crowd and into the common understanding. That is truly sad.
I don't think he's equating them as identical situations. He's using analogy to explain that Facebook's acceptable ad policies are not exactly the same as US law - and that Facebook doesn't get selective solely in the area of abortion.
Hopefully we can see blue states pass abortion bounty bounty laws, where anyone aiding and abetting this sort of behavior is at least civilly, but maybe even criminally liable.
Texas let the genie out of the bottle, and you can't put it back in.
Texas has a bounty on people helping residents across the boarder to seek care AFAICT - that's an action that happens within the state. Passing a law restricting actions in another state is either 1) super illegal or 2) creates a really awful situation legally in the states.
If Texas can say "Hey, Massachusetts, it's illegal for teachers in your state to teach evolution" then we've essentially destroyed any ability to have laws in the US.
Facebook's data centers and personnel might well be located within the jurisdiction of a blue state. Perhaps this will incentivize it to not retain this information, so that it can't be requested by hostile law enforcement or authoritarian regimes.
> creates a really awful situation legally in the states.
You are correct, it's a pretty awful situation, but it's one that we currently live in.
Also, it's rather common for sovereign states to sanction people for committing crimes in other jurisdictions. Meng Wanzhou was arrested for breaking US laws regarding trade with Iran in China.
It's not even an access to abortion issue. Abortion is legal in that state. 23 weeks is really late, an abortion that late would be illegal in most of europe.
AFAIK 23 weeks would be illegal in the majority of the US as well. Though there is some ambiguity as a number of states just say 'fetal viability' which can be as late as 24 weeks depending on who you ask.
This would have been illegal in states like New York. The people who are blindly defending this should consider that situations have nuance, and that the child that was born probably also looked like a small newborn instead of a meat bean.
Not exactly. European laws have restrictions on when it's available "upon request", but if there are any medical concerns around the fetus or the mother they can and are performed much later.
This is likely more of a side-effect of having government sponsored healthcare wanting to limit the number of elective procedures rather than any sort of moral issue like its viewed in countries like the United States.
In most of Europe what happened in this particular case would still have been illegal (although it's fair to ask whether the individual in question would have had a legal abortion at an earlier point in time in Europe). The linked article leaves out a lot of relevant contextual details; there's more here: https://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/nebraska/nor...
Would it? There's always been an open question in the US around whether or not you charge mothers who seek illegal abortions vs the doctors. How have European courts typically sentenced women who sought to terminate pregnancies passed the gestational term limits?
The teenager ("mother") isn't being prosecuted for getting the abortion. She's being charged for concealing or abandoning a dead human body, concealing the death of another person, and false reporting. It's the teenager's own mother who's being charged with the abortion-related offences (performing or attempting an abortion on a pregnancy at more than 20 weeks, and performing an abortion as a non-licensed doctor).
I see that perspective, but the rules around reporting and disposing of bodies have purposes independent of the abortion debate, e.g., to protect the rights of live-born disabled babies from intentional euthanasia.
Here, the police laid the first set of three charges before there was any allegation of anything other than miscarriage/stillbirth, so it's hard to argue that the police were trying to punish the teenager for abortion in this particular case.
In the US that question is actually less a legal or moral question and more of a political one. Politicians are generally afraid of the public opinion reaction to punishing mothers (especially if they happen to be 10 year old victims of rape[1]) - that is of course what all of these restriction laws do, they punish mothers, but silently executing an action and announcing that action out loud are two different things.
Facebook could have refused on the grounds that they aren't based out Nebraska and not subject to their jurisdiction. They could have used some of their extensive legal budget to challenge the warrant on those grounds.
> grounds that they aren't based out Nebraska and not subject to their jurisdiction
This isn’t how jurisdiction works. Facebook had a customer in Nebraska who allegedly did a crime in Nebraska under Nebraska law. That creates a legal nexus for them there.
Operating a telecommunications service doesn't automatically make you subject to every state's jurisdiction. Interstate communication is subject to federal control. States can't willy-nilly act like they can reach outside their boundaries.
> It's not reasonable or logical to believe that it's ok for companies to break some laws but not others.
"One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." Martin Luther King Jr.
Facebook are being told which laws are unjust by multiple different groups (not just on the topic of abortion) who disagree about everything other than that Facebook is pure evil for allowing the other lot to say anything.
This is not a normative statement: I'm not saying which group Facebook should listen to. Only that everybody (except for Facebook themselves) agrees that Facebook should not be making the decision.
I am asking that Facebook takes a principled stand.
Judging from the reaction of Meta they realise that it was a mistake not to enable the "host proof" encryption protocols - like Signal, and what Whats APp was supposed to be (is it still?) - across the communication tools
They have exposed themselves to this - being complicate in what is starting to look like an organised campaign against women - they deserve our condemnation
> I am asking that Facebook takes a principled stand.
It would be interesting to see it play out, but a company refusing to comply with a search warrant will likely result in really bad stuff for the company. Like officers in prison and conviction of crimes like Arthur Anderson during the Enron scandal.
I don’t see an opportunity here for Facebook to “take a stand” unless Zuck wanted to burn the company down.
That’s not realistic. And I think calling for companies to act illegally is a slippery slope I don’t want to get onto.
Real people without expensive teams of lawyers and wealth to fall back on risked jail, beating, and lynching to sit at a lunch counter. I'm sorry that the officers of Meta are men of little courage and worth.
This kind of moral posturing may feel satisfying but that kind of reasoning is literally why in Germany we're 80 years later still cleaning up the mess of companies benefitting from forced labor under entirely legal-at-the-time public-private partnerships.
Facebook doesn't get to decide which laws are unjust. But Facebook gets to decide which laws it considers unjust and how it wants to deal with them. If big corporations can decide they consider tax laws unjust and want to avoid them as much as possible, they can also consider laws unjust that impact other people.
William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
In particular, I'm fairly sure everyone who bombs abortion clinics[0] tells themselves that the laws they break are the unjust ones, because who sees themselves as the villains of their own stories?
Considering the people who support the bombing of abortion clinics are the ones currently making these laws and are in control because they have used the law to disenfranchise and suppress voters to be able to do so with only the support of a minority of actual legal subjects and considering that the only other party has spent the past decades sitting on its hands in malicious compliance while using civil rights as a dangling carrot for the remaining voters, maybe the US legal system is so broken this issue can't be solved by bowing down to authority? And even if it can, maybe the time frames involved to do so are so long mere submission will cost many lives and harm many more.
A wolf and a sheep can't find a mutually satisfactory agreement when it comes to whether the sheep should be eaten by the wolf. Having irreconcilable differences is all fine and dandy in a democracy as long as those differences aren't resolved against you in a way that has life-altering consequences for you.
If you value order over justice, I'm sorry but there's a name for a system like that.
Hey I love the quote love the idea but we are actually asking not for the law to be laid flat as it were but mere civil disobedience to unjust law and acceptance of the consequences. Put up a fight.
I think the argument could be read that breaking one law would undermine all other laws as well. But I believe the essence of that dialogue is more that the ends do not justify the means instead of being a refutation of the previous idea.
There are a lot of people in this country who genuinely believe that abortion is murder, and that's why we are in this mess in the first place. Those people believe laws that permit abortion are unjust and deeply immoral -- should they start using that as an excuse to punish people who legally obtained abortions, blockade clinics, etc.?
In a country with widely divergent religious and political views, we would end up with anarchy if everyone started disobeying laws they believed were unjust.
One can believe abortion (or laws against abortion, for that matter) to be unjust, while also laws against vigilante violence to be just, and thus refrain from that kind of action.
One can also believe vigilante violence against people given abortions to be just, and thus justify such actions against them. In which case, the question is, "What should someone whose moral code is opposed to yours do?" Which in my opinion is a silly question.
For this to lead to anarchy, it must be the case that a significant number of people avoid causing anarchy for the sole reason of following the law for its own sake, without consideration for any punishment for violating the law.
> One can also believe vigilante violence against people given abortions to be just, and thus justify such actions against them. In which case, the question is, "What should someone whose moral code is opposed to yours do?" Which in my opinion is a silly question.
No, it's not a silly question. It is the reason we need to have laws.
It's ok to break some laws and not others. Breaking the law, and following the litigation to have the law struck down through courts is part of the rule of law.
That mechanism is built into the system, just as much as democratic change is
Yes companies and people should disobey the law more often, we should all strive to minimize the effects of government control and coercion enabling us to lead our lives as we see fit for the short time we're on earth.
For me, I'm happy Uber is around today, most likely because the flouted the law. Win/Win for me and them IMO.
I'm not really sure I agree Uber was "built" by cab drivers, but for the sake of argument, sure, but what's the alternative? The subway has way more crime.
In which "justifying rape" is only recently (I am getting old. Last decades) gone out of fashion.
Some call it a "rape culture", with some justification.
Uber is a part of that culture, and it is an open question just where on the spectrum of "angelic operator" to "dangerous predation" they lie. But the claim: "cheap transportation is partially built on the backs of hundreds of rape cases" is only true because of "partially". I think it is a weak claim.
If so, how is that any different from Uber breaking various laws?
The pursuit of private profit vs the defense of someone else's private liberty.
You might think rule of law subsumes both considerations, or something else, but if so you should say that. Asking a rhetorical question whose answer is blindingly obvious is more of a conversational gambit for Socratic authority than a sincere inquiry.
Yes, companies definitely should disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant in cases where someone is being prosecuted for having an abortion. Obeying the law in this case is clearly immoral!
There is nothing unreasonable or illogical about believing that it is okay for companies to break some laws but not others. You can come to that conclusion in at least two perfectly reasonable ways: you can believe that breaking laws is not in itself a bad thing (but that actions that break some law may be bad for some other reason, such as harming people), or that it is a bad thing but in some cases the lesser of two evils.
However, in practice it may be difficult for a company to organize such disobedience, particularly since, for example, Facebook cannot avoid hiring employees from religious groups who are in favor of these laws. So, a more practical approach is to avoid being in the position of surveilling people's private communications in the first place, so that no employees at the company have access to the information the police seek. End-to-end encryption is a crucial structural protection against this kind of pervasive surveillance, because it prevents intermediaries from having the private information in the first place. Pseudonymity is another one: the teenager should never have given Facebook her legal name, but unfortunately Facebook has extensive policies in place to extort legal names from its users, making them vulnerable to such abuses.
Of course talking about encryption always brings out the knuckledraggers who link to XKCD 538 and talk about hitting people with $5 wrenches. Hopefully this example clarifies why encryption sometimes defeats a $5 wrench: neither the Nebraska teenager nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case.
People have different beliefs about many different things, not just morals. For example, some people believe that the Earth was created 6000 years ago. I'm not claiming my beliefs are infallible, just explaining what they are and, in some cases, why I hold them.
It's difficult to tell from your one-line comment, but it sounds like one of your beliefs is moral relativism: that there is no objective reality of what is good and bad, only "different morals" held by different people. That belief is false.*
Laws exist only in the same sense that Zeus or Santa Claus exists, which I think is the sense you believe that morals exist: they are collections of ideas that are passed from mind to mind, but there is no sense in which it can be objectively true or false to say, "The law forbids [such and such]." There is only, at best, a social consensus.
______
* Of course, my belief that goodness and badness exist objectively is fallible, but even if it is as incorrect as the belief that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, its veracity is still an objective question; it could be true, false, or partly true, but not meaningless.
It is unfortunate that you think you are contributing to the conversation by posting a one-line statement that simply repeats conventional beliefs.
What evidences can you give for the existence of the law that cannot also be given for Santa Claus? Or could not be given for Zeus, if we were in Classical Greece?
Facebook selectively complies in what could charitably be viewed as a profit-focused strategy and less charitably as nakedly partisan. Case in point, ongoing violation of Washington State campaign finance laws.
> after authorities obtained her Facebook messages using a search warrant.
The fact that it was obtained using a search warrant is an very important part of the story. Right now, the headline is designed to create an outrage against Facebook. Forbes is being very misleading here.
