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digital privacy
Nebraska Teen Sentenced to 90 Days in Jail After Self-Managed Abortion
The case of Celeste Burgess illustrates "the real, human cost of mass surveillance of everyone's private digital communications," said one digital rights advocate.
Jul 21, 2023
Advocates for digital privacy rights and reproductive rights alike were outraged Thursday over the jail sentence of a 19-year-old in Nebraska who self-managed her abortion last year—a case which one campaigner said highlights how prosecutors will "stretch laws far beyond their intended scope" to penalize people who end or attempt to end their pregnancies in the post-Roe v. Wade legal landscape.
Self-managed abortion is only banned in two states—Nevada and South Carolina—but prosecutors charged Celeste Burgess with one felony and two misdemeanors last year, several months after she had a stillbirth at 29 weeks of pregnancy. Burgess, who was 17 at the time, had procured pills for a medication abortion shortly before the stillbirth, and had discussed the outcome of the pregnancy on Facebook Messenger with her mother, Jessica Burgess.
Nebraska had a 20-week abortion ban in place in April 2022, when Burgess's stillbirth took place.
Prosecutors ultimately dropped the misdemeanor charges against Burgess in exchange for her plea of guilty to a felony charge of concealing or abandoning a dead body. On the Facebook messaging application, Burgess and her mother had discussed "burning the evidence" of the stillbirth and burying it, which they did with the help of a third person named Tanner Barnhill, who has been sentenced to probation.
According toJezebel, police received a tip about the disposal of the remains and obtained a warrant to view the mother and daughters' Facebook messages after Celeste Burgess mentioned the correspondence when she was being questioned by law enforcement.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, complied with the warrant and released the messages, which were not subject to end-to-end encryption.
Digital rights groups have long called on Facebook and other online messaging platforms to make end-to-end encryption the default setting for users' conversations.
Burgess' case illustrates "the real, human cost of mass surveillance of everyone's private digital communications," said Meredith Whittaker, president of the encrypted messaging app Signal.
Emma Roth, a staff attorney at Pregnancy Justice, which advocates for people who face pregnancy-related criminal charges, toldJezebel that police and prosecutors in Nebraska charged Burgess out of desperation to "criminalize what they view as immoral behavior," in the absence of state laws against the 17-year-old's procurement of abortion pills.
"When [prosecutors] are faced with the limitations of state law and the fact that a self-managed abortion or a pregnancy loss is not illegal under state law, it's almost as if they start throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks," Roth said. "Prosecutors are much more likely to try to 'make an example' of someone who seeks an abortion later on in pregnancy because they deem that less morally acceptable, and they may seek charges in the hope that the public will find the facts of the case egregious and will welcome a prosecution."
"But the risk, of course, is that any type of precedent that a prosecutor sets when bringing a case against someone who sought a later abortion can be applied against somebody seeking an earlier abortion," she added.
In the case of Burgess, noted journalist Jessica Valenti, one detail that made it into numerous media reports was a claim that the 17-year-old said in her Facebook messages that she couldn't "wait to get the 'thing' out of her body."
In reality, Valenti wrote, "that sentence is nowhere in the Facebook messages; in fact, the language is actually a police officer's interpretation of the teenager's conversation."
Prosecutors in Madison County, Nebraska "tried to paint a portrait of this mother and daughter in a negative light and to deprive them of their humanity and to erase the fact that we're talking about a teenager who was not ready to have a child," Roth told Jezebel.
While prosecutors have long filed charges against people for pregnancy losses and self-managed abortions, saidJezebel reporter Susan Rikunas, "Celeste Burgess may be the first person charged and sentenced for crimes related to an abortion since the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling."
Last year's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization reversed nearly a half-century of national abortion rights affirmed by Roe.
As progressive advocacy group Indivisible said, Burgess' jail sentence represents Republican lawmakers' "deranged vision for our country."
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We Hoped for a Better Social Platform; Instead, We’re Left Hanging by a Threads
A small-government intervention will clean up the public market and force Threads—and Meta—to build a better, safer sewing machine.
Jul 13, 2023
As a kid, I worked in a men’s store tailor shop on the East Side of Cleveland. It was chaos, watching master tailors cut, sew, and press tiny threads into modern fashion. My job was to clean the shop, oil the machines, and keep the steam presses hydrated. Thread was everywhere and constantly needed to be swept up, as each garment was crafted with care and purpose.
