Nebraska story
This week saw the arrest of a Nebraska teenager and her mother, who are charged with multiple felonies for terminating the 17-year-old's pregnancy at 28 weeks and burying (and, apparently, trying to burn) the fetus. Allegedly, this was a home-based medication abortion...and the reason the authorities found out is that following a tip-off the police got a search warrant for the pair's Facebook accounts. There, the investigators found messages suggesting the mother had bought the pills and instructed her daughter how to use them.
Cue kneejerk reactions. "Abortion" is a hot button. Facebook privacy is a hot button. Result: in reporting these gruesome events most media have chosen to blame this horror story on Facebook for turning over the data.
As much as I love a good reason to bash Facebook, this isn't the right take.
Meta - Facebook's parent - has responded to the stories with a "correction" that says the company turned over the women's data in response to valid legal warrants issued by the Nebraska court *before* the Supreme Court ruling. The company adds, "The warrants did not mention abortion at all."
What the PR folks have elided is that both the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, and the wording of the warrants are entirely irrelevant. It doesn't *matter* that this case was about an abortion. Meta/Facebook will *always* turn over user data in compliance with a valid legal warrant issued by a court, especially in the US, its home country. So will every other major technology company.
You may dispute the justice of Nebraska's 2019 Pain-Capable Unborn Child Act, under which abortion is illegal after 20 weeks from fertilization (22 weeks in normal medical parlance). But that's not Meta's concern. What Meta cares about is legal compliance and the technical validity of the warrant. Meta is a business, not a social justice organization, and while many want Mark Zuckerberg to use his personal judgment and clout to refuse to do business with oppressive regimes (by which they usually mean China, or Myanmar), do you really want him and his company to obey only laws they agree with?
There will be many much worse cases to come, because states will enact and enforce the vastly more restrictive abortion laws that Dobbs enables, and there will be many valid legal warrants that force them to hand data to police bent on prosecuting people in excruciating pregnancy-related situations - and in many more countries. Even in the UK, where (except for Northern Ireland) abortion has been mostly non-contentious for decades, lurking behind the 1967 law which legalized abortion until 24 weeks is an 1861 statute under which abortion is criminal. That law, as Shanti Das recently wrote at the Guardian, has been used to prosecute dozens of women and a few men in the last decade. (See also Skeptical Inquirer.)
So if you're going to be mad at Facebook, be mad that the platform hadn't turned on end-to-end encryption for its messaging. That, as security engineer Alec Muffett has been pointing out on Twitter, would have protected the messages against access by both the system itself and by law enforcement. At the Guardian, Johana Bhuiyan reports the company is now testing turning on end-to-end encryption by default. Doubtless, soon to be followed by law enforcement and governments demanding special access.
Others advocate switching to other encrypted messaging platforms that, like Signal, provide a setting that allows you to ensure that messages automatically vape themselves after a specified number of days. Such systems retain no data that can be turned over.
It's good advice, up to a point. For one thing, it ignores most people's preference for using the familiar services their friends use. Adopting a second service just for, say, medical contacts adds complications; getting everyone you know to switch is almost impossible.
Second, it's also important to remember the power of metadata - data about data, which includes everything from email headers to search histories. "We kill people based on metadata," former NSA head Michael Hayden said in 2014 in a debate on the constitutionality of the NSA. (But not, he hastened to add, metadata collected from *Americans*.)
Logs of who has connected to whom and how frequently is often more revealing than the content of the messages sent back and forth. For example: the message content may be essentially meaningless to an outsider ("I can make it on Monday at two") until the system logs tell you that the sender is a woman of childbearing age and the recipient is an abortion clinic. This is why so many governments have favored retaining Internet connection data. Governments cite the usual use cases - organized crime, drug dealers, child abusers, and terrorists - when pushing for data retention, and they are helped by the fact that most people instinctively quail at the thought of others reading the *content* of their messages but overlook metadata's significance.intuitively grasp the importance of metadata - data about data, as in system logs, connection records - has helped enable mass Internet surveillance.
The net result of all this is to make surveillance capitalism-driven technology services dangerous for the 65.5 million women of childbearing age in the US (2020). That's a fair chunk of their most profitable users, a direct economic casualty of Dobbs.
Illustrations: Facebook.
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.