23 weeks might be illegal even in California. In California, there is no strict cut-off date as to when a pregnancy may be terminated. But absent special circumstances, abortion cannot be performed once the fetus becomes viable. Hospitals will resuscitate and actively treat babies born in the 22nd week of pregnancy.
> abortion cannot be performed once the fetus becomes viable
I don't think that's universally true. That would depend upon the state. The Roe decision protected women from government intervention before the fetus was vaible but now that Roe is gone that does not mean the inverse is true.
Yes - but let’s not use this instance as “abortion” story. This story can also be used by anti-abortion people to show how abortion is about killing babies.
In short, if you ask any nurse or doctor they will tell you that rules are to try to save any baby which is more than 22 weeks.
Yeah, the only real civil rights question I see here that relates to Facebook and social media is how are courts looking at warrants for social media accounts. If the police suspect you of a crime they can't just ask for warrants to acquire the letters you may have written to anyone you've ever corresponded with. They have to be more specific. But if they can request a broad swath of your messages simply because you have a social media account then that's a bit like requesting papers from someone simply because they own a filing cabinet.
To answer your question breaking laws designed to help people versus laws designed to persecute people are very different things. It’s all very well being in favour of the rule of law, but unjust laws are tyranny. When companies assist with tyranny, they can and should get bad press, whether that tyrrany happens in China, Russia or America. They choose where to trade, where to be registered and where to employ people.
Many, many people do not agree with your insinuation that abortion laws are "tyrrany;" that's why laws are passed in states whose populations have determined to various degrees that abortion must not be allowed.
Even in those states, abortion enjoys wide popular support (See: The Kansas referendum), it's just that they've been gerrymandered to the point that their governments are not remotely representative of the wishes of most of their constituents.
Uber provides services at a lower cost to the consumer and lowered barriers of entry for millions of drivers compared to taxi companies entrenched by state monopolies. How is that not helping people?
A paternalistic state is as much a tyranny as a persecutory one. The only only difference is in the overt methods. The motives and thinking behind the two are the same. If you're of the view that certain laws are inherently unjust, by whom or by what standards should that distinction be made? Who watches the watchers?
Why would you think a country that dictates with whom or how one can form an economic contract would leave alone the right to bodily integrity? Individual human beings, whether representing companies or themselves, choose where to trade, register, and employ (or be employed by) people. Human beings are the ones decide to create companies, governments, and tyrannies.
You give companies far too much agency when you want to pin them as enablers of tyranny but deny them any in their contributions to personal liberty, whether political or economic. You can't have it both ways.
Everybody seems to be reading and answering this from the assumption that the writer of this article wants you to believe Facebook is bad for complying with this warrant, but I can't see where that is the case. I read the article and she's just reporting what happened. There is no statement saying this is bad, anyone should be outraged, or that they should ignore and/or break laws. Presumably, part of the reason for writing articles like this is just to inform people who might think of breaking the law not to engage in their conspiracies to break laws using Facebook private messages as the communications medium. Drug dealers and terrorists are well aware by now, but people who weren't breaking the law a few weeks ago need to know.
>this article wants you to believe Facebook is bad for complying with this warrant, but I can't see where that is the case.
That's probably due the headline missing vital context that turns this from arguments on backdoors(a topic FB has often got into trouble with) to one of "can you issue search warrants on digital media?"
But I understand writers don't often write the headline in larger publications. Maybe the writer wanted to be impartial but some higher power wanted to maximize engagement
Facebook shouldn't have had access to this access this data in the first place. Sure, they have to (within some framework) cooperate with law enforcement, but their entire platform is optimized to be a data vacuum for advertising from the jump. The fact that mass surveillance for the state is a side effect is just piling unacceptable effect onto unacceptable cause. Fuck facebook all day long.
We would expect individuals to disobey fugitive slave laws and refuse to return slaves to bondage. We also would expect people not to turn in jews in nazi occupied states.
It is curious if we were to expect civil disobedience by individuals risking everything but also expect companies who risk little to turn in little Anne Frank at the first opportunity without even diminishing our respect.
Or Hatebook could decide that this law is unjust and block all users from Nebraska from accessing their platform as a protest. This would do more to get the law changed than a letter writing campaign, etc. Twitter and the other social platforms could follow suit. And sure the company has a responsibility to share holders but that shouldn't override all else. A stance of "we don't want to get involved in politics" is a political statement in and of itself and these companies donate millions to campaigns. Look at all the CA stuff that got abused in a previous election.
Or they can say that "they are just following the law" while they collect all the ad $$$. They have the power to morally affect this issue. They can very trivially put out a statement that they will no longer continue operate in states and countries that violate the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But we see the big players chasing money over humanity and democracy and even decency. And it isn't just Hatebook, look at the concessions Apple and Google and others have made to get access to markets in China and other totalitarian regimes.
From [1]: "“I don’t think I’ve ever had a case like this,” he said Friday. “Usually, abortions are performed in hospitals, and doctors are involved, and it’s not the type of stuff that occurred in this case.”"
Sure, people respond to incentives. But this one is particularly cruel.
Also, despite all those bogus studies (which, for example, don't correct for how much rule of law is upheld when comparing countries), it will reduce the total number of late-stage abortions significantly. That's a win in my books.
> Numerous legitimate studies show that limited/no access to abortions leads to more at-home/back-alley abortions[1,2].
Abortions don't just spontaneously happen. Your style of carefully-worded rhetoric is intentional in that it gives people an impression like they just do. They don't; the mother makes knowing decisions to terminate the life of her child. Now, several states greatly restrict these intentional, knowing, conscious decisions.
That's quite the leap. No one is arguing that elective abortions occur spontaneously (because those are miscarriages [1]), hence the moniker pro-CHOICE. And considering pregnancy is often incredibly dangerous[2], not always a consciously made decision[3], and in many cases will bear no fruit (pun intended)[4], there is ample reason to allow someone to make a decision about their pregnancy.
I looked at the abstracts of the references you provided, and the first two seem to share the general biases of these kind of studies.
The first Lancet one has this as a finding:
> The abortion rate was lower in subregions where more women live under liberal abortion laws (p<0·05)
They don't seem to have corrected for other factors like rule of law, income, and level of economic development.
The second Lancet one also suffers from the same issue (though at least acknowledge the rule if income), and the authors reveal their biases very soon:
> We developed a new statistical model that jointly estimated unintended pregnancy and abortion that aimed to better inform efforts towards global equity in sexual and reproductive health and rights.
The last one's [1] conclusions seem like they could be broadly correct. If no abortion is allowed at all, you'd expect more maternal deaths. However, the actual amount is disputable as this is based on modelling not concrete data. Additionally, they seem to be assuming a total ban on abortion, which doesn't seem realistic to me.
> But go off and pat yourself on the back for fetuses having more value than the incubation receptacle they're within.
Finally, we need to avoid personal attacks if we are going to have a fruitful discussion.
"“Late term” abortion typically refers to abortions obtained at or after 21 weeks, however it is not an accepted medical term, nor is there a consensus around to which gestational ages it refers. Members of the medical community have criticized the term “late-term” abortion, as it implies abortions are taking place after a pregnancy has reached “term” (37 weeks) or “late term” (>41 weeks) which is false. In fact, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has written that “late-term abortion” has no medical meaning and should not be used in clinical or legal settings."
"Abortions at or after 21 weeks are uncommon, and represent 1% of all abortions in the US. ... Reasons individuals seek abortions later in pregnancy include medical concerns such as fetal anomalies or maternal life endangerment, as well as barriers to care that cause delays in obtaining an abortion." (https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/fact-sheet/abortion...)
As of today, abortions in Nebraska are still legal up to the 22nd week, with the exception of two small towns in the state. It was expanded from up to the 20th week in 2019.
40% of Nebraska women from the ages 15-44 live in a county that has no abortion provider. There are insurance restrictions in Nebraska preventing assistance in paying for an abortion. Parental consent is required to get an abortion. There's a mandatory 24 hour waiting period where you must receive state-mandated abortion counseling. Telemedicine for abortion is banned.
But, yeah, actually, this is way more access than most women in this country have to an abortion. Kudos, Nebraska.
However, in February the state failed to pass a trigger law that would've banned all abortions when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Nebraska legislators have indicated they may call a special session to try again to pass the bill.
As someone from the Midwest, not having access to medical services nearby is the norm. Nebraska is not SF and there does not exist an expectation of immediate convenience. You are used to driving >3 hours for basically any sort of serious medical care, and generally you like it that way because it's quiet and close knit.
Geography is not the reason why it's been nearly impossible to get an abortion in conservative states for 50 years. Lack of access is a huge barrier to women who need abortions, which largely are the vulnerable, young, poor, people of color, and those with health complications.
Right, I get that. But even if a hospital was literally next door to you in Nebraska, laws would be put in place so you couldn't get an abortion there. That has been happening since Roe v Wade in order to make abortion next to impossible to get, even if it was legal. Like the laws passed in southern states that made it effectively impossible for black people to vote.
Well, yeah, that's probably because for nearly 50 years the government ostensibly recognized the right to have an abortion. Of course some people are going to be avoiding the system after recent events, and people who are afraid to seek help from others are more likely to resort to extreme measures out of desperation. I think they should adjust their expectations if they think this was a random outlier...
You do if you reasonably fear you're going to be criminalized for seeking medical attention. Here's an example from a few years ago (so reporting is not shaped by current events), and you can find many more recent examples.
In any case, such nuance is likely beyond the grasp of a 17 year old. I think you are well aware that this doesn't always yield simple seeming edge cases and that you are capable of looking into other examples but chose not to. Here's some more.
Oh. Well that fetus at that point knew the sound of it's mothers voice. It had a preference for a dominant hand. It could taste the difference across foods mom was eating. It felt pain, the same way you and I felt pain.
If you wouldn't inject a kitten or a puppy with meth just for fun, you probably shouldn't do it to a fetus either.
Sure, whatever you say - I think your claims are realistic. For example, your bit about a fetus (one floating in amniotic fluid) breathing was 100% believable. And the part where it was seeing light though the woman's body was down-right amazing "science".
Actually I never mentioned sight - even once born babies have very blurry and rough eyesight (it might be near monochromatic but we aren't sure).
They do breathe in the womb - both by getting oxygenated blood through the umbilical cord and by inhaling and exhaling amniotic fluid. This starts at 10 weeks. (Also why you see doctors flip babies after birth - to clear amniotic fluid from their respiratory system)
> That felt it's lungs fail to process air and that slowly choked and felt pain everywhere in it's body until the lights dimmed
You said this. You literally claimed that the fetus was breathing air. I will grant that the lights dimming might have been a metaphor, but in the context of a sentence suggesting the fetus was breathing air, I strongly doubt it wasn't literal.
I deeply apologize for saying the dying baby full of meth breathed air and not amniotic fluid. I will aspire to do better next time when discussing the painful deaths of babies.
Correct terminology is important. Things like "heartbeat laws" that apply to embryos that don't actually even have hearts yet are the result of playing fast and loose with terms.
Given she is underage and pregnant, who made her pregnant? Why are they so desperate to conceal the evidence of the miscarriage, to the point where they burned the body, was it to prevent DNA testing?
That's just the tip of the iceberg here. It needs to be understood why they took this course of action.
A teenager getting pregnant from another teenager is extremely common, and likely more common than the alternative. Burning a body is also an extremely traditional, something like 60% of Americans are cremated. Suggesting the police need to be involved in totally ordinary circumstances seems silly to me.
> The idea that all of those instances require an investigation
Only the ones where the woman who is pregnant is underage and someone decides to burn the body. Her mother not taking her to the hospital is neglect at a minimum. A miscarriage at that point could easily result in death.
It's wild what people on HN will write from a position of privilege. Because everyone has the money to just go to the hospital.
Plus everything you just wrote is a deterrent for women to seek care. If you know you'll be criminally investigated for a miscarriage even if you did nothing wrong you'll think twice before seeking care. Which of course means more women will die. But by all means continue with your "investigations".
The police exhumed the body because the 22-year old man who helped bury the body made a police report. The police didn't seek the Facebook search warrant until after they exhumed the body and found evidence the body was burned.