Whether Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg realized it or not, the name of his new text-based social media platform, Threads, is the perfect metaphor for the new platform we’ve all been craving. Will it be sewn into something beautiful or just another tangled mess that needs to be swept up?
Elon Musk’s decisions at the helm of Twitter and the longstanding issues surrounding the lack of controls against bullies and bots have disgusted millions of users. But is jumping ship to a new platform—owned by a flawed company that has not cleaned up its own issues—the way we want to engage?
After my first day on Threads, I already faced issues that have plagued Twitter for years. I had fake profiles and bots already following my account.
Social media fashions have changed from when we first logged on over a decade ago. We are no longer excited by chaos, stunts, or gimmicks, or learning basic HTML to customize our backgrounds on MySpace. Many of us just want an uncluttered, simple social platform that’s bully and bot-free, and isn’t trying to sell us stuff we don’t want or need. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, knows this, and was quoted in The New York Times saying he wants “Threads to be a ‘friendly place’ for public conversation.”
But is that even possible, given that Threads has seemingly already fallen short on protections? After my first day on Threads, I already faced issues that have plagued Twitter—a blatantly similar type of platform—for years. I had fake profiles and bots already following my account.
If Threads wants to succeed, it needs a bobbin to keep it running smoothly. Think of it as adding some simple guardrails to help guide the threads from jamming the machine. Without this basic intervention, we already know the downward spiral that’s coming next.
We have watched social networks, including Meta, fight to keep and expand archaic protections that were granted in 1996’s Communications Decency Act. These protections were created to allow companies like AOL and Prodigy to be treated as blind infrastructure, like a telephone line, and never be held liable for any communications on their railways.
These laws were created before there were modern-day social networks, let alone billions of dollars in advertising revenue being moved through them.
Unfortunately, as each of these platforms competes to become the largest network in the free market, without any intervention or protections, they will create more of the same bot-driven cesspools, spreading misinformation and disinformation and promoting false advertising. There is no real incentive for them to do anything different in the United States. Threads is not yet in the European Union, since the E.U. has stricter privacy laws. It also has yet to implement advertising, but that’s just a matter of time.
Now is the time to evolve the Communications Decency Act so that the next generation of social networks are sewn into a more wearable garment. This is not unAmerican. Think back to that famous Thomas Jefferson quote, “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." Let’s follow this lead and advance our social platforms by evolving Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act and force these powerful companies to take accountability for their actions.
Historically, Twitter only took performative actions to resolve or remove bots and fake accounts before they testified before Congress or before a major election. The company was well known for putting out self-congratulatory press releases on how it clamped down and removed tons of bots and bad actors—but let’s be honest, they never implemented long-term fixes to these known problems.
A simple change in liability, the bobbin, will ensure social networks run smoother by forcing them to focus on their consumers. This simple change will make these companies spend resources on security measures, monitoring technology, and even hiring staff to review advertising for accuracy, just like every other media outlet in America.
In other words, a small-government intervention will clean up the public market and force Threads—and Meta—to build a better, safer sewing machine. One that does not allow its users to be threatened by hate speech or acts of violence without real consequences.
It’s time for Congress to take out their brooms, evolve the Communications Decency Act, and help clean up these threads.
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To 'Uphold Human Right to Privacy,' Global Coalition Demands Safeguards for Encrypted Services
"The need for privacy has never been more urgent," said one advocate. "Encryption is a shield that protects everyone but most especially the most targeted and vulnerable communities."
May 03, 2023
A global coalition of more than 40 companies and digital rights groups on Wednesday urged governments around the world to publicly vow to "protect encryption and ensure a free and open internet."
The coalition sent its open letter to policymakers in Australia, Canada, the European Union, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States on World Press Freedom Day because digital privacy safeguards are particularly important to journalists and their sources, though advocates stressed they're essential to preserving democracy and human rights at large.
"Encryption is a critical tool for user privacy, data security, safety online, press freedom, self-determination, and free expression," states the letter. "Without encryption, users' data and communications can be accessed by law enforcement and malicious actors."
