The problem is not what people read, but what they do not read - journalists have an axe to grind against Facebook, so they write titles that make it sound like Facebook willingly gave the data to the police, and most people don't go beyond reading the title.

What makes you say journalists have an axe to grind against Facebook? If anything, I think they spent more than a decade being too generous to Facebook, and even now are overly credulous a lot of the time.

Facebook was a media darling until they became profitable and ate the media’s lunch. When it became clear that FB would swallow a large chunk of online ad dollars that the media companies coveted, their attitude changed rather suddenly.

They did willingly give the data to the police. Compare Apple v. FBI. "But the iPhone was encrypted" - nothing is stopping Facebook from encrypting Messenger.

That's right, nothing is stopping them. In fact, they've already done it. Messenger supports e2ee.

Whether you think Facebook is right or not, this story gives pause about what kind of information you share online. It's one more reason to participate less or not participate at all in these services.

That seems a good thing, as it will tarnish Facebook both with beeing bad and with being involved in the abortion issue, which is super division no matter what.

And it is not like Facebook doesn't have options here. They can fight the warrant and they can publish the private information of the people involved with the warrant.

For sure. What troubles me here is that Facebook didn't fight it. What I'd like them to do is to fight overly intrusive requests all the way to the Supreme Court. Maybe this is trying to say they that feel that they got hoodwinked? If so, they need to say that very clearly. Because I'm not at all confident that Facebook is particularly committed to user privacy, especially when they are eager to suck up to politicians.

Right. This is the thread I'm interested in.

Facebook, has among many choices, two clear and easily territories in which to advance user privacy: technically and legally.

Technically, Facebook could implement E2E for private messages. Doing so would make disclosure not something they were unwilling to do, but unable to do.

The other, and this is much more juicy, would be to lobby the California legislature to make it illegal under state law to disclose private conversations re: abortion to states where abortion is prohibited.

The fact that these are possible, but not likely to happen is another issue altogether.

> much more juicy

You're not kidding. Doing state-by-state battle over jurisdiction and the right of each state to create its own laws would be ... interesting. I'd expect it to be very destructive overall. Not saying it would necessarily lead to an end of the union, but it's a step.

Seems to be a pattern, lately, and specific to abortion as well. The ends justifying the means, regardless of collateral damage.

What we have now has the same legal-political texture the same as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. A state like California is compelled to assist states like Nebraska in the enactment of punishment of an act which is legal in California but which is illegal in Nebraska.

Make such assistance illegal so that Facebook doesn't have a choice in the matter. Facebook certainly has the political power[money] to successfully lobby for such a legislative change, but it doesn't have the will to do so.

It's likely that the abortion in this case would have been illegal in California. It's hard to say for sure, because California prohibits abortion after medical viability rather than setting a strict week limit, but it happened at week 23 when many fetuses are viable.

Mostly, for my own edification, but did similar ambiguities arise during the implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act? If so, how where they handled?

I don't want to say "similar", because chattel slavery was uniquely bad, but even in areas that wouldn't enforce the Fugitive Slave Act forced prison labor was pretty common at the time. There was also the question of what should happen to people who conspire to violate the Fugitive Slave Act, although my understanding is that in practice it was impossible to get northern juries to convict them.

It's not obvious to me that the end of the Union would be a bad thing.

It is hard to deny that this is a pretty common thought these days. I hear a lot of people making sounds in that direction, regardless of their more traditional ideological views.

We'd have to figure out how the nukes are divided up, however. Though what is it they say about possession being 9/10ths of the law...

> how the nukes are divided up

The Lord's our shepherd, goes the psalm When Alabama gets the bomb.

~ Tom Lehrer, "Who's next"

Well, the USSR broke up without too much fuss about who got the bombs; as far as I can see, only Russia was interested. But I can imagine a Divided States of America in which both successor states have nukes. I suspect they'd be reluctant to attack one-another. They might even both choose to disarm, depending on the nature of the break-up.