Yeah the fetus was 6 months old. That's a baby at that point if it is outside of her womb. She could have easily given birth and it would have gone on to live a completely normal life. I'm pro abortion generally, but you need to do it long before the fetus is viable.
Sorry but are you really saying 'easily' and 'given birth' after eachother? Have you ever witnessed a birth? And how do you know it would have gone on to live a completely normal life? What kind of disney movie do you live in?
By easily, I meant that the baby would have good chances of survival. It wouldn't be fighting against 1% odds and require $100M expenditures in the NICU
Yes, I've witnessed a birth.
Most babies born go on to live normal lives. Do you really think I was implying I was a mindreader, and I know the baby would have a normal life, rather than just saying the odds are good?
You interpreted my comment 100% in bad faith which is pretty lame for HN. You might feel more comfortable on reddit.
So sure, investigate the situation... figure out how a minor ended up pregnant and make sure that the abortion was voluntary. Perhaps fine her and place her on probation due to the circumstances, and get her mental health counseling.
But to put her on trial as an adult seems more like vengeance than justice.
This isn't really a good case to build sympathy on. She didn't abort with a doctor's assistance, it was fairly late, and she hid the remains. This would have been illegal across most of the US.
I didn't have to look too hard to find that it's 22 weeks in Germany [0] (excluding exceptional cases) and seems to be fairly similar for other Western European nations.
It doesn't seem so hard to me to feel empathy towards a 17 year old girl that found out she was pregnant around the same time the Supreme Court leaked the overturning of Roe v Wade.
That's certainly not a recipe for making good decisions, and now since she's being tried as an adult she not only has to live with a criminal record, but her name being blasted all over the place while living in an abortion-hostile state.
She is alleged to have aborted the fetus in April. The SCOTUS leak was in May. She was 23 weeks pregnant, she should have consulted with a doctor early in 2022. Tough to blame this on the Roe controversy when it hadn't even started yet.
This is very easy for you to say. Are you a teenage girl? Do you live in a dark-red state? Have you ever tried to consult a doctor in Nebraska about abortion?
As if deep red areas of the country are unfamiliar with abortion? They are very familiar with keeping it under the radar, but fine upstanding evangelical Christians absolutely still have abortions.
Also, there are three Planned Parenthood clinics in Omaha, Nebraska, less than two hours from Madison County. This young woman was less than a year from being legally an adult. I'd give it good odds that my 11 year old daughter could figure out she should talk to a doctor in this situation, and I sure as hell hope that by 17 she's definitely figured that out.
- Only 3 clinics in the state, all 2 hours away
- Only 1 clinic performs abortion at 20 weeks
- Requires a 24 hour wait period by law
- Requires parental consent under 18
- Between 16-20 weeks, costs $2500-$5000
These are all pretty significant barriers for anyone without resources, especially a teen trying to hide her pregnancy.
Information you post to Facebook is essentially public. Best we teach our kids that. The "privacy" safeguards are BS.
Also I think that the Nebraska law is a symptom of toxic, fascist mindset that's pervading the country - and that's more concerning to me than Facebook so easily folding (which I expected).
This is DMs, most people don't think of those as private, and it's unreasonable to tell people to treat DMs as public. By the same logic email, SMS, voicemail and all "essentially public".
If that 17 year old becomes a 30 year old with access to something sensitive the adversary wants, then the adversary might harass/blackmail that 30 year old with what they did when they were 17 years old.
I haven't worked at Facebook, but I'd be surprised if this were true. Other large companies have audit logs of employee access to user data that are actively monitored; accessing information of users without a paper trail of justification will get you fired.
This is the exact reason why that bit was going around. These corporations are not your friends, they have no obligation to preserve your privacy, and any data you've passed along their servers now belongs to them.
People were told to delete tracking apps to stop giving those companies data. So that data can't be used against you. This girl gave Facebook data. Facebook then turned that data over to the police. That data was used against her. Exactly how people said it would be.
> they have no obligation to preserve your privacy
It's not just that they have no obligation they are legally required to comply with subpoena requests and provide any and all data that an independent judge has deemed necessary.
You can't have realistically have a situation where the entire management team goes to jail for refusing to comply with them. Nor is it necessarily wrong for them to choose to respect the law even if it's a bad law.
The implication from the person I responded to was that telling people to delete tracking apps was a distraction or deception. That somehow it was Facebook trying to get people to funnel data through them.
But that's not what it was. The same people who were trying to get people to delete tracking apps would have also said "Don't talk about this through Meta apps" also.
It's a bit outside of what Facebook did, whether they should have complied or risked consequences, etc.
As an aside, Signal people. If you want to chat discreetly, Signal.
On my own Twitter feed, there were plenty of pro-choice activists who seemed unaware message apps are the primary threat.
The idea that Twitter is a threat doesn’t go down well with the Twitter crowd.
Same is true for FB, etc.
I personally had to explain to a number of people, face to face, that whatever threat is posed by menstrual tracking apps is nothing compared to FB, Twitter, and Google.
People seemed especially suprised that Twitter was a problem.
> It's not just that they have no obligation they are legally required to comply with subpoena requests and provide any and all data that an independent judge has deemed necessary.
I have, for north of a decade, not understood why this sort of thing hasn't triggered the exact same alarms that outright government-run mass data collection and spying would—if the government can pay for the data, can strong-arm to get the data, and can subpoena the data, it's barely better that a private company is collecting it, than the government, if your concern is government mis-use of data. No one should be allowed to collect and hoard information about people the way big tech companies (and some others, like CC companies and banks) do, for exactly the same reasons that we don't want the government doing that itself.
That is not as farfetched as it may first appear. Recall, if you will, how every MSM outlet started extolling the abhorrence of "stealthing"(1), in unison, not long before the US reversed course and called Assange an enemy of the state and the UK police entered the embassy to grab him? Social Engineering 101.
(1)Of course, removing a condom w/o consent is abhorrent.
Presumably a warrant is signed by an actual judge. I'm not sure I want every company launching their own investigation into the underlying evidence behind a search warrant in order to determine if they should comply or not.
If we are unhappy with the warrants, we should address that at the judicial level.
In the US, at least in my state, search warrants have to be specific about what is being searched for, where to search for it, and when the search should occur. So I think the warrant would likely have mentioned what sorts of messages they were looking for between dates X and Y, not just that Meta was ordered to turn over the entire message history for a user.
This is tragic. Women should have access to abortion, and 23 weeks is plenty, but miscarrying and burying it in the backyard needs an investigation. Just to make sure we have all the facts.
No comment on the general issue of abortion. Question remains for those who push this line as to which body part is that? A fetus is clearly an organism growing inside of someone's body but it is not a "body part" of another organism.
It's a part of her umbilical cord at least, even if at the end of that umbilical is a weird collection of cells that will form a different entity. I think of it like cell division, where there is a weird process, and at some point there's kind of two organisms in one, until they separate, and then it's two different organisms (cytokinesis).
Human pregnancy is absolutely bizarre and quite dangerous. Some weird facts:
- Fertilization doesn't even happen until the 2nd or 3rd week.
- Pregnancy can occur outside of the uterus, which quickly leads to ruptured organs and death for the mother.
- 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage.
- The fetus's cells float freely in the mother's blood plasma, which makes the mother a chimera.
- A mother's blood can develop antibodies to rhesus antigens in the baby's blood, identifying the baby as a foreign invader.
- A fetus's "coating" has genes that inhibit T-cells in the mother, which is the only way the mother's body doesn't destroy the fetus (which is an alien parasite to the mother/host).
- Fetal stem cells can travel throughout the mother to repair things - or create an immune disorder.
- Women grow an extra organ (the placenta) during pregnancy.
- During development, a female fetus develops all the eggs the adult form will carry throughout its lifetime.
- Amniotic fluid is fetus pee.
- A fetus can't survive outside the uterus before 23-25 weeks.
> It's a part of her umbilical cord at least, even if at the end of that umbilical is a weird collection of cells that will form a different entity. I think of it like cell division, where there is a weird process, and at some point there's kind of two organisms in one, until they separate, and then it's two different organisms (cytokinesis).
Is the umbilical part of the mother's body? "The umbilical cord develops from and contains remnants of the yolk sac and allantois. It forms by the fifth week of development, replacing the yolk sac as the source of nutrients for the embryo" per wiki. The process definitely reminds of parasitical organisms, in parts.
> Human pregnancy is absolutely bizarre
Honestly I still am having problems wrapping my head around the basic fact of existence. Reality is bizarre.
Merits of this particular case aside, as it seems like it would be a generous good faith assumption, given your general statement, in your ideal world when do we start harbouring criminal suspicions on a process that happens to between one and two thirds of all women?
23 weeks is the size of a grapefruit. 12 weeks is the size of the lime; is that small enough for you that you wouldn't put a woman going through the trauma of a miscarriage (or abortion) through criminal investigation?
Do we need to automatically assume that when a woman wants to not just flush it down the toilet like waste that is reason for suspicion?
May you never have a partner who has a miscarriage and then has to decide whether to put themselves at the mercy of the criminal system whether they go through "proper channels".
I think your grapefruit comparison is inaccurate unless you are referring to just the head. The Mayo Clinic's guide to pregnancy lists a baby's head at 24 weeks, just the head alone, at 8.7 inches (circ), but total length heel to crown is also 12.2 inches, which is about 60% the average length of a full term baby.
23 weeks is also more or less the borderline for where we have standardized national practices for saving an extreme premature delivery. I've read studies that put viability in the NICU at week 23 anywhere from 10% on the extreme low end, to 50% on the extreme high. By week 24 that jumps to ~30-75%.
The current Supreme has engaged in historical revisionism to reach its anti-abortion stance (eg abortion was perfectly legal 200 years ago, so much so that Ben franklin published at-home instructions for performing an abortion [1]). At the time of the ruling, it was pointed out that these draconian laws that half the states had passed or were passing wouldn't stop abortion, they would simply stop safe abortions. This case is evidence of that.
Some might choose to focus on why the defendant chose to get an abortion. I don't see any details of that here. Personally, I don't care. If she wants one, she should be able to get one.
Investigating this case at all is both unexpected and psychotic. Trying her as an adult is the next level of psychotic.
That all aside, as for Facebook, again this is light on detail regarding the cooperation given. Did they fight the subpoena? Did they have any grounds to? What steps were made to protect that user's privacy? We simply don't know.
As an aside, it seems like you have better privacy by using regular SMS than any form of IM. Law enforcement can get metadata but that's not so useful. Getting the actual messages from any IM service seems to be much easier. Perhaps WhatsApp would be better? I don't know how accessible WA messages currently are.
As for Facebook removing posts supplying at-home abortion medication, here I'm somewhat sympathetic just because Facebook does have to follow the law (even if that law is psychotic and unjustifiable). It's no different to supplying medical marijuana to people in places where it's illegal. Or supplying much cheaper medications from Canada or Mexico. These are all technically illegal so any company is going to have to try and enforce that.
Remember the political forces behind this under the guise of being "pro-life" go to every effort to restrict access to affordable medical care, recently voted against child tax credit (in the IRA) and fight efforts to allow people to fight a living wage.
What Ben Franklin wrote is completely orthogonal to the legality of abortion. It was a States' rights issue until Roe v. Wade, and now it's a States' rights issue again. There was no single "law" or "right" that ever said abortion was legal, even in the case of Roe v. Wade, which is now considered a flawed ruling.
I think the pressures and incentives in play right now are going to generally push big tech companies in that direction, arguably already have quite a bit. I expect to see a lot more of it unfortunately.
Need to get more people onboard with end to end encryption and obfuscating every possible piece of data online. As other commenters have stated, the corporations that run the internet are not your friends.
There is a large number of people in the US who are authoritarian and can't help but try to get involved in other people's business to the maximum degree. They won't stop at any boundary, they are religious zealots.
>> If you think "religious zealots" are the only authoritarians, boy do I have news for you!
> There are plenty of other ones, but religious ones are the only people who truly obsess over the actions of others.
Sorry, no. I don't know how anyone could come to believe something so incorrect. For instance, the Chinese Communist Party is 1) authoritarian, 2) atheist, and 3) very obsessed over the actions of others (as shown by the massive surveillance and control apparatus it's built).
