cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
Use Signal messenger and have it set for auto deletion of messages if you must message!!!
Signal or Matrix is also fine.
Of course use Signal or Matrix but please don’t think that makes your messaging entirely impenetrable. I am not saying their end-to-end encryption has been breached. But a compromised device is a compromised device. Signal might be secure at least for now, but is your keyboard?
We do live in times of zero-click spyware and while the general public doesn’t necessarily have to worry about things like Pegasus atm, it is still used increasingly and not just against people who break the law.
I do my best, although I do fail to be up to date every once in a while, to stay as secure as possible, but to think any communication is entirely secure is not a good policy.
Unless you pissed off an entire nation state I wouldn’t worry about signal as long as you encrypt your device and use a password to unlock. Although I believe that some police in the u.s. have some kind of black box for unlocking phones. In that case, I guess you break off your USB port and rely on wireless charging. Even then, they could send the phone to someone to disassemble and pull an image from the device image and try to get in that way.
I mean you don’t even need that now. Anyone can technically do that with a PC and the right payloads. If anything it’s best to use the internet as if it has a backdoor.
Pissing off entire nation state or at least people in power in that nation is unfortunately easy these days. And while the average person usually doesn’t run into these issues the shrinking spaces and criminalization of civil society even in countries you wouldn’t think are that far gone are at the level that surprising people might run into these issues. There are also some situations where you don’t need to piss off entire governments to get a lot of data from a person. Tech-savvy abusive spouse might be enough.
We are not really disagreeing here. I just think that we need to be open about the vulnerabilities and strengths of software. The security of Signal and Matrix are absolutely great especially compared to things like WhatsApp. But they are not 100% secure. Very little is.
Agreed. Basically if you know that nobody will have physical access to the device and that nobody who cares has the money to buy a vulnerability from an Israeli firm, then you’re good.
Oof. I feel there’s a lot more of this kinda stuff to come…
Meta complied with the request, with the Messenger chat history appearing to show Celeste and Jessica discussing Celeste’s use of home abortion medication. At the time, Celeste was 28 weeks pregnant — at the start of her third trimester.
Police used the chat history as evidence to seize the pair’s computers and phones. They have since charged the two women with a number of crimes, including charging Jessica with allegedly performing an abortion 20 weeks after fertilization and performing an abortion without a licensed doctor (both felonies), and charging Celeste (who is being tried as an adult) with the felony of removing, concealing, or abandoning a dead human body.
So… was there ever a doctor involved at all? I’m a big proponent of the right to choose, but this is pretty messed up.
Nope. Also this was done 2 months after the cutoff for legal abortion where they’re at, and 1 month after viability of the fetus outside the womb. Personally think that’s important to bear in mind here.
Wait what the heck is an illegal abortion? You mean getting one from unlicensed practioners? Some do it time to time to save money or don’t know any better.
Well this bodes well for Threads.
Damn these seem like trustworthy people who we should definitely federate with.
Any and every Lemmy instance owner would hand over your DMs to law enforcement as well btw.
I’m almost certain that if something like this happened to any fediverse instance - that a local police enforcement would contact the admin and asked for user’s data, which they are required by law to provide or they would go to jail/get a hefty fine and possibly a criminal record, they would do that too. That’s also why E2E is required, to prevent such problems for instance admins - but then again, there’s really nothing you can do against local law, and if it requires that you have to be able to cooperate, well… Then there’s not much the admin can do, without putting himself in a real risk of prosecution, because he is breaking the law by have E2E.
That’s also a good reason to be careful when selecting your home instance, and making sure that you choose one in a country that has all right laws in that regard.
Of course, that’s assuming the police makes contact. I don’t suppose that the admins would be searching through the DMs of people to snitch on them. And if Meta is doing that preemtively and is actively snitching on people - that’s downright evil.
If you have nothing to hide… but then they just change the laws, now you are a criminal and they already have handy tools in place to convict you.
You cannot be convicted for an action that was made illegal after you comitted it. This is just Facebook sucking data and making money off others’ misfortune. I am sure that they didn’t hand over the chat logs for free. “I got nothing to hide” is exactly the reason Meta is a multi-billion company. Your agenda should be “I have nothing to gain from sharing my life with them”.
It’s like “don’t talk to cops, it will not help you”.
I am sure that they didn’t hand over the chat logs for free
They handed over the chat logs in response to a court order to do so. The gov’t didn’t pay them. They forced them.
You cannot be convicted for an action that was made illegal after you comitted it.
That was not my point. The point is, if the tech for mass surveillance is already in place and the laws change to more authoritarian or even just more dumb, it will be harder to escape those.
“I have nothing to gain from sharing my life with them”.
That is obvious not true, otherwise people would not be using social media.
this is pretty disgusting even for Facebook
She aborted at 28 weeks. That’s nearly 6 and a half months pregnant. Most babies can survive outside the womb when they’re around 22 to 23 weeks. This was a baby, not some tiny fetus.