"Government attacks on encrypted services threaten privacy and put users at risk," the letter continues. "This might seem like a distant problem primarily faced in authoritarian countries but the threat is just as real and knocking at the doors of democratic nations."
"Policymakers understand the importance of privacy when it comes to opening someone else's physical mail, accessing their banking or other private information, but limit such protections online."
As the coalition, organized by Tutanoa, Fight for the Future, and Tor, explained, the value of end-to-end encryption "in defending privacy cannot be overstated, but is also seen as a threat to law enforcement who argue that the ability to freely access individuals' communications is critical for criminal investigations."
Law enforcement's narrative "has spurred worrying initiatives such as the Online Safety Bill in the U.K., the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act and EARN IT Act in the U.S., India's Directions 20(3)/2022 – CERT-In, Bill C26 in Canada, the Surveillance Legislation Amendment Act in Australia as well as the proposed rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse in the E.U.," the coalition noted. "These laws aim to take away the right to privacy online by forcing encrypted services to weaken the security of their users and give law enforcement access to user information upon request."
In a statement, the coalition condemned the aforementioned proposals as "alarming examples of democratic governments following in the path of authoritarian governments like Russia and Iran, who actively limit their citizens' access to encrypted services thereby weakening their human rights."
Pushing back against such measures, the letter calls on "democratic leaders" to "protect encryption and uphold the human right to privacy."
Specifically, signatories implored all governments to:
- Ensure that encryption is not being undermined via overreaching legislative initiatives;
- Ensure that technologies providing secure, encrypted services are not being blocked or throttled; and
- Revisit any bills, laws, and policies that legitimize undermining encryption or blocking access to services offering encrypted communication.
"Encrypted services are at the forefront of the battle for online privacy, freedom of the press, freedom of opinion and expression," says the letter. "Many journalists, whistleblowers, and activists depend on secure, encrypted solutions to protect their data as well as their identity. Access to these tools can be literally life or death for those who rely on them."
The open letter echoes United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres' fresh warning that "in every corner of the world, freedom of the press is under attack."
"Freedom of the press is the foundation of democracy and justice," said Guterres. "It gives all of us the facts we need to shape opinions and speak truth to power."
"Meanwhile, journalists and media workers are directly targeted on and offline as they carry out their vital work. They are routinely harassed, intimidated, detained, and imprisoned," he added. "At least 67 media workers were killed in 2022—an unbelievable 50% increase over the previous year."
"Many policymakers believe they can have a 'magical key' to access encrypted communication—completely ignoring technical facts: Encryption is either securing everyone or it is broken for everyone."
While legislative and regulatory attempts to undermine encryption are especially hazardous to reporters and dissidents, experts made clear that weakening digital privacy ultimately endangers everyone.
"Encryption is a necessary tool for safeguarding our digital rights and the principles of a free and open society. By upholding encryption within messaging apps, websites, file sharing, and other online services, we empower journalists to report on important issues while protecting their sources without fear of surveillance and retribution," said Isabela Fernandes, executive director of the Tor Project. "The Tor network is underpinned by encryption, and we have partnered with many news outlets and social media sites to launch Onion Sites that bypass censorship and allow people to safely and anonymously access, share, and publish information."
Fight for the Future campaigner Eseohe Ojo argued that "the need for privacy has never been more urgent."
"Encryption is a shield that protects everyone but most especially the most targeted and vulnerable communities," said Ojo. "This ranges from journalists and activists to LGBTQ+ folks, abortion seekers, [and] ethnic and other minorities. Why take away the tools needed to help protect them at a time they need these tools the most?"
"Policymakers understand the importance of privacy when it comes to opening someone else's physical mail, accessing their banking or other private information, but limit such protections online," she added. "Encrypted services protect and empower individuals. It is about time governments recognize and safeguard access to these tools."
Tutanota co-founder Matthias Pfau lamented that "many policymakers believe they can have a 'magical key' to access encrypted communication—completely ignoring technical facts: Encryption is either securing everyone or it is broken for everyone."
"If policymakers want a 'magical key,' they will ultimately destroy the security of all citizens, including journalists and whistleblowers who depend on encryption to expose abuses of power or other grievances in society," Pfau warned. "That's why we at Tutanota will never weaken our encryption. If governments outlaw encryption, they need to block access to our encrypted email service, just like Russia and Iran are already doing."
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