Because of "terrorism" etc., text messages and the like will always be subpoenable. Meta would not be able to quash a bog-standard request like this. It's only even newsworthy because it involves the rescinded right to abortion.
The lesson here is don't use unencrypted services to discuss your crimes.
This thread is disgusting. All these men making excuses for why the state should investigate a 17 year old for a miscarriage.
It's not your fucking business. It's a private health matter. Period. You don't get to go on a fishing expedition "to get to the bottom" of anything after the fact with zero evidence of any wrong doing.
The really important part is: when you decide to break an unjust law, don't talk about it on surveilled platforms, they're complicit and will hand your ass in. Don't bring your smartphone with you either.
Edit: yes I understand the laws themselves are sexist, but HN users didn't write the laws, and the "all you men" fingerpointing isn't really productive. Why the men here? You have much easier and more significant targets than male HN users.
I just want to say for the record that this comment briefly had a positive score before I got dogpiled.
Sure, keeping sensitive conversations off of un-surveilled systems is easy for an informed person to say but most people have no clue how much surveillance actually happens. The battle to get people to chose to use the correct tools has been lost. The only course of action here to to fight and push for privacy rights.
How is this about controlling a woman's body? It is the question of what life is and when is it okay to end it. I think abortions should be legal, however, whether you are a male or a female does not make your opinion more valid. Unless you think there is a difference between a baby inside of a woman and a baby outside of her.
Parent is calling it out, not doing it themselves. The topic itself is deeply rooted in sexism. These kinds of transgressions against women often get drowned in debates about technicalities, which end up dominating the conversation and shifting attention away from the real problem - in this case bodily autonomy.
So I for one actually applaud parent for calling it out.
Making excuses for the state or making excuses for Facebook? Because I will apologize for Facebook in this case all day long. Not because I think their motives are pure. But because they are behaving exactly as the system incentivizes them. And to me, this is the most clear example of why Roe was a good precedent. Because a big part of laws is how they are enforced and there was a for some time a pro-democracy court which believed this was relevant. And now there is a legal absolutist court which believes that the letter of law is imporant and how a law is enforced can be regarded free of context at another time. But the tools of the state are blunt and this can be reason as much as justice for choosing what is and is not a crime. And to blame Facebook in this case rather than to accept that the consequence of laws is state violence is a way of deceiving oneself.
Corporations are amoral constructs. The expectation that they will behave morally and that they therefore deserve moral reciprocity is the greatest mass deception of our time.
You have one legal mechanism for enforcing good behavior upon capital, democracy.
There are countless examples of individuals placing the welfare of the corporation above their own personal morality. The same happens within the armed forces, the police, governments, religious institutions, etc.
If you think there is sufficient historical precedent to believe that shaming corporations into good behavior is an effective long term way to protect individuals then we simply disagree. I think you're wrong and believe that law is the only mechanism to ensure their behavior is pro-social.
To me, complaining about the bad behavior of capital is like being angry at the sun for burning you. IMO, you're only real option is to protect yourself.
Exactly. Demanding that Facebook upend the law for personal benefit has never been a real political position. It's just animals making a mess all over the democratic system.
To me this is no more disgusting than whatever happens in China or the Islamist world. Very few here lives in a place where abortion is banned (abortion is legal in most of USA as well) so not sure why it is such a huge deal compared to all other shit that happens in the world. If you want this to change then vote for it to change, don't pressure Facebook to change it, encouraging companies to break laws isn't a good thing.
No, it is a reasonable bar. People say that different states in the US are like different countries, if that was the case why are people so outraged that this happened to a girl in a different country? It isn't like I am outraged that abortion is illegal in Poland, but I would be outraged if they banned abortion in my country.
Different states are not different countries, and, if I may be so bold, the U.S. should be held to a higher standard than theocratic states or dictatorships.
There are legal means for resisting a search warrant which a company responsible for so much personal information would hopefully pursue based on the merits and contents of a search warrant.
Plenty of silicon valley companies resist laws with much larger consequences freely and mostly with impunity.
Some of the same people will be saying uber was a hero for breaking taxi laws around the world (more before it became fashionable to hate uber)
I mean, they could just refuse and get held in contempt.
It's not like a Nebraska sheriff can hop over to California or wherever Facebook data centers are and start seizing computers until they found this girl's messages (so much of that process would be absurd).
Just look to Trump to observe what obstructing a court order looks like.
I am not, of course, a corporate lawyer. One would know appropriate procedures to delaying, opposing, or otherwise objecting and appealing an order like this.
But it's Facebook. A half a trillion dollar company can resist an overzealous prosecutor going after a single teenager by just ignoring it and ignoring the consequences of ignoring it. It is approximately equivalent to a billionare not paying a parking meter. Sure, they "have to", but nothing of consequence actually happens if they don't.
Facebook should have fought the search warrant if it, say, wanted to hold on to its most valuable demographic.
But the amount that you can be outraged at Facebook for complying with a court order is limited, rule of law (and not just rule of your opinion on what the law should be) is important. You definitely don't want people who have opposite opinions to be making up what they think the law should be.
I don't think I'm anywhere near my limit with regards to outrage towards Facebook. Facebook should have protected that data better, Facebook should have fought the warrant, and yeah I'm fine with Facebook refusing to hand over the data and going to court over it.
I believe that companies should be zealous advocates for their users, just as lawyers are for their clients. Facebook was not any kind of advocate here.
Up to what point? Are you saying that someone should be allowed to abort their baby one day before it would be born on its own? That would actually be a pretty extreme opinion, and would put you in a fairly small minority. Most people recognize that somewhere along the line a fetus becomes a child with a set of basic human rights just like the rest of us. The definition of that point is the entire reason we argue incessantly about it.
And yet this happens naturally all the time and we don't investigate every single case because it's..... A private health matter.
No matter how many times I say this someone always jumps in with "what about". Let me stop you right there. It's not your business. It's a private health matter. Period.
There's a reason we don't count unborn fetuses until they are actually born as people. Mainly the fact that so much can go wrong between those two points in time.
What does whether it is investigated or not have to do with whether it is morally or legally right? A lot of rapes don't get investigated, I guess that is just a private matter too.
> Let me stop you right there. It's not your business. It's a private health matter. Period
That's literally the heart of the discussion. A lot of people don't view it to be a private health manner if you kill a fetus that would be perfectly fine on the outside world, but just hasn't made that transition yet. You're just saying "Stop talking. I'm right". Good for you in having confidence in your convictions I guess, but don't expect to convince anyone.
> There's a reason we don't count unborn fetuses until they are actually born as people. Mainly the fact that so much can go wrong between those two points in time.
Yes, and already born humans can die from natural or unnatural causes. The system is fairly good at detecting if someone died from natural or unnatural causes though, and then looking into the unnatural causes a bit deeper if it seems appropriate. How would you be able to tell if this woman (1) had an abortion(natural or unnatural), and then burned the body and buried her, or (2) gave birth at 6 months to a viable baby, and then killed her shortly after it was born?
If it involves the legal or political system, it's all of our business, at least within whatever jurisdiction we're talking about. There aren't subjects only women get to talk about and vote on and only men get to talk about and vote on. If we vote on it (or the people who will) - we ALL get an opinion and a voice and a vote. It would also probably be good to not assume everyone's comment who you disagree with are "men."
I asked this elsewhere, but I'll ask the same question to you: Do you think it is a private health matter to abort a fetus after 40 weeks of gestation, that is 100% normal, 100% viable, and poses no abnormal risk to the mother?
Do you think parents should be forced by law to donate their organs for transplant when necessary to save their kids? Because it's the exact same situation.
There is no taking of organs. It would be merely removing the parasite from the body of the host.
And from a practical perspective, how exactly are you getting rid of a 40 week old fetus? You need to effectively give birth to get rid of it, regardless of whether you kill it or let it live.
From an ethical perspective there's no difference between forcing someone to donate their body to a fetus and a transplant - both are violations of bodily autonomy.
Bodily autonomy doesn't exist, I'm not sure where this idea has come from. If it did exist, prisons wouldn't exist because they are fairly clearly a violation of bodily autonomy.
I understand "bodily autonomy" is a pretty popular buzz phrase, but does it actually exist? There are plenty of procedures you can't just go in and ask that they perform, and plenty of medical procedures you would be denied unless you met their criteria. If we truly had bodily autonomy, we'd be able to get whatever procedure we wanted done.
The real issue I have is that Facebook keeps an unencrypted copy of everyone's DMs stored and just waiting to be handed to the government. I understand it's how they make money, and that they've done it forever, but man, I guess using Signal has spoiled me. It's so weird to me that most people are completely unaware or unworried that their "private" conversations aren't private in the slightest.
Google also has a bunch of WhatsApp backups in Google Drive, and Apple has hundreds of millions of iCloud Backups (non-e2e, by design, preserved as an iMessage encryption backdoor for the FBI) containing everyone's iMessages (or realtime iMessage sync private keys).
I get the objection to Apple's unencrypted iCloud backups, but could we present the facts without multiple exaggerations, distortions, and unsupported opinions, please?
First, no, it's not "everyone's iMessages". There has been a lot of very public discussion of this. If you don't back up your Messages to iCloud, which a lot of informed people don't do anymore, then Apple does not have that unencrypted copy.
Second, unless you have support that Apple did this "for the FBI", specifically for that reason, as opposed to it being a mix of reasons, and also involving user-support reasons, as has been widely reported, please stop repeating that unsupported claim.
And lastly, until Apple commits an offense of the nature under discussion here, let's not tar them with the same broad brush as we are justly using to tar Facebook.
> If you don't back up your Messages to iCloud, which a lot of informed people don't do anymore, then Apple does not have that unencrypted copy.
This is false. Apple will still have the unencrypted copies (actually, the effectively-unencrypted sync keys, as "Messages in iCloud" cross-device sync keys are the thing at issue here) because the people you iMessage with will be providing them to Apple. iCloud Backup is on by default, so approximately everyone you talk to using iMessage is escrowing their private keys to Apple.
Turning off iCloud Backup on your device does not protect your iMessages, as the backdoor exists on the devices of both conversation participants.
It's sort of like switching email providers to get away from Gmail; if everyone you send or receive emails to/from is using Gmail, Google is still getting a copy of all of your correspondence.
> Second, unless you have support that Apple did this "for the FBI", specifically for that reason, as opposed to it being a mix of reasons, and also involving user-support reasons, as has been widely reported, please stop repeating that unsupported claim.
I updated the comment with the link to the Reuters article that says they did this specifically for the FBI.
From the article:
> More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee.
> Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order.
> In private talks with Apple soon after, representatives of the FBI’s cyber crime agents and its operational technology division objected to the plan, arguing it would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against iPhone-using suspects, the government sources said.
> When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to the six sources. Reuters could not determine why exactly Apple dropped the plan.
> “Legal killed it, for reasons you can imagine,” another former Apple employee said he was told, without any specific mention of why the plan was dropped or if the FBI was a factor in the decision.
Genuine question: At any point, Signal could slip some code into their App Store or Google Play app which lets their servers ask for your DMs in plaintext. For all we know, they have already done so. It seems like the threat model is to assume the client is 100% trustworthy but the servers are potentially untrustworthy; why does this model make sense? Shouldn't we assume that the clients are also untrustworthy unless we have built them from source ourselves or gotten the binaries from a trusted party?
> Shouldn't we assume that the clients are also untrustworthy unless we have built them from source ourselves or gotten the binaries from a trusted party?
This is why Signal's client codebases is open source. In principle, a qualified engineer can review it and confirm (to some degree of confidence) that Signal is not lying about its E2EE claims.
The next step is trusting the compiled version of the program. In the abstract, you have no reason to do this, except that you also have no reason to trust any third party (including random third-party-store builds). You don't have any particular reason to trust your own builds either, thanks to RoTT[1]. In practice this makes the official build the most trustworthy, since they're the only party that's actually officially claiming properties about the client in an official capacity (and therefore potentially liable if those claims are false).