People are getting all upset at Facebook/Meta here but they were served a valid warrant. I don’t think there is much to get mad about them here. The takeaway I get is this:
Avoid giving data to others. No matter how trustworthy they are (not that Meta is) they can be legally compelled to release it. Trust only in cryptography.
There is of course the other question of if abortion being illegal is a policy that most people agree with…but that is a whole different kettle of fish that I won’t get into here.
Completely right. This is an education issue.
There are several other issues how these two handled this situation.
Court and police records show that police began investigating 17-year-old Celeste Burgess and her mother Jessica Burgess after receiving a tip-off that the pair had illegally buried a stillborn child given birth to prematurely by Celeste.
Don’t discuss this or involve anyone else.
The two women told detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division that they’d discussed the matter on Facebook Messenger, which prompted the state to issue Meta with a search warrant for their chat history and data including log-in timestamps and photos.
Why are they even talking to police? Lawyer up, even if the lawyer is free.
(E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.)
Facebook messenger and text message is the absolute worse way to discuss things like this. They should’ve at least turned on E2EE but they already admitted fault and their devices would’ve been taken away anyway.
They seem like they together. They should’ve just discussed this in person.
Granted, I’m lucky enough never to have been arrested or questioned about a crime. I don’t know how difficult and manipulative interrogations are outside of what I’ve seen on TV. Even still, I’m amazed by and critical of people who talk to the police without a lawyer present.
Even if you think (or know) you’re guilty, that doesn’t mean you should let the system have its way with you.
They couldve opted to end 2 end encryption just like they do on whatsapp. Then the warrant can eat shit.
While whatsapp is using e2e encryption it is still owned by meta, as such I trust it just as much as plain facebook messenger. Signal ftw.
A valid warrant that was only possible to get information from because of Meta’s policy of “opt-in” for encrypted messages. They are still at fault imho
Maybe just elect non fanatical nut jobs?
Good luck with that. The way voting works in the US basically guarantees a 2-party race. With only 2 parties you end up having policies grouped into these huge bundles, so making an actual decision on any particular issue is incredibly difficult. (Unless you are a billionaire and want to lobby a party for a law)
The problem is that private messages should be private, meaning Meta should’ve had no ability whatsoever to share those messages even if served a warrant. Those messages should be E2E encrypted.
Fwiw, Messeger does have e2e encryption, just opt in only afaik. Whether or not you trust meta with that is another matter, but it is there.
I haven’t trusted Meta since they IPO’d. I deleted my account sometime back in 2015 or so, had to recreate it when I went on-site as a contractor for a week, and promptly deleted it again.
But it’s good that they have E2E, it should be on by default and not able to be disabled. Regardless, they probably have anything encrypted indexed anyway so they don’t lose that little bit of info about you.
On one hand - yes Meta followed the legal requirement, but the bigger picture is that people always say “so what it’s <insert deficiency> just don’t do anything illegal”. But that’s only fine when legality matches morality. And the disparity has been growing lately.
I understand what you are saying but I don’t think that having every company coming up with their own definition of morality is the right solution. The only goal of these companies is to create profit, and I doubt that their definition of morality will be overall beneficial.
Oh yeah I agree I didn’t mean it that way either. I just meant it as an argument for privacy/end to end encryption
This is an older story, and 5 months later Meta announced that they’re rolling out full E2EE encryption to Messenger, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Are they doing it out of the goodness of their hearts? Probably not, they’re a corporation, but this does show that global backlash actually works for something.
Use end to end encrypted messaging apps, and, if you’re in a situation like this, know what they can be forced to share via court order. For example, while WhatsApp has full E2EE and messages can’t be turned over, IP addresses can, which can be used to track location, so don’t connect to an abortion clinic’s wifi for example. Probably just a good rule in general, as law enforcement could subpoena router logs if they have a suspicion.
Ideally use something that can hand over less metadata like Signal if you’re in this sort of situation, they don’t even keep IP address, but this is a lesser known app that also relies on the recipient using Signal.
Remember folks, when subverting a theocratic hellscape, use something encrypted.
Anyone happen to know if this was chat history through Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp? WhatsApp claims end to end encryption doesn’t it? I thought they say Facebook Messenger is also encrypted, but not end to end.
Aside from any moral or political views, it amuses me when people do criminal acts and fail to realize police can inspect personal data like text messages, email, and social media. I think people smart enough to realize that are smart enough to avoid committing a crime in the first place. Though there are smart criminals that get away with it, you just don’t hear about them because they don’t get caught. In any case I tend to think being stupid is prerequisite to being a criminal.
Another case of Meta cowering in front of local extremist laws. For those arguing that it should follow the local laws, hell no and fuck you. Do you realize Saudi Arabia for instance officially calls atheists terrorists and that we could imagine Meta handing over lists of atheists based on private conversations to the Saudi government to have them beheaded using some bogus anti-terrorism search warrant? We’re not very far from that if we still believe Meta did nothing wrong.
