The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zevd/this-is-the-data-facebook-gave-police-to-prosecute-a-teenager-for-abortion

by gok • 4 years ago

91 90 4 years ago

sbierwagen• 4 years ago

In this case, Burgess was 28 weeks pregnant, which is later in pregnancy than mifepristone and misoprostol are recommended for use.

28 weeks is, of course, 7 months. Third trimester elective abortion is illegal in the UK, Spain, France, Germany...

MilnerRoute2• 4 years ago

I'm still really surprised. Surprised that a prosecution happened for a 17-year-old girl. And that Facebook gave that 17-year-old girl's private messages to the police to facilitate that prosecution.

mlyle3• 4 years ago

Surprised that a prosecution happened for a 17-year-old girl.

Yes, this is a total waste. Is this making the world a better place?

And that Facebook gave that 17-year-old girl's private messages to the police to facilitate that prosecution.

I'm not surprised that Facebook complied with a lawfully issued search warrant.

gambiting• 4 years ago

I disagree with the entire idea of prosecution here, I think it's wrong, but I think we should recognize that Facebook was served with a lawful warrant for data here - surely we want facebook to obey the law in the countries they operate, and if a warrant is presented they should comply?

mlyle3• 4 years ago

Weeks is a reasonable metric; it's what's used in those laws in Europe, too.

Note that there's a ~2 week difference in the week metric between the way we talk about pregnancy (weeks since LMP) and the way these laws are generally written (weeks since conception).

Someone2• 4 years ago

I don’t think using weeks was anything other than following regular practice. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy:

“Childbirth typically occurs around 40 weeks from the start of the last menstrual period (LMP), a span known as the gestational age. This is just over nine months. Counting by fertilization age, the length is about 38 weeks.”

I think that’s because months vary in length, making it relatively hard for people to count with them. Example: 28 weeks isn’t 7 months, it is slightly less than 6½ average months (6 months is a tiny bit over 26 weeks, and two weeks under half an average month)

MilnerRoute2• 4 years ago

Interestingly, Motherboard says 28-week abortions are perfectly legal -- in about half of America. But Nebraska moved the line between legal and illegal by eight weeks, to 20 weeks. (For what it's worth, this all happened before the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, so that's the issue here: the state's own stricter 20-week deadline.)

The 17-year-old will be tried as an adult, on a felony and two misdemeanor charges.

Motherboard adds: "Facebook and other tech platforms have previously declined to say whether they would give law enforcement data that relates to abortion cases. This case shows that Facebook, at least, will and already has."

rcoveson4• 4 years ago

The overwhelming majority of babies delivered in a hostpital at 28 weeks survive. It would have had a < 50% chance of lasting complications. I actually had a cousin born recently who was more premature than this.

It's tragic to think of the circumstances that drove somebody to this, but you could say that about any act of violence.

guelo• 4 years ago

Why is the European angle suddenly in every abortion discussion? I'm fascinated by how these kind of talking points emerge and then are suddenly everywhere, must be some kind of influencer coordination.

(I'll probably get down voted for this because whenever I bring this kind of thing up people seem to get personally offended. Even though it's not your talking point, you picked up somewhere recently)

bpodgursky• 4 years ago

Because it's incredibly annoying to hear Europeans to complain about the oppression of US abortion laws which are actually more permissive than the ones in their own country.

botverse• 4 years ago

Because in Europe there are a lot of civilised countries with freedoms to aspire to.

joenot4432• 4 years ago

This is an incredibly sad story all around. The saddest part, to me, was that for whatever reason they chose to wait rather than legally ending the pregnancy much earlier. The fetus aborted was 28 weeks, or 7 months, and almost certainly viable.

washbrain10• 4 years ago

The saddest part to me is that two women are going to face prison time, effectively ruining their lives.

Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Who could say. I can say for sure that two humans are experiencing something truly, truly awful and may be forced into enduring the awfulness for years to come.

sp5274• 4 years ago

Could the fetus have survived? Who could say.

Can someone ELI5 why this is the standard? Shouldn't it be something more reasonable like "has a relatively developed brain", "can experience pain", "shows early signs of consciousness", "has major organs", "is a recognizably bipedal/human lifeform", etc? Every cutoff I've encountered seems to be entirely subjective and like it reduces down to "whatever I find politically expedient".

The very cynical side of me feels like the standard typically used was meant to buy as much time as possible for an abortion and not because it was grounded in anything scientific or morally conscionable.

rcoveson4• 4 years ago

Could the fetus have survived?