The "formal" solution is maybe something like Binary Transparency[2], or verifiable builds. But the end-user ergonomics of those solutions are still being worked out.
Right. But that means, in my eyes, that Signal's official builds are _exactly as untrustworthy_ as Signal's server is; if I couldn't trust Signal if they said they didn't log non-E2EE messages, I don't see why I can trust Signal when they say they don't have a way to retrieve plaintext messages from their client build. If we're talking about liability if claims are false, I should be fine using any chat platform which claims to not log messages, right?
The RoTT thing isn't that relevant IMO; if we're under an RoTT-style attack, everything is off. But crucially, that's a different threat model; I can trust my compiler independently from Signal. I don't feel like I can trust Signal's client independently from Signal's server; either Signal as a whole is trustworthy, or they're not.
Now I agree that if we had some kind of verifiable or reproducible builds, E2EE would make sense. If anyone could download Signal's source code, build it, and verify that the binary is identical, we would have the "normal" FOSS defenses, where we could assume that some security researcher would do that now and then.
> If we're talking about liability if claims are false, I should be fine using any chat platform which claims to not log messages, right?
It's a fine point, but I'd argue that Signal's promises are still "worth more" than a competitor who merely promises to not log without any technical backing: the latter is a purely social promise, while the latter is a social promise rooted in a cryptographic claim that, with the right skills, you could verify.
The RoTT threat model (which I agree is extreme!) is really not that far off: when you download the official Signal app, you're trusting, modulo the integrity of the app store, that Signal has either backdoored everyone or nobody. In other words: they would need to deliver the weakness to all users, increasing the risk of discovery, or to none of them. Binary transparency makes that gamble riskier still, by forcing Signal (or the app store) to publish signatures for each build before clients accept them for installation.
Computers will never perfectly eliminate the latent social trust required when running someone else's code, which we all do even when we run any code at all (even our own). But Signal's current model is about as good as it gets for laypeople: you can verify the source, and the parts you can't verify require significant malicious investment and/or exposure risk. For the more (potentially rightfully?) paranoid among us, building from source and comparing the binaries is about as good as it gets for now.
> the latter is a social promise rooted in a cryptographic claim that, with the right skills, you could verify.
How would one do that? Do you mean if you literally decompiled the binary and read through the machine code and built up a solid understanding of what everything does (and did this after every app update)? Or is there something more practical you're referring to?
> when you download the official Signal app, you're trusting, modulo the integrity of the app store, that Signal has either backdoored everyone or nobody
The way I imagine this attack working, Signal would have code in everyone's app which lets the server ask for DMs, but the server would only ask for DMs when there's a reason to do so (such as when a government requests it). That way, yes, everyone is backdoored, but there's no suspicious network traffic or anything which would give it away. I'd say Signal can be pretty confident that nobody will read through the machine code and make a solid enough mental model of how the entire system works to notice such a backdoor.
> Or is there something more practical you're referring to?
I would probably compile the reference source and use BinDiff[1] (or a handful of other tools) to compare it with the official binary. I've used BinDiff successfully for similar purposes in the past; it's also a popular tool for finding N-days after patches go out.
Signal could patch in that kind of backdoor, sure. But it's still globally disclosed in that case: you're revealing your backdoor to every prospective reverse engineer (there's a lot of them!), even if you only selectively enable it. Signal can probably be about as confident that nobody is reading their machine code as Chrome can, which is to say not confident.
And note: you don't need a solid enough mental model of how the system works at the machine level. You only need a differential understanding of what the public code says and what the machine code does, which is much easier.
Is it possible? Sure. But it's much, much higher risk and visibility than every other technique available to nation-state adversaries.
Telegram, widely hated on HN, years ago I think published how to verify their builds.
Yes, on iOS you'll need a jailbroken device to do it but it was doable.
(Writing in past tense since I haven't checked lately.)
Edit:
unlike WhatsApp, Telegram never was caught pants down uploading unencrypted data to Google with a wink wink, nudge nudge agreement.
And they never got caught uploading data to Facebook directly" from the endpoint "for security before sending it end-to-end encrypted between endpoints.
Oh, and they never got caught sending unencrypted data over the https port. (When normally extremely pedantic HN-ers write that Telegram sends data unencrypted, it means it is not end-to-end encrypted, not that it is plain text. Again contrary to what WhatsApp was caught doing.)
Disclaimer: I use Telegram myself, recommend Signal short term and I'm actively looking for a better solution for the future. Current bets: Matrix for group chats and I am also (probably too) excited about nostr for future social networking.
Honestly, encrypted communications for the average person, being a relatively recent development, is much weirder. Email isn't traditionally encrypted (don't bring up the mess that is PGP); IRC wasn't; neither was AIM, ICQ, or MSN; Twitter DMs aren't; XMPP isn't; before the Internet, phone calls could be wiretapped by the government. Physical mail, while not encrypted, could be considered an exception, seeing as it's illegal to open in the majority of cases.
"Private" communications have never really been that private, unless you're speaking face to face alone in a room or passing notes to each other. Not to say I'm in favor of it being that way, but that's what people have long adjusted to.
Encyption isn't traditional, but neither is it traditional for common people to have records of the conversations they had with friends and family, least of all records that are possessed and preserved indefinitely by any third party. Even if you consider letter writing; letters might be intercepted by the government but even then the postal service wasn't maintaining an archive of the contents of all the letters everybody ever sent.
> Honestly, encrypted communications for the average person, being a relatively recent development, is much weirder.
Not at all. For nearly all of human history, privacy of communication was the norm with a few understood exceptions.
If you had a conversation with someone it was just about always private forever. Unless the location was bugged with microphones, but that wouldn't be the case unless you were already under investigation. Most importantly, it wasn't possible to go back in time and bug the room for a conversation last week.
Phone lines could be tapped but not all phone lines were recorded all the time, wasn't yet technically possible. So again you'd be private unless already under investigation and the tap couldn't happen retroactively.
It's only now that reality has changed dramatically and all messaged are recorded (e.g. here by facebook) and are available retroactively and across the whole population (i.e. they don't need to target someone specific, just run a query for phrases and see who pops up).
I disagree, privacy was the norm. Never did government have as much access to communication. Even ICQ, AIM were private because government usually didn't have interest in spying here because the demographics were mostly not of interest. Today we have a protocol about a lot of things, text, locations, group memberships. Surveillance is vastly greater than anytime before with a few magnitudes.
> all the other cases they hand wave and ignore are sacrifices they are willing to make to control women
Could you elaborate on this point? I hope I don't come off as insensitive, when saying that just as a social phenomenon, this discussion is peculiarly interesting, and while I ultimately believe that the an (actual) woman has the absolute right to decide over her own life including a (potential) child, I can understand why "pro-life" people make the arguments they make -- and at first I'd believe their own reasoning. To me it the entire topic of abortion seems like something beyond morality, there is no good and bad choice, just bad and less bad. The reason I say it is "interesting" is that it appears people are talking past one another on such a massive scale, and as it appears to me considering different images as unstated examples. The pro-choice image (to me) involves an every day woman who cannot handle a child in her current circumstances, and decides to abort the pregnancy out of necessity, while the pro-life image appears to involve notions of promiscuity, indifference towards a child and egoism. I have to wonder why these contrasting views have arisen, and who stands to profit from it. Arguments like "controlling women's bodies" are in my eyes to this end too simplistic. The danger -- as with any social debate -- of misunderstanding the opposing side is that one cannot reason and anticipate their behaviour, as one is distracted by a moral mirage, that might be easier to make fun of, but that fighting is a dangerous waste of energy.
Not everyone agrees a life is life at conception. We can all agree the potential is there and that barring any intervention, biology or bad luck that a human is inevitable. Just as I wouldn't criminalize a woman biological factors or bad luck, I wouldn't criminalize interventions. So many can look in the mirror, with a clear conscience.
I take a long, hard look at the adorable two year old I surprisingly got pregnant with at 40… and still believe that no one should have go through with a pregnancy they don’t want, no matter how young/old/healthy/slutty they are. We had wanted a child for over a decade, but outside of an early ectopic pregnancy (was lucky to catch it early enough to terminate it with Methotrexate instead of having to do surgery), it looked like it was a good thing I was content to be an aunt. I never resented those unknown young women who “took the easy way out” instead of birthing a baby for a nice, professional couple like us to adopt.
Women who go through with unwanted pregnancies and then give up the babies for adoption are heroes, and deserve more support, during and AFTER - the physical effects of even a “normal” pregnancy can be life-long. I still have a ton of back pain (not helped by lifting 30 lbs of often uncooperative toddler), and the toes on my right foot are slowly getting number. Other than the age thing, I had a very healthy, normal pregnancy.
I am my mother's fifth child. She always wanted four.
She was a family planning campaigner at the time (campaigning for access to contraception - a hot issue at the time) and was quite embarrassed.
Throughout my childhood my mother was an active and prominent campaigner for the right of women to control their own bodies. There is no doubt that I would have been aborted.
I am very glad I wasn't, I love life. But I absolutely support the right of women to end their pregnancies legally and safely.
While this case involved a search warrant, Facebook also gives information to police departments without a warrant for any case that they determine to be an "emergency". Here is the portal where the information is requested and provided:
Back when I used to have a Facebook account, Facebook provided private information from my account to a police department without a warrant for a situation that they deemed an "emergency", but that I did not. I no longer use Facebook.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadThey made a decision not to.
So showing up (at thousands of courthouses a year) is the default. If you’re helpful (to the prosecution), we will let you do things by email.
Obviously you can't put FB in jail, so does that turn into a bigger fine?
I see this claim made a lot, and I don't understand it. When the canadian trucker protest (please don't make this discussion about that, I am not saying it was good or bad, I am just using it as an example) switched to crypto after the gov froze their bank accounts, the gov also froze those crypto wallets. That seems like the opposite of powerless.
I think it's really naive to think that the gov won't just be able to bully any type of new system into submission, like they always do. If there are people running the system, then those people can be coerced.
So for most people this can just be shortened to "Cryptocurrency can't help you".
These people didn't do anything wrong either:
"They Told Their Therapists Everything. Hackers Leaked It All"
A mental health startup built its business on easy-to-use technology. Patients joined in droves. Then came a catastrophic data breach.
https://www.wired.com/story/vastaamo-psychotherapy-patients-...
On some of the most popular ones, you can lose your account and all data/connections at any time that they demand your government ID and you refuse to provide it.
I don't use services like this, myself, but many people use these popular services as their exclusive destination on the internet.
It would not be enough for the young to care about anonymization. They would need to care about it far in excess of their desire to interact with common platforms, celebrities, pop culture and their peers. It is an unreasonably high demand for kids.
I could understand not agreeing with the law but maybe encouraging rogue behavior could come back to bite you in unexpected and deleterious ways
So yes, it's a product choice, but it's not a product choice out of some strange effort for the company to have access to your data, but because it provides the right product mix.
You might as well argue that your bank having access to your account records to hand over is a product choice. Yes, there are ways to work around that. Maybe some blockchain variant will give that level of privacy. It will not do it without significant tradeoffs.
If the private messaging were encrypted by default it would also be easy to offer an opt in feature that would preserve recovery (e.g. by the users software encrypting a copy of their encryption key over to the platform). I expect relatively few users would opt into it.
Imagine that back in the 80s when people regularly communicated by letters in the post if the post office offered an option to open, copy and archive all your letters, just in case you lost them. ... how many people would have opted into it? with the obvious invasion of privacy, vs just taking care to not lose whatever they intended to keep... Not zero, I suppose, but not many. And today these platforms archive and hand over communications far more casual and ephemeral than letters.
> A Nebraska teenager is facing criminal charges alleging she aborted a fetus in violation of state law, after authorities obtained her Facebook messages using a search warrant.
Should companies disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant from a state government in the United States?
If so, how is that any different from Uber breaking various laws?
I happen to believe that access to abortion is important (although quite a lot of people don't), but the rule of law matters too. It's not reasonable or logical to believe that it's ok for companies to break some laws but not others. So, I can't really be mad at Facebook for doing this.