The USSR was dominated by Russia, and they had the codes anyway. So I guess in the case of the USA it would matter how it broke apart.

> both successor states

Why would there be only two?

> Why would there be only two?

Sure. You could abolish the Union entirely, and just have states. I don't think it's obvious that that would be a terrible thing - either for USAians or for the rest of us. My sense is that a lot of USAians don't really want a Union. I suspect that many USAians think the Union was effectively a coup.

The question remains: how do you spread the nukes around?

My guess is that the residents of Wyoming could do without nukes. They have a lot of land-based nukes, that serve no defensive purpose (for Wyoming); they just make Wyoming a target. I wonder which state might decide that they need nukes, to defend themselves from someone outside North America?

Second question: how you divide up the military equipment that isn't nuclear - ships, tanks, rockets, planes etc. All that equipment carries a heavy cost - it has to be maintained, replaced, tested etc.

The people expressing this thought clearly have spent very little time in other countries to appreciate what y'all have.

Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxembourg were the same country, at least for some time, then split up and are good countries to live in (probably beating the US on most quality of life metrics). Same goes for the Nordics which were at different times in various combos (Denmark-Norway, Sweden-Finland, Sweden-Norway, Iceland was a part of Denmark).

Also a bunch of other examples where the countries aren't necessarily the best to live in, but pretty much everyone is happy they split - Yugoslavia, India/Pakistan, West Pakistan/East Pakistan. Singapore/Malaysia (to be fair Singapore were kicked out).

A split of the US among the crazily politicised duopoly wouldn't be the end of the world. One part would be reactionary as hell and move time back (on social and ecological issues), the other.. who knows.

Fantasizing about the end of the world/country/whatever is a popular pastime in the US. It is reasonable to suspect that the talk is primarily the 1% loudest people and that if anything starts to look like it's getting real, the remaining majority will step on the brakes.

There's a time bomb baked into the conceptualization of mythos of the United States.

The US in many ways legitimizes itself as a government in the traditional of the "western european project," by evoking the ritual, esthetic, ideals, and historical lineage of ancient Greece and Rome. From names and architecture, to values and ritual, there is an establishment of ties, real or imagined to be real.

On one hand, this works fantastically to mentally cement the US in the greatest of greats, but we cannot ignore the visibly obvious - that ancient Greece and Rome declined and fell. By drawing a parallel to ourselves(us-centric obvs) we draw a parallel to our own decline. We we're honest with this comparison, we have to be honest about the demise of these governments too. It's not possible to separate the too.

"End of the Union" is a catastrophically bad idea and it disturbs me that otherwise intelligent people would take it seriously. I find it stunning how people who might otherwise decry things like "racism" can be in a mindstate of not understanding how close of an idea this is to "Maybe we should do the Civil War" again.

> Maybe we should do the Civil War again

There's a fair argument that it never ended; the South was defeated, but never gave in. Or at least, part of the South didn't. Come on, isn't that the meaning of the Confederate flag? Doesn't it mean "Fuck you, Union"?

/me a brit, I don't have a dog in this race. I'd just feel massively more comfortable if the most powerful country in the world knew who it was, what it's policies are, and who it's friends are. If they can't figure that out, and have to break up, that's miles better than the USA being balanced 49% to 51% on every policy and every federal court judgement.

I'd prefer it if the USA split, rather than having a schizophrenic USA, with the biggest army in the world, that can't agree who it is, what it's economic policy is, or what it's foreign policy is. Schizo USA is screwing everyone else up.

That's a pretty fair dog actually.

I like the goal you're looking at, I just don't think that's a viable path from where we're standing; which is to say in reality a broken US gives you more potential chaos, not less?

I've come to believe that "nation" is somewhat of a weird and artificial concept and so that in many ways it almost doesn't make sense to compare e.g. the US and Russia. And so, while "no lopsidedly strong nation" would be optimal, from here I do think that US in its current form is a pretty good hedge against the others, for the most part.

Reconstruction 2.0 it is then. The Compromise of 1877 was a uniquely bad idea.

