A Mother And Daughter Are Now Charged With Abortion After Facebook Turned Over Their Chat Messages
A Facebook document shows that the company turned over the chats of a mother and daughter to the Nebraska police after they were served with a warrant as part of an investigation into an illegal abortion, according to a court document.
Having launched the investigation before Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in April, it is one of a few known instances in which Facebook has turned over information in order to assist law enforcement in pursuing an abortion case.
However, this is also an example of a scenario that abortion rights experts have warned will become more common as all abortions become illegal in many states in the coming years.
Jessica Burgess, 41, has been charged with giving abortion pills to her daughter Celeste, who was 17 years old at the time. She then assisted Celeste in burying and reburying the fetus after she took the pills. This case was reported for the first time by the Norfolk Daily News.
Last month, the two were charged with the crime and pleaded not guilty to it. There has been no response to a request for comment from the lawyers for the two women.
In a sworn affidavit from Detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk Police Investigations Unit, it is written that police started investigating Celeste’s case after