That wouldn’t be breaking the law. It would actually be following the law.
Even if they tried, they could have still been required to turn over the data.
Yes. This goes back to the fugitive slave act days.
That said, they should have fought. They should always fight. There might be novel case law. And it sets the right precedent.
Shameful.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
I would like to see FB challenge it and get a ruling.
Supreme Court chooses what cases to look at.
And since it has swung to being much more conservative are more interested in cases which reinforce the originalism doctrine for interpreting the constitution.
"Still, Meta has remained largely silent on how it will moderate abortion content in general. However, users recently noticed that Instagram and Facebook posts about acquiring abortion pills such as mifepristone were being systematically removed. At the same time, Meta continued to earn revenue from anti-abortion advertisements containing dangerous misinformation, Media Matters found. An investigation by the Markup discovered that Facebook was collecting data from users interacting with abortion services websites, and subequently made that information available to anti-abortion groups."
> subequently made that information available to anti-abortion groups
That part is probably misleading, I'm assuming they didn't give them any kind of information, they just allowed demographic targeting like they do for most kinds of ads.
Only in America has the continuous rhetoric actually forced the idea that abortions are murder out of the fringe crowd and into the common understanding. That is truly sad.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7868372/coronavirus-covid-pandemi...
Canada's abortion laws are more restrictive than what was under Casey.
Even if you are pro-choice, comparing an unborn child to a disease that kills millions is a poor move.
Texas let the genie out of the bottle, and you can't put it back in.
If Texas can say "Hey, Massachusetts, it's illegal for teachers in your state to teach evolution" then we've essentially destroyed any ability to have laws in the US.
> creates a really awful situation legally in the states.
You are correct, it's a pretty awful situation, but it's one that we currently live in.
Also, it's rather common for sovereign states to sanction people for committing crimes in other jurisdictions. Meng Wanzhou was arrested for breaking US laws regarding trade with Iran in China.
This is likely more of a side-effect of having government sponsored healthcare wanting to limit the number of elective procedures rather than any sort of moral issue like its viewed in countries like the United States.
Those crimes don't make sense if they're following an abortion. That looks to me like a flimsy cover for prosecuting getting an abortion.
Here, the police laid the first set of three charges before there was any allegation of anything other than miscarriage/stillbirth, so it's hard to argue that the police were trying to punish the teenager for abortion in this particular case.
1. https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/jul/21/could-10-year...
The legality of 23rd-week abortions in parts of Europe is not an issue.
How did this get to 20 weeks?
Who in any position of power was watching out for this child?
Now those in power will use it to crush her.
How sad. How bad. How mad.
This isn’t how jurisdiction works. Facebook had a customer in Nebraska who allegedly did a crime in Nebraska under Nebraska law. That creates a legal nexus for them there.
But it's debatable whether Facebook Messenger is a "telecommunications service" under US law.
"One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." Martin Luther King Jr.
Judging from the reaction of Meta they realise that it was a mistake not to enable the "host proof" encryption protocols - like Signal, and what Whats APp was supposed to be (is it still?) - across the communication tools
They have exposed themselves to this - being complicate in what is starting to look like an organised campaign against women - they deserve our condemnation
It would be interesting to see it play out, but a company refusing to comply with a search warrant will likely result in really bad stuff for the company. Like officers in prison and conviction of crimes like Arthur Anderson during the Enron scandal.
I don’t see an opportunity here for Facebook to “take a stand” unless Zuck wanted to burn the company down.
That’s not realistic. And I think calling for companies to act illegally is a slippery slope I don’t want to get onto.
Facebook doesn't get to decide which laws are unjust. But Facebook gets to decide which laws it considers unjust and how it wants to deal with them. If big corporations can decide they consider tax laws unjust and want to avoid them as much as possible, they can also consider laws unjust that impact other people.
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
- Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7515521-william-roper-so-no...
In particular, I'm fairly sure everyone who bombs abortion clinics[0] tells themselves that the laws they break are the unjust ones, because who sees themselves as the villains of their own stories?
[0] https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9827886/abortion-clinic-attack...
A wolf and a sheep can't find a mutually satisfactory agreement when it comes to whether the sheep should be eaten by the wolf. Having irreconcilable differences is all fine and dandy in a democracy as long as those differences aren't resolved against you in a way that has life-altering consequences for you.
If you value order over justice, I'm sorry but there's a name for a system like that.
There are a lot of people in this country who genuinely believe that abortion is murder, and that's why we are in this mess in the first place. Those people believe laws that permit abortion are unjust and deeply immoral -- should they start using that as an excuse to punish people who legally obtained abortions, blockade clinics, etc.?
In a country with widely divergent religious and political views, we would end up with anarchy if everyone started disobeying laws they believed were unjust.
That is exactly what many are doing.
The logic doe cut both ways. We need to protect people wherever we find them.
The rule of law is a good thing, but to pretend that it is an absolute thing is to be a party to tyranny
One can also believe vigilante violence against people given abortions to be just, and thus justify such actions against them. In which case, the question is, "What should someone whose moral code is opposed to yours do?" Which in my opinion is a silly question.
For this to lead to anarchy, it must be the case that a significant number of people avoid causing anarchy for the sole reason of following the law for its own sake, without consideration for any punishment for violating the law.
No, it's not a silly question. It is the reason we need to have laws.
That mechanism is built into the system, just as much as democratic change is
For me, I'm happy Uber is around today, most likely because the flouted the law. Win/Win for me and them IMO.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62158976
In which "justifying rape" is only recently (I am getting old. Last decades) gone out of fashion.
Some call it a "rape culture", with some justification.
Uber is a part of that culture, and it is an open question just where on the spectrum of "angelic operator" to "dangerous predation" they lie. But the claim: "cheap transportation is partially built on the backs of hundreds of rape cases" is only true because of "partially". I think it is a weak claim.
The pursuit of private profit vs the defense of someone else's private liberty.
You might think rule of law subsumes both considerations, or something else, but if so you should say that. Asking a rhetorical question whose answer is blindingly obvious is more of a conversational gambit for Socratic authority than a sincere inquiry.
You are either disingenuous or naive if you think this is true.
It is an extremely complex question both ethically and practically.
There is nothing unreasonable or illogical about believing that it is okay for companies to break some laws but not others. You can come to that conclusion in at least two perfectly reasonable ways: you can believe that breaking laws is not in itself a bad thing (but that actions that break some law may be bad for some other reason, such as harming people), or that it is a bad thing but in some cases the lesser of two evils.
However, in practice it may be difficult for a company to organize such disobedience, particularly since, for example, Facebook cannot avoid hiring employees from religious groups who are in favor of these laws. So, a more practical approach is to avoid being in the position of surveilling people's private communications in the first place, so that no employees at the company have access to the information the police seek. End-to-end encryption is a crucial structural protection against this kind of pervasive surveillance, because it prevents intermediaries from having the private information in the first place. Pseudonymity is another one: the teenager should never have given Facebook her legal name, but unfortunately Facebook has extensive policies in place to extort legal names from its users, making them vulnerable to such abuses.
Of course talking about encryption always brings out the knuckledraggers who link to XKCD 538 and talk about hitting people with $5 wrenches. Hopefully this example clarifies why encryption sometimes defeats a $5 wrench: neither the Nebraska teenager nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case.
Everyone has different morals. That's why laws exist.
It's difficult to tell from your one-line comment, but it sounds like one of your beliefs is moral relativism: that there is no objective reality of what is good and bad, only "different morals" held by different people. That belief is false.*
Laws exist only in the same sense that Zeus or Santa Claus exists, which I think is the sense you believe that morals exist: they are collections of ideas that are passed from mind to mind, but there is no sense in which it can be objectively true or false to say, "The law forbids [such and such]." There is only, at best, a social consensus.
______
* Of course, my belief that goodness and badness exist objectively is fallible, but even if it is as incorrect as the belief that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, its veracity is still an objective question; it could be true, false, or partly true, but not meaningless.
It is unfortunate that you think you are contributing to the conversation by posting a one-line statement that simply repeats conventional beliefs.
What evidences can you give for the existence of the law that cannot also be given for Santa Claus? Or could not be given for Zeus, if we were in Classical Greece?
But for the fun of it:
The law is written down, codified in a formal way that is consistent across writing.
The law is backed up by police thugs.
The law has formal processes of creation and destruction.
Santa Claus has none of these things.
a) Yes, they should
b) At minimum they should fight the warrant and advocate for their users
c) They should protect that data such that they can't turn it over
The fact that it was obtained using a search warrant is an very important part of the story. Right now, the headline is designed to create an outrage against Facebook. Forbes is being very misleading here.
I don't think that's universally true. That would depend upon the state. The Roe decision protected women from government intervention before the fetus was vaible but now that Roe is gone that does not mean the inverse is true.
In short, if you ask any nurse or doctor they will tell you that rules are to try to save any baby which is more than 22 weeks.
A paternalistic state is as much a tyranny as a persecutory one. The only only difference is in the overt methods. The motives and thinking behind the two are the same. If you're of the view that certain laws are inherently unjust, by whom or by what standards should that distinction be made? Who watches the watchers?
Why would you think a country that dictates with whom or how one can form an economic contract would leave alone the right to bodily integrity? Individual human beings, whether representing companies or themselves, choose where to trade, register, and employ (or be employed by) people. Human beings are the ones decide to create companies, governments, and tyrannies.
You give companies far too much agency when you want to pin them as enablers of tyranny but deny them any in their contributions to personal liberty, whether political or economic. You can't have it both ways.
That's probably due the headline missing vital context that turns this from arguments on backdoors(a topic FB has often got into trouble with) to one of "can you issue search warrants on digital media?"
But I understand writers don't often write the headline in larger publications. Maybe the writer wanted to be impartial but some higher power wanted to maximize engagement
Yes
It is curious if we were to expect civil disobedience by individuals risking everything but also expect companies who risk little to turn in little Anne Frank at the first opportunity without even diminishing our respect.
Or they can say that "they are just following the law" while they collect all the ad $$$. They have the power to morally affect this issue. They can very trivially put out a statement that they will no longer continue operate in states and countries that violate the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But we see the big players chasing money over humanity and democracy and even decency. And it isn't just Hatebook, look at the concessions Apple and Google and others have made to get access to markets in China and other totalitarian regimes.
Also, despite all those bogus studies (which, for example, don't correct for how much rule of law is upheld when comparing countries), it will reduce the total number of late-stage abortions significantly. That's a win in my books.
Citation required.
Numerous legitimate studies show that limited/no access to abortions leads to more at-home/back-alley abortions[1,2].
They also show that abortion bans will lead to higher maternal mortality rate [3].
But go off and pat yourself on the back for fetuses having more value than the incubation receptacle they're within.
1: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... 2:https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1... 3: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/30/abortion-bans-incr...
Abortions don't just spontaneously happen. Your style of carefully-worded rhetoric is intentional in that it gives people an impression like they just do. They don't; the mother makes knowing decisions to terminate the life of her child. Now, several states greatly restrict these intentional, knowing, conscious decisions.
1: https://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/gynecology-and-obs...
2: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2020...
3: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/sexualviolence/unders...
4: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pregnancy-los....
The first Lancet one has this as a finding:
> The abortion rate was lower in subregions where more women live under liberal abortion laws (p<0·05)
They don't seem to have corrected for other factors like rule of law, income, and level of economic development.
The second Lancet one also suffers from the same issue (though at least acknowledge the rule if income), and the authors reveal their biases very soon:
> We developed a new statistical model that jointly estimated unintended pregnancy and abortion that aimed to better inform efforts towards global equity in sexual and reproductive health and rights.
The last one's [1] conclusions seem like they could be broadly correct. If no abortion is allowed at all, you'd expect more maternal deaths. However, the actual amount is disputable as this is based on modelling not concrete data. Additionally, they seem to be assuming a total ban on abortion, which doesn't seem realistic to me.
> But go off and pat yourself on the back for fetuses having more value than the incubation receptacle they're within.
Finally, we need to avoid personal attacks if we are going to have a fruitful discussion.