It's going to be a real bad thing for some people in some of the states. E.g., the last time the Union was split up it was over the "right" to treat people as livestock. Or look at the use of federal civil rights laws in the ending of Jim Crow.

>over the "right" to treat people as livestock

Yes, to me (not from USA) it looks as if would get worse for most USAians if the Union broke up. Especially marginalized people. But I think that for the rest of us, it would be cool if the US government would agree to work together, or agree to divorce. It's shit, being in the blast-radius of a marital crisis that's lasted 30 years.

Messenger already has opt-in end to end encryption and it's the default on WhatsApp.

Thank you for the info. I'm not a messenger user myself. Make it opt-out then :)

They tried, but governments and organizations like NCMEC (and many other people) got up in arms about how it would protect child abusers (which is not incorrect). AIUI, they've been working on solutions that would alleviate some of those concerns before switching to enable e2ee by default.

The second option wouldn't really have helped here because abortion law in Nebraska is almost as permissive as in California.

There was a warrant, which is pretty much the bar. If you can get a warrant to find evidence for a crime, I don't know what the court battle would be about. You don't have a right to privacy to conspire about crimes on facebook. Even if you don't agree it should be a crime.

I think this is the closest thing to Meta stating that they were misled

“Court documents indicate that police were at that time investigating the alleged illegal burning and burial of a stillborn infant.”

Perhaps that is actually what the police were investigating at the time.

Yep. Facebook Messenger isn’t E2E encrypted by default, it takes a bit of digging to make it that way, and Facebook obeys warrants for unencrypted messages. This may be important if you’re doing something recently made illegal.

The stories were accurate, but most of the headlines said Facebook "gave" data to law enforcement, when it's more accurate to say they were legally obligated to provide data. The villains in this story are the law enforcement agencies, legislators and judges who set the rules. Facebook did nothing wrong.

I've been on the other end of law enforcement requests for data, and they were not legally obligated to provide the data right away. They had the option to fight the subpoena.

For example, Twitter fought an attempt to expose somebody mocking Rep Devin Nunes: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/18/devin-nunes-...

Story says it was a warrant. Not a request or a subpoena. Fighting a warrant isn't really possible. Defense can move to suppress it at pretrial, but FB has no standing to refuse to service a warrant.

Could you say a bit more? IANAL, but I only know about warrants in the context of them coming in and taking stuff. I don't know what a warrant could even mean here, especially given that the information isn't physically in Nebraska.

Ok, I just double-checked that, and apparently Facebook has a Nebraska data center. So the information could possibly be there. But I have a hard time imagining Nebraska PD going into a 10-acre data center and just grabbing servers.

Warrants don't need to be for physical items. Even pre-internet, PD could issue a warrant for phone records and it doesn't matter where or how the records are stored. They just need the records to be turned over for inspection. Nebraska can sanction anyone who doesn't comply with a warrant.

Thanks. I have looked for information on this and can't find much. Maybe part of this is per-state variation?

IANAL but I think a subpoena is different from a warrant.

They are. Roughly, a warrant is issued to a law enforcement agent and grants them powers not normally granted (arrest, search, etc). A subpoena is issued to a 3rd party to produce evidence or appear in court.

In this case, the warrant appears to have been issued to an officer in the Norfolk PD, who then asked FB for any messages between the two suspects.

What's not clear to me (IANAL) is what power FB had to refuse to comply with the warrant. If they refused to comply, would the police start seizing servers? Or, would FB be held in contempt (usually applies to subpoenas, not sure if that would apply with a warrant).

All that said, the "easy" answer for FB (Apple, Google, etc) is E2E encryption of messages. Then all they can do it produce the encrypted "gibberish" and the PD has to hack it or move on.

Facebook absolutely did something wrong. Perhaps, if they weren't so intent on hoovering up our data for advertisers, they might have built their systems such that they couldn't provide that data to law enforcement.

Never underestimate a PR team’s ability or desire to spin everything.