Pro-abortion demonstration in Lincoln, Nebraska, on July 4th. KENNETH FERRIERA/AP
Facebook has been under criticism in the United States for two days after it disclosed the content of conversations between a mother and her 17-year-old daughter in a case of illegal abortion to the judiciary. The investigation and the court order issued to Facebook predates the US Supreme Court’s June 24 annulment of the Roe vs. Wade decision that enshrined abortion rights in the United States.
In the state of Nebraska, where the two women live, abortion is legal up to twenty weeks after conception (fourteen weeks in France). The young woman is accused of having an abortion when she was 24 weeks pregnant and her mother is accused of complicity in ordering abortion pills. The two women reported by an anonymous informant are also accused of illegally burying the fetus and lying to investigators.
Facebook has been widely criticized for agreeing to broadcast the exchanges between the two women on Facebook Messenger to investigators after receiving a court order. “Nothing in the formal requests we received from investigators in early June, prior to the Supreme Court decision, mentioned an abortion, explained Andy Stone, spokesman for Facebook. The requisitions related to an investigation (…) into the burial or cremation of a stillborn baby. »
Court Requirement
Like all American companies, Facebook must respond to legal requests from American authorities. On rare occasions in the past, large Silicon Valley companies have challenged requests for access to private messages; In 2010, Twitter specifically challenged a request for access to private messages from the account operated by the WikiLeaks website. According to Meta’s transparency tool, Facebook answers just over 100,000 requests for information each year in the US alone, although only a fraction of those requests relate to private messages.
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In US states where abortion has been or will be illegal, it is very likely that law enforcement agencies will in the future send requests for information to social networks, email providers, telephone companies or other communication companies, and that the latter will have little choice but to do so react.
Abortion rights advocates have warned since the cancellation of Roe vs. Wade how quickly online exchanges could be used to prosecute women who have had or seek to have abortions in states that ban abortion. Major organizations defending the rights of individuals and the freedom to terminate pregnancy recommend the use of secure messaging to prevent incriminating messages from being obtained by law enforcement.
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message encryption
Unlike messages exchanged through secure applications like WhatsApp or Signal, exchanges in Facebook Messenger are not end-to-end encrypted by default – you need to enable an option for that. When an exchange is encrypted end-to-end, only the sender and recipient can read it; Neither Facebook nor the telephone company can access its content.
In this case, too, the investigators used very important means to get to the communication between the two women: During a search, they also confiscated five phones and several laptops, from which they extracted more than 24 gigabytes of data.
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Following the Supreme Court decision, conservative elected officials in Nebraska sought to shorten the state’s legal time limit for abortions to 12 weeks after conception. But even in this very conservative state, where the only House is two-thirds Republican and one-third Democrat, the bill had not received a majority of the vote. Recent opinion polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans support abortion rights in cases of rape or when the mother’s health is at stake, and that approximately 60% of respondents support abortion rights as practiced in the Supreme Court decision of the court.
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