[1]: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7g29k
"Abortions at or after 21 weeks are uncommon, and represent 1% of all abortions in the US. ... Reasons individuals seek abortions later in pregnancy include medical concerns such as fetal anomalies or maternal life endangerment, as well as barriers to care that cause delays in obtaining an abortion." (https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/fact-sheet/abortion...)
But, yeah, actually, this is way more access than most women in this country have to an abortion. Kudos, Nebraska.
However, in February the state failed to pass a trigger law that would've banned all abortions when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Nebraska legislators have indicated they may call a special session to try again to pass the bill.
Why?
In this case it's a bit more suspicious, but it's not an unlikely explanation by itself.
They did. They found messages of the girl self aborting well into viability and then planning to hide the body.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/8/20954980/stillbirth...
In any case, such nuance is likely beyond the grasp of a 17 year old. I think you are well aware that this doesn't always yield simple seeming edge cases and that you are capable of looking into other examples but chose not to. Here's some more.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61995250
If you wouldn't inject a kitten or a puppy with meth just for fun, you probably shouldn't do it to a fetus either.
They do breathe in the womb - both by getting oxygenated blood through the umbilical cord and by inhaling and exhaling amniotic fluid. This starts at 10 weeks. (Also why you see doctors flip babies after birth - to clear amniotic fluid from their respiratory system)
You said this. You literally claimed that the fetus was breathing air. I will grant that the lights dimming might have been a metaphor, but in the context of a sentence suggesting the fetus was breathing air, I strongly doubt it wasn't literal.
1. fetuses
2. citation needed. Meth is a drug that causes euphoria and (amongst other things) a general lack of concern for pain (if it's even noticed).
Please stop making random things up and asserting them as true.
Meth kills thousands of people a year. It's a CNS stimulant.
pretty sure we inject them with shit that kills them all the time. it's just pentobarbital sodium and phenytoin sodium instead of methamphetamine.
That's just the tip of the iceberg here. It needs to be understood why they took this course of action.
Only the ones where the woman who is pregnant is underage and someone decides to burn the body. Her mother not taking her to the hospital is neglect at a minimum. A miscarriage at that point could easily result in death.
Plus everything you just wrote is a deterrent for women to seek care. If you know you'll be criminally investigated for a miscarriage even if you did nothing wrong you'll think twice before seeking care. Which of course means more women will die. But by all means continue with your "investigations".
Either way not being able to afford food for your children is still neglect. The mother has a duty of care she failed to live up to.
> criminally investigated for a miscarriage even if you did nothing wrong
Disposing of human remains without going through the proper channels is "something wrong". It's a public health risk.
And for Nebraska to put this 17 year old on trial as an adult is doubly cruel.
Yes, I've witnessed a birth.
Most babies born go on to live normal lives. Do you really think I was implying I was a mindreader, and I know the baby would have a normal life, rather than just saying the odds are good?
You interpreted my comment 100% in bad faith which is pretty lame for HN. You might feel more comfortable on reddit.
But to put her on trial as an adult seems more like vengeance than justice.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Poland
[0] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg...
That's certainly not a recipe for making good decisions, and now since she's being tried as an adult she not only has to live with a criminal record, but her name being blasted all over the place while living in an abortion-hostile state.
Also, there are three Planned Parenthood clinics in Omaha, Nebraska, less than two hours from Madison County. This young woman was less than a year from being legally an adult. I'd give it good odds that my 11 year old daughter could figure out she should talk to a doctor in this situation, and I sure as hell hope that by 17 she's definitely figured that out.
Also I think that the Nebraska law is a symptom of toxic, fascist mindset that's pervading the country - and that's more concerning to me than Facebook so easily folding (which I expected).
(Although I agree that the premise in a broader sense of trusting a Chinese company over an American one is flawed.)
Maybe still safer than a US company having the data, but not great.
Any other belief regarding the privacy of them is flawed and incorrect.
And yes, it's well known that Zuck did abuse God-mode back in the day.
No, it's not. People should treat unencrypted centralized service DMs as public.
TFA is the proof.
So many people, including folks who should know better (professors, etc) were freaking out.
I wonder if it was dreamed up in FBs PR department as a distraction.
People were told to delete tracking apps to stop giving those companies data. So that data can't be used against you. This girl gave Facebook data. Facebook then turned that data over to the police. That data was used against her. Exactly how people said it would be.
It's not just that they have no obligation they are legally required to comply with subpoena requests and provide any and all data that an independent judge has deemed necessary.
You can't have realistically have a situation where the entire management team goes to jail for refusing to comply with them. Nor is it necessarily wrong for them to choose to respect the law even if it's a bad law.
But that's not what it was. The same people who were trying to get people to delete tracking apps would have also said "Don't talk about this through Meta apps" also.
It's a bit outside of what Facebook did, whether they should have complied or risked consequences, etc.
As an aside, Signal people. If you want to chat discreetly, Signal.
The idea that Twitter is a threat doesn’t go down well with the Twitter crowd.
Same is true for FB, etc.
I personally had to explain to a number of people, face to face, that whatever threat is posed by menstrual tracking apps is nothing compared to FB, Twitter, and Google.
People seemed especially suprised that Twitter was a problem.
I have, for north of a decade, not understood why this sort of thing hasn't triggered the exact same alarms that outright government-run mass data collection and spying would—if the government can pay for the data, can strong-arm to get the data, and can subpoena the data, it's barely better that a private company is collecting it, than the government, if your concern is government mis-use of data. No one should be allowed to collect and hoard information about people the way big tech companies (and some others, like CC companies and banks) do, for exactly the same reasons that we don't want the government doing that itself.
Governments can kill you, and brag about it publicly.
(1)Of course, removing a condom w/o consent is abhorrent.
If we are unhappy with the warrants, we should address that at the judicial level.
In the US, at least in my state, search warrants have to be specific about what is being searched for, where to search for it, and when the search should occur. So I think the warrant would likely have mentioned what sorts of messages they were looking for between dates X and Y, not just that Meta was ordered to turn over the entire message history for a user.
No comment on the general issue of abortion. Question remains for those who push this line as to which body part is that? A fetus is clearly an organism growing inside of someone's body but it is not a "body part" of another organism.
Human pregnancy is absolutely bizarre and quite dangerous. Some weird facts:
- Fertilization doesn't even happen until the 2nd or 3rd week.
- Pregnancy can occur outside of the uterus, which quickly leads to ruptured organs and death for the mother.
- 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage.
- The fetus's cells float freely in the mother's blood plasma, which makes the mother a chimera.
- A mother's blood can develop antibodies to rhesus antigens in the baby's blood, identifying the baby as a foreign invader.
- A fetus's "coating" has genes that inhibit T-cells in the mother, which is the only way the mother's body doesn't destroy the fetus (which is an alien parasite to the mother/host).
- Fetal stem cells can travel throughout the mother to repair things - or create an immune disorder.
- Women grow an extra organ (the placenta) during pregnancy.
- During development, a female fetus develops all the eggs the adult form will carry throughout its lifetime.
- Amniotic fluid is fetus pee.
- A fetus can't survive outside the uterus before 23-25 weeks.
Is the umbilical part of the mother's body? "The umbilical cord develops from and contains remnants of the yolk sac and allantois. It forms by the fifth week of development, replacing the yolk sac as the source of nutrients for the embryo" per wiki. The process definitely reminds of parasitical organisms, in parts.
> Human pregnancy is absolutely bizarre
Honestly I still am having problems wrapping my head around the basic fact of existence. Reality is bizarre.
23 weeks is the size of a grapefruit. 12 weeks is the size of the lime; is that small enough for you that you wouldn't put a woman going through the trauma of a miscarriage (or abortion) through criminal investigation?
Do we need to automatically assume that when a woman wants to not just flush it down the toilet like waste that is reason for suspicion?
May you never have a partner who has a miscarriage and then has to decide whether to put themselves at the mercy of the criminal system whether they go through "proper channels".
23 weeks is also more or less the borderline for where we have standardized national practices for saving an extreme premature delivery. I've read studies that put viability in the NICU at week 23 anywhere from 10% on the extreme low end, to 50% on the extreme high. By week 24 that jumps to ~30-75%.
Because there isn’t a huge difference when it comes to complying with subpoenas.
FB learned a long time ago that defending unpopular criminals’ communications isn’t worth the political cost.
Some might choose to focus on why the defendant chose to get an abortion. I don't see any details of that here. Personally, I don't care. If she wants one, she should be able to get one.
Investigating this case at all is both unexpected and psychotic. Trying her as an adult is the next level of psychotic.
That all aside, as for Facebook, again this is light on detail regarding the cooperation given. Did they fight the subpoena? Did they have any grounds to? What steps were made to protect that user's privacy? We simply don't know.
As an aside, it seems like you have better privacy by using regular SMS than any form of IM. Law enforcement can get metadata but that's not so useful. Getting the actual messages from any IM service seems to be much easier. Perhaps WhatsApp would be better? I don't know how accessible WA messages currently are.
As for Facebook removing posts supplying at-home abortion medication, here I'm somewhat sympathetic just because Facebook does have to follow the law (even if that law is psychotic and unjustifiable). It's no different to supplying medical marijuana to people in places where it's illegal. Or supplying much cheaper medications from Canada or Mexico. These are all technically illegal so any company is going to have to try and enforce that.
Remember the political forces behind this under the guise of being "pro-life" go to every effort to restrict access to affordable medical care, recently voted against child tax credit (in the IRA) and fight efforts to allow people to fight a living wage.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...
There is a large number of people in the US who are authoritarian and can't help but try to get involved in other people's business to the maximum degree. They won't stop at any boundary, they are religious zealots.
Alternative varieties merely want to steal as many resources as possible, beyond that they don't care about the actions of others.
> There are plenty of other ones, but religious ones are the only people who truly obsess over the actions of others.
Sorry, no. I don't know how anyone could come to believe something so incorrect. For instance, the Chinese Communist Party is 1) authoritarian, 2) atheist, and 3) very obsessed over the actions of others (as shown by the massive surveillance and control apparatus it's built).
The lesson here is don't use unencrypted services to discuss your crimes.
It's not your fucking business. It's a private health matter. Period. You don't get to go on a fishing expedition "to get to the bottom" of anything after the fact with zero evidence of any wrong doing.
The really important part is: when you decide to break an unjust law, don't talk about it on surveilled platforms, they're complicit and will hand your ass in. Don't bring your smartphone with you either.
Edit: yes I understand the laws themselves are sexist, but HN users didn't write the laws, and the "all you men" fingerpointing isn't really productive. Why the men here? You have much easier and more significant targets than male HN users.
I just want to say for the record that this comment briefly had a positive score before I got dogpiled.
I do agree that it's more productive when the conversation is civil and polite - but sexism is firmly in the middle of this particular topic.
And insulting your argument is the opposite of ad hominem.
So I for one actually applaud parent for calling it out.
You have one legal mechanism for enforcing good behavior upon capital, democracy.
Such nonsense. Corporations are a legal entity, they exist on paper. Facebook is people. People make decisions. People are not amoral.
If you think there is sufficient historical precedent to believe that shaming corporations into good behavior is an effective long term way to protect individuals then we simply disagree. I think you're wrong and believe that law is the only mechanism to ensure their behavior is pro-social.
To me, complaining about the bad behavior of capital is like being angry at the sun for burning you. IMO, you're only real option is to protect yourself.
-stop them from poisoning people
-stop them from lying to people
-stop them from endangering workers
-stop them from endangering their customers
-stop them from exploiting ecosystems unto failure
-stop them from manipulating workers
-stop them from extorting workers
-stop them from enslaving people
I'm very curious to know what the percentage of those people self-identify as libertarians and have "don't tread on me" decals on their vehicles.
Which folks are pretty hard core libertarians?
Plenty of silicon valley companies resist laws with much larger consequences freely and mostly with impunity.
Some of the same people will be saying uber was a hero for breaking taxi laws around the world (more before it became fashionable to hate uber)
It's not like a Nebraska sheriff can hop over to California or wherever Facebook data centers are and start seizing computers until they found this girl's messages (so much of that process would be absurd).
Just look to Trump to observe what obstructing a court order looks like.