Much more likely than not at 28 weeks. ~50% viability is like a month earlier than that.

Would the fetus have had a good quality of life?

Roughly even or better chances of lasting complications. Of course, some percentage of babies delivered at every stage of pregnancy have a chance of lasting complications. You could throw a "who could say" after anything you want.

newfonewhodis2• 4 years ago

The fetus aborted was 28 weeks, or 7 months, and almost certainly viable

Never surprises me that HN is full of world-class doctors who can provide a medical conclusion based simply on a news story.

lvass• 4 years ago

Not really needed in this case. I was born with 7 months and didn't spend a night in hospital.

joenot4432• 4 years ago

One needn't be a doctor to reference a common fact. Medical viability is about 23 -24 weeks, I think I learned that in high school bio. As an aside, the snark is an ugly shade and isn't appreciated.

xiphias2• 4 years ago

The case law is still inconsistent about taking the life of a fetus in the late stage: Scott Peterson was charged with second degree murder for taking the life of unborn son at 7 and half months pregnacy when he took his pregnant wife's life, which is a precedent for it being a life at that stage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Peterson

dfxm12• 4 years ago

I think for whatever reason they chose to wait is doing a lot of work there. They probably didn't have much of a choice. Unless you live near Omaha or Lincoln, there aren't many options available to you when selling this type of care. One of the ways the system is rigged to run out the clock on girls and women until it's illegal or unfeasible.

belval• 4 years ago

I'll preface this by saying that I am pro-choice, but 28 weeks is late, very late.

Survival rates for infants born at 28 weeks gestation is between 80-90 percent. Babies born at 28 weeks old only have a 10 percent chance of having long-term health problems.

mattnewton2• 4 years ago

It doesn’t make the way the case was prosecuted any less dystopian really. Just all-around awful.

The real question was why they (the defendants) felt they had to do it the way they did and couldn’t involve a medical professional.

washbrain10• 4 years ago

You don't know the circumstances, though. I can imagine dozens of scenarios where someone would be forced or feel forced to wait this long, or experience a change in their life that makes them rethink carrying the fetus to term.

The victims here are the two people who are standing trial, and no amount of, "Welllllll buuuuut, it was pretty late... soooo..." changes the fact that two women will needlessly have their lives and reputations destroyed.

rcoveson4• 4 years ago

But if the same entity had been located outside the woman when it was killed, then it would be another victim, right? What detail about it being in utero makes it an ethical non-entity? The shared blood supply? The fact that it doesn't breath air?

28 weeks isn't even considered a "previably delivery". At that mark it's just called premature. In your ethical system, when does it gain the ability to be a victim?

Someone2• 4 years ago

IMO, the aborted child is the main victim. In all likelihood, it was healthier than the average child born at 28 weeks, and most of those survive.

Yes, there may be mitigating circumstances, and that should affect the severity of any punishment, but from the info I read here, it looks looks highly likely (1) these women are guilty, and because of that it IMO is good that the government tried to find out whether they were.

(1) one way they wouldn’t be guilty is if they neither knew nor suspected she was pregnant for over 20 weeks.

makomk• 4 years ago

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this would be illegal almost everywhere. Most countries have some exceptions for abortions this late on if performed by a doctor under circumstances that make it medically necessary, but this ain't that. (The main places where an elective abortion this late on might actually be legal are actually in the more liberal parts of America, as far as I know.)

slg2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this would be illegal almost everywhere.

Directly from the article:

[28 weeks] is also later than Nebraska's 20-week abortion ban (abortion at 28 weeks is legal in about half the country; Nebraska's abortion laws have not changed since Roe v Wade was overturned).

samfisher83• 4 years ago

It was court ordered. Facebook didn't just give this information voluntarily to police.

washbrain10• 4 years ago

My understanding is that a court order is not an immediate, absolute command with zero recourse or ability to have one's lawyers respond? Surely Facebook could have done something, even if it wasn't ultimately successful?

creato• 4 years ago

I fully believe abortion should be reasonably legal, and if it were more accessible it may have prevented a lot of the tragedy of this case. But given the details in this article, it seems like this case would be criminal even in that hypothetical world.

nickff• 4 years ago

There are many things that might have been done; if the warrant should not have been served, the best person to challenge it would probably be the defendant (or their counsel). They would likely challenge the admissibility of the evidence. I am not sure what grounds Facebook would have to challenge this warrant, unless it would be improper for them to provide private communications for some reason.

slg2• 4 years ago

I don't think the article is intended as a direct criticism of Facebook specifically. The purpose of the article is "to show in shocking detail how abortion could and will be prosecuted in the United States, and how tech companies will be enlisted by law enforcement to help prosecute their cases."

adamrezich3• 4 years ago

I have not read the article (and don't intend to) but this here headline is an astoundingly well-crafted work of attention-catching rage-bait art. in eleven mere words, you get:

- Facebook (fuck em)

- giving collected personal data (fuck that) to

- the police (fuck em) because

- a teen had an abortion (fuck yeah(?))

