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.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      As long as it’s inside someone’s body, it’s a body part, not a person, and there’s no such thing as murdering a body part.

      • @[email protected]
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        -21 year ago

        Had it been outside of her body at the time it would have been viable as a stand alone person.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 year ago

            What makes it relevant for me at least:

            This isn’t a situation where the fetus/baby would have died on the table after labor without medical intervention, or an argument of “given longer time in the pregnant lady it would have been a healthy baby”. This woman could have went through the same exact experience of labor, when she went through labor, and pushed out a baby to put into the system for adoption.

            At the moment she took medicine to kill it, if labor had been induced instead she would have given birth to a viable baby. There’s evidence of conciousness of the fetus two months before that point. The fetus would have been healthier if cooked longer, but it was “fully cooked” so to speak.

            At that point I personally have a hard time writing the fetus off as simply part of the pregnant woman’s body.

            It shows signs of conciousness and could survive separately from the pregnant woman if removed from her without other intervention (the meds that killed it). We don’t have any other “body parts” that work that way. To me, those differences require different considerations from say tumor removal.

            The only thing that prevented this from being a baby capable of being given to the adoption system is that the woman carrying it chose to take medicine to kill it.

            Arguments about whether it would be better not to exist than be in the system are separate from this for me.

    • @[email protected]
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      211 year ago

      I can’t remember the last time I saw anything that made me think “I would like to go to America”.

      These days it’s just another thing to add to the ever increasing list of reasons NOT to go there.

      • @[email protected]
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        111 year ago

        I live in a third world country with a crumbling infrastructure, shitloads of violence and crime, a rapidly rising cost of living, crap working opportunities and corrupt government.

        Americans live in a first world country where it seems more and more like most of the problems I mentioned are somehow worse there and the ones they haven’t got yet are on the horizon.

        I used to think it would be my future home. Now I’m looking for literally anything other than the US/China.

    • @[email protected]
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      01 year ago

      Not sure how this is in any way an America specific thing.

      The abortion was at 28 weeks, fetuses are viable outside the womb at 24 weeks, and Nebraska allows abortions until 20 weeks. They waited two whole months past the point they could have taken care of this with no fuss, one month past the point of viability.

      They didn’t do this through a doctor or any safe/proper way. The pregnant woman took medicine to kill the fetus, then delivered it as a stillbirth. Her and her mother then burned the stillborn and buried it on a farm.

      The mother and daughter told police they discussed it in their facebook dms, police made a formal legal request for the dms to facebook and facebook complied. They didn’t follow the golden rule of “don’t talk to police”. On top of that, the court documents indicate that the dms were part of a bunch of evidence that made the case, not the single piece of evidence that convicted them.

      Honestly asking, is there something I’m missing here that would have made this turn out differently in another country? America isn’t as great as its own patriotism claims, but I see this take very often in situations that don’t seem to have much at all to do with it happening in America.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        I read the article at a glance, to be fair. Iirc the pair live in one of the many states where abortion itself is now criminalised, so there was no way to deal with this “without a fuss”.

        • @[email protected]
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          31 year ago

          The godawful changes with Roe v Wade happened after this incident, and you can’t be charged with breaking a law by actions taken before the law was in effect/changed. So at the time, they still could have done the abortion legally.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    -41 year ago

    I have mixed feelings on abortion, but spying on and snitching on people you disagree with is too far

  • @[email protected]
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    381 year ago

    Use Signal messenger and have it set for auto deletion of messages if you must message!!!

    • @[email protected]
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      131 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        101 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          51 year ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 year ago

            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.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          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.

  • @[email protected]
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    31 year ago

    Read the article guys, don’t fall into the headline trap. Facebook is definitely a bad guy, but it’s not the bad guy here.

    • @[email protected]
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      -31 year ago

      Huh? This is a company responding to a legal warrant for evidence disclosure in an area it operates in. What does capitalosm have to do with it?

        • @[email protected]
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          -11 year ago

          Ok, that’s absolutely vile and reprehensible. But that’s not actually related to what occurred in this instance. The suspects told the police that they discussed breaking the law using FB messenger. Police made a legal search warrant to collect that data from Facebook. Facebook complied.

          Capitalism or anti-abortionism doesn’t really enter the situation.

          • @[email protected]
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            31 year ago

            First off, capitalist power structures invented police - which means that everything police does is tied up with capitalism straight off the bat.

            Second, just because something has been declared illegal does not make that thing immoral - and police doing something that is legal does not make the police any less inherently immoral. The fact that the police is doing the patriarchy’s bidding by policing women’s bodies in this way is about as immoral as it gets.

            Third, you could argue that the women in question shouldn’t have admitted this information to the police in the first place - but that ignores the conditions under which these women were probably interrogated.

            Fourth, capitalist institutions will inevitably always side with the power structures that protect the status quo - it doesn’t matter how many “Woman’s Day” marketing they put up… at the end of the day, they will side with the patriarchy and enable it’s violence - as you can see with the link I provided to you in my first response.

  • @skymtf
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    161 year ago

    One thing I hate is while I dont trsut metas encryotion, it isnt even a default which at this point in American history is just irresonabile and reckless. It sucks we can’t teach about open source in schools.

  • mochi
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    391 year ago

    Well, don’t use Facebook to talk about doing things that are illegal. Why do people not use common sense?

    • 👁️👄👁️
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      111 year ago

      Because when you talk person to person, most average people do not think there’s a middle man ease dropping.

  • @[email protected]
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    21 year ago

    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.

  • Kotton
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    91 year ago

    When are they going to rebrand to 2facedbook?

  • @[email protected]
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    441 year ago

    I thought messenger was end-to-end encrypted, at least according to Facebook. How were they able to hand over the chat logs? The messages should be encrypted with a key that is itself encrypted with user’s password, which Facebook doesn’t store.

    What am I missing?