I am not, of course, a corporate lawyer. One would know appropriate procedures to delaying, opposing, or otherwise objecting and appealing an order like this.
But it's Facebook. A half a trillion dollar company can resist an overzealous prosecutor going after a single teenager by just ignoring it and ignoring the consequences of ignoring it. It is approximately equivalent to a billionare not paying a parking meter. Sure, they "have to", but nothing of consequence actually happens if they don't.
Facebook should have fought the search warrant if it, say, wanted to hold on to its most valuable demographic.
But the amount that you can be outraged at Facebook for complying with a court order is limited, rule of law (and not just rule of your opinion on what the law should be) is important. You definitely don't want people who have opposite opinions to be making up what they think the law should be.
I believe that companies should be zealous advocates for their users, just as lawyers are for their clients. Facebook was not any kind of advocate here.
Up to what point? Are you saying that someone should be allowed to abort their baby one day before it would be born on its own? That would actually be a pretty extreme opinion, and would put you in a fairly small minority. Most people recognize that somewhere along the line a fetus becomes a child with a set of basic human rights just like the rest of us. The definition of that point is the entire reason we argue incessantly about it.
No matter how many times I say this someone always jumps in with "what about". Let me stop you right there. It's not your business. It's a private health matter. Period.
There's a reason we don't count unborn fetuses until they are actually born as people. Mainly the fact that so much can go wrong between those two points in time.
> Let me stop you right there. It's not your business. It's a private health matter. Period
That's literally the heart of the discussion. A lot of people don't view it to be a private health manner if you kill a fetus that would be perfectly fine on the outside world, but just hasn't made that transition yet. You're just saying "Stop talking. I'm right". Good for you in having confidence in your convictions I guess, but don't expect to convince anyone.
> There's a reason we don't count unborn fetuses until they are actually born as people. Mainly the fact that so much can go wrong between those two points in time.
Yes, and already born humans can die from natural or unnatural causes. The system is fairly good at detecting if someone died from natural or unnatural causes though, and then looking into the unnatural causes a bit deeper if it seems appropriate. How would you be able to tell if this woman (1) had an abortion(natural or unnatural), and then burned the body and buried her, or (2) gave birth at 6 months to a viable baby, and then killed her shortly after it was born?
It's pretty clearly mostly men making these comments cause there's a distinct lack of awareness about how female anatomy actually works.
There is no taking of organs. It would be merely removing the parasite from the body of the host.
And from a practical perspective, how exactly are you getting rid of a 40 week old fetus? You need to effectively give birth to get rid of it, regardless of whether you kill it or let it live.
Bodily autonomy is one of the fundamental human rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodily_integrity
It's not just Facebook that's guilty of this.
EDIT: Here's the substantiation requested: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
First, no, it's not "everyone's iMessages". There has been a lot of very public discussion of this. If you don't back up your Messages to iCloud, which a lot of informed people don't do anymore, then Apple does not have that unencrypted copy.
Second, unless you have support that Apple did this "for the FBI", specifically for that reason, as opposed to it being a mix of reasons, and also involving user-support reasons, as has been widely reported, please stop repeating that unsupported claim.
And lastly, until Apple commits an offense of the nature under discussion here, let's not tar them with the same broad brush as we are justly using to tar Facebook.
This is false. Apple will still have the unencrypted copies (actually, the effectively-unencrypted sync keys, as "Messages in iCloud" cross-device sync keys are the thing at issue here) because the people you iMessage with will be providing them to Apple. iCloud Backup is on by default, so approximately everyone you talk to using iMessage is escrowing their private keys to Apple.
Turning off iCloud Backup on your device does not protect your iMessages, as the backdoor exists on the devices of both conversation participants.
It's sort of like switching email providers to get away from Gmail; if everyone you send or receive emails to/from is using Gmail, Google is still getting a copy of all of your correspondence.
> Second, unless you have support that Apple did this "for the FBI", specifically for that reason, as opposed to it being a mix of reasons, and also involving user-support reasons, as has been widely reported, please stop repeating that unsupported claim.
I updated the comment with the link to the Reuters article that says they did this specifically for the FBI.
From the article:
> More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee.
> Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order.
> In private talks with Apple soon after, representatives of the FBI’s cyber crime agents and its operational technology division objected to the plan, arguing it would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against iPhone-using suspects, the government sources said.
> When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to the six sources. Reuters could not determine why exactly Apple dropped the plan.
> “Legal killed it, for reasons you can imagine,” another former Apple employee said he was told, without any specific mention of why the plan was dropped or if the FBI was a factor in the decision.
This always confused me with all the E2EE hype.
This is why Signal's client codebases is open source. In principle, a qualified engineer can review it and confirm (to some degree of confidence) that Signal is not lying about its E2EE claims.
The next step is trusting the compiled version of the program. In the abstract, you have no reason to do this, except that you also have no reason to trust any third party (including random third-party-store builds). You don't have any particular reason to trust your own builds either, thanks to RoTT[1]. In practice this makes the official build the most trustworthy, since they're the only party that's actually officially claiming properties about the client in an official capacity (and therefore potentially liable if those claims are false).
The "formal" solution is maybe something like Binary Transparency[2], or verifiable builds. But the end-user ergonomics of those solutions are still being worked out.
[1]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
[2]: https://developers.google.com/android/binary_transparency
The RoTT thing isn't that relevant IMO; if we're under an RoTT-style attack, everything is off. But crucially, that's a different threat model; I can trust my compiler independently from Signal. I don't feel like I can trust Signal's client independently from Signal's server; either Signal as a whole is trustworthy, or they're not.
Now I agree that if we had some kind of verifiable or reproducible builds, E2EE would make sense. If anyone could download Signal's source code, build it, and verify that the binary is identical, we would have the "normal" FOSS defenses, where we could assume that some security researcher would do that now and then.
It's a fine point, but I'd argue that Signal's promises are still "worth more" than a competitor who merely promises to not log without any technical backing: the latter is a purely social promise, while the latter is a social promise rooted in a cryptographic claim that, with the right skills, you could verify.
The RoTT threat model (which I agree is extreme!) is really not that far off: when you download the official Signal app, you're trusting, modulo the integrity of the app store, that Signal has either backdoored everyone or nobody. In other words: they would need to deliver the weakness to all users, increasing the risk of discovery, or to none of them. Binary transparency makes that gamble riskier still, by forcing Signal (or the app store) to publish signatures for each build before clients accept them for installation.
Computers will never perfectly eliminate the latent social trust required when running someone else's code, which we all do even when we run any code at all (even our own). But Signal's current model is about as good as it gets for laypeople: you can verify the source, and the parts you can't verify require significant malicious investment and/or exposure risk. For the more (potentially rightfully?) paranoid among us, building from source and comparing the binaries is about as good as it gets for now.
How would one do that? Do you mean if you literally decompiled the binary and read through the machine code and built up a solid understanding of what everything does (and did this after every app update)? Or is there something more practical you're referring to?
> when you download the official Signal app, you're trusting, modulo the integrity of the app store, that Signal has either backdoored everyone or nobody
The way I imagine this attack working, Signal would have code in everyone's app which lets the server ask for DMs, but the server would only ask for DMs when there's a reason to do so (such as when a government requests it). That way, yes, everyone is backdoored, but there's no suspicious network traffic or anything which would give it away. I'd say Signal can be pretty confident that nobody will read through the machine code and make a solid enough mental model of how the entire system works to notice such a backdoor.
I would probably compile the reference source and use BinDiff[1] (or a handful of other tools) to compare it with the official binary. I've used BinDiff successfully for similar purposes in the past; it's also a popular tool for finding N-days after patches go out.
Signal could patch in that kind of backdoor, sure. But it's still globally disclosed in that case: you're revealing your backdoor to every prospective reverse engineer (there's a lot of them!), even if you only selectively enable it. Signal can probably be about as confident that nobody is reading their machine code as Chrome can, which is to say not confident.
And note: you don't need a solid enough mental model of how the system works at the machine level. You only need a differential understanding of what the public code says and what the machine code does, which is much easier.
Is it possible? Sure. But it's much, much higher risk and visibility than every other technique available to nation-state adversaries.
[1]: https://www.zynamics.com/bindiff.html
Yes, on iOS you'll need a jailbroken device to do it but it was doable.
(Writing in past tense since I haven't checked lately.)
Edit:
unlike WhatsApp, Telegram never was caught pants down uploading unencrypted data to Google with a wink wink, nudge nudge agreement.
And they never got caught uploading data to Facebook directly" from the endpoint "for security before sending it end-to-end encrypted between endpoints.
Oh, and they never got caught sending unencrypted data over the https port. (When normally extremely pedantic HN-ers write that Telegram sends data unencrypted, it means it is not end-to-end encrypted, not that it is plain text. Again contrary to what WhatsApp was caught doing.)
Disclaimer: I use Telegram myself, recommend Signal short term and I'm actively looking for a better solution for the future. Current bets: Matrix for group chats and I am also (probably too) excited about nostr for future social networking.
"Private" communications have never really been that private, unless you're speaking face to face alone in a room or passing notes to each other. Not to say I'm in favor of it being that way, but that's what people have long adjusted to.
Not at all. For nearly all of human history, privacy of communication was the norm with a few understood exceptions.
If you had a conversation with someone it was just about always private forever. Unless the location was bugged with microphones, but that wouldn't be the case unless you were already under investigation. Most importantly, it wasn't possible to go back in time and bug the room for a conversation last week.
Phone lines could be tapped but not all phone lines were recorded all the time, wasn't yet technically possible. So again you'd be private unless already under investigation and the tap couldn't happen retroactively.
It's only now that reality has changed dramatically and all messaged are recorded (e.g. here by facebook) and are available retroactively and across the whole population (i.e. they don't need to target someone specific, just run a query for phrases and see who pops up).
Could you elaborate on this point? I hope I don't come off as insensitive, when saying that just as a social phenomenon, this discussion is peculiarly interesting, and while I ultimately believe that the an (actual) woman has the absolute right to decide over her own life including a (potential) child, I can understand why "pro-life" people make the arguments they make -- and at first I'd believe their own reasoning. To me it the entire topic of abortion seems like something beyond morality, there is no good and bad choice, just bad and less bad. The reason I say it is "interesting" is that it appears people are talking past one another on such a massive scale, and as it appears to me considering different images as unstated examples. The pro-choice image (to me) involves an every day woman who cannot handle a child in her current circumstances, and decides to abort the pregnancy out of necessity, while the pro-life image appears to involve notions of promiscuity, indifference towards a child and egoism. I have to wonder why these contrasting views have arisen, and who stands to profit from it. Arguments like "controlling women's bodies" are in my eyes to this end too simplistic. The danger -- as with any social debate -- of misunderstanding the opposing side is that one cannot reason and anticipate their behaviour, as one is distracted by a moral mirage, that might be easier to make fun of, but that fighting is a dangerous waste of energy.
Whether your argument is strong or weak; declaring it over by unilateral fiat is intellectual laziness.
"Every sperm is sacred Every sperm is grate If a sperm gets wasted Dog gets quite irate!"
Stop that wanking now!!
Women who go through with unwanted pregnancies and then give up the babies for adoption are heroes, and deserve more support, during and AFTER - the physical effects of even a “normal” pregnancy can be life-long. I still have a ton of back pain (not helped by lifting 30 lbs of often uncooperative toddler), and the toes on my right foot are slowly getting number. Other than the age thing, I had a very healthy, normal pregnancy.
I am the other end of that equation.
I am my mother's fifth child. She always wanted four.
She was a family planning campaigner at the time (campaigning for access to contraception - a hot issue at the time) and was quite embarrassed.
Throughout my childhood my mother was an active and prominent campaigner for the right of women to control their own bodies. There is no doubt that I would have been aborted.
I am very glad I wasn't, I love life. But I absolutely support the right of women to end their pregnancies legally and safely.
Justice.
https://www.facebook.com/records
Back when I used to have a Facebook account, Facebook provided private information from my account to a police department without a warrant for a situation that they deemed an "emergency", but that I did not. I no longer use Facebook.