- and needs to be prosecuted because said teen presumably lives somewhere where this is illegal (fuck em)

once you get used to instinctively breaking these things and evaluating the way they emotionally manipulate you to click on them to read more, it's like "seeing the code" in The Matrix, you don't even need to read the article anymore because you've already parsed the intended emotional payload, and from there you can choose whether or not to digest it.

teachrdan• 4 years ago

But perhaps you want to read the article to learn the facts of what happened?

llanowarelves• 4 years ago

Vice is one of the best at it. Read their comment section on fb. The comments are almost all the gut response they wanted to elicit from the headline. Even in the cases when their own full piece is different.

Purely from a people-programming standpoint, I respect them as masters at it.

It's not just Vice either. But the info-tainment nature of the brand seems to lend itself really well to it.

lukewrites• 4 years ago

While it's a clickable headline it isn't near as inflammatory as it could be; "the data" is a very anodyne way to refer to "Facebook Messenger conversation between mother and daughter".

fitblipper• 4 years ago

The problem is the 3rd party doctrine. The data should not be treated as if it is Facebook's to give away. Instead it should be the defendant that receives the request for their data using the proper warrant process. Instead governments incentivize companies like facebook, google, and amazon to collect all the private data on citizens that the people need to live in the society and then they claim it is no longer the people's data so they have an easy path to obtain it without a balance in place to apply the proper amount of friction to getting that data.

abigail955• 4 years ago

I'm not clear how that would have changed the outcome in this case

newfonewhodis2• 4 years ago

Some points that folks on this thread are missing:

1. This is not a story about when a pregnancy can/should be terminated.

2. The person in this story is a child - 17 years old. Many times, what seems like normal weight gain ends up being a pregnancy. This is especially true for younger/skinnier folks.

3. Remove the hot-button issue - abortion - from this story and consider the implications. Two people were having what they thought was a private conversation.

HN crowd is not representative of the real world where FB/Messenger is essential AND where people don't understand privacy (and social) implications of using FB.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 4 years ago

Two people were having what they thought was a private conversation.

They can now be the poster girl(s) for two causes: "more abortion" and "facebook isn't private".

abigail955• 4 years ago

At the risk of being extremely inflammatory,

Plenty of criminals think they are having a private conversation, when in fact, the government is listening in.

What they did was a crime in Nebraska. It has been a crime in Nebraska for decades (centuries?).

The government used due process to get a subpoeona for information to investigate a crime.

Yes, the wounded parties here will feel like their privacy was violated, but from the information we have in the article, it seems justified.

The privacy and social implications have been the same for decades: your communications can be intercepted or retrieved by law enforcement, so if there is probable cause that you committed a crime, someone might go looking.

whywhywhydude• 4 years ago

Why vice is highlighting Facebook is beyond me. If a judge gives you a warrant, aren’t you forced to provide the data? Otherwise, don’t you face contempt of court charges and possibly get jailed?

mattnewton2• 4 years ago

I think because a lot of people have an expectation of privacy in messaging services that is demonstratively not true here. They either think warrants aren’t possible because of some of the noise around different end-to-end encrypted systems, they don’t think a warrant will be issued for cases like this, or they aren’t really thinking about it at all.

kragen8• 4 years ago

If they'd had this conversation over Freenode, Signal, Pond, WhatsApp, or maybe even Matrix or Telegram, probably nobody except the mother and daughter would have a copy of their private messages. Because they used Facebook Messenger instead, Facebook was in a position to provide the private chat to the police. Facebook Messenger is no different in this way from Slack, Discord, or numerous other insecure chat systems.

It's unfortunate that Vice didn't bother to mention this.

kragen8• 4 years ago

To repeat my comment on the earlier now-buried post:

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!

This does not entail that obeying the law is always immoral, or even that breaking it is always moral. You can come to the conclusion that it is okay for companies to break some laws but not others 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, and also because the court order may not inform Facebook what the case is about. 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 Celeste Burgess, the Nebraska teenager, nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case.

(originally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32402302, edited a bit)

lmm2• 4 years ago

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!

I like living in a country where it's illegal to kill babies on a whim, thank you very much. So no, while you might disagree with this law, it's not at all "clear".

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 Celeste Burgess, the Nebraska teenager, nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case.

Facebook employees who refused to comply with a warrant would absolutely be thrown in jail once they ran out of lawyers and money (admittedly a process that would probably take years). Just look at the ProtonMail guy.

kragen8• 4 years ago

Probably many things are clear to me that are not clear to you. Some of them are things I'm wrong about. Others are things I know more about than you do. In yet other cases, the difference in perceptions stems from other causes. It sounds like abortion is in the second category.

You might want to consider that the kind of inflammatory language you're using tends to make productive argument much less likely.

Facebook employees who refused to comply with a warrant would absolutely be thrown in jail

I think it is very unusual for employees to end up in jail because their corporate employer was found guilty of contempt of court. In particular, I don't think any ProtonMail employee has ever been thrown in jail. We know about cases where companies have successfully refused to introduce cryptographic backdoors into their software; even in the case of the unnamed climate activist https://www.techdirt.com/2021/09/10/protonmail-turned-over-f... ProtonMail was only ordered to provide his IP address, not inject backdoored encryption into his browser to steal his email.

We also know about cases, for example in Germany, where police have injected malware into customers' devices, and as I understand it, companies are required to assist in this. This is not the established law in Nebraska, although it is surely happening covertly in the US in some cases.

abigail955• 4 years ago

Why is all abortion law immoral?

Why can't we draw a line somewhere before 28 weeks and say that if you want an abortion, you have to decide before 7 months have gone by?

I can't imagine thinking that it should be legal to kill a full term fetus as it's being delivered solely because it hasn't been born yet.

kragen8• 4 years ago

First, as to the abortion question, I'm interested to hear what you think about https://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.h... (exegesis in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion).

As for "legal to kill a full term fetus as it's being delivered", of course that is not what is alleged to have happened in this case, and it is wrong, but most people who ever lived disagreed with me about this; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide helpfully explains, "Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskans."

However, surely even if you and I disagree on which acts are real crimes, we can agree that pervasive surveillance by Facebook aids in the prosecutions of many real crimes. But that is not enough to show that it is desirable; it also enables unjust government persecution of people who are doing things that are illegal, but should not be, and this must also be weighed in the balance. From my point of view it is evident that this is such a case. Perhaps your example would be something different: Christians being persecuted for holding worship services in their homes, for example, or the Righteous Among the Nations secretly protecting Jews in their houses during the Holocaust.

In short, totalitarianism is not transparently the best form of government, and for many of us this case illustrates the dangers to liberty from Facebook's pervasive surveillance.

cato_the_elder• 4 years ago

This is a duplicate with significant discussion in the previous submission, from an outlet with a similar slant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32401381

kragen8• 4 years ago

I don't think the other submission included the actual chat transcript.

331c8c71• 4 years ago

It's all incredibly sad: the abortion itself, the decision to do it (which could've been avoided in a better society), the ruined lives or at least the psychological burden, the naiveté of using f-ing facebook, the compliance of the meta.

Sad, just sad, and a reminder that the technogical "innovation" (praised so highly here) is (oftetimes) much less about transforming the society and human lives for the better than it might appear from the hyped-up kool-aid spread generously to/by the tech crowd and the general populace.

ta8645• 4 years ago

This gives a different reason why "They're a private company, they can implement any policies they want", is a horrible argument. Even for the cases where you happen to agree with the outcome.

We need to regulate these large, ubiquitous platforms as we would the town square or any other public infrastructure.

washbrain10• 4 years ago

Ok, I'll bite, how would making them a "town square" have helped the defendent here?

kragen8• 4 years ago

We did, that's the problem! Facebook didn't send the messages to the police because they thought the issue needed attention; they sent the messages to the police because a court order threatened them with contempt of court if they didn't.

abigail955• 4 years ago

So much fuss about privacy, data collection, facebook, and police.

The real issue here is someone tried to abort a 28 week old fetus?

Only Americans find this acceptable. It's a fringe and extreme position in all of the developed world to abort a viable fetus on-demand. I continue to be shocked at the permissiveness of American abortion law.

I hope this ends in conviction of those responsible.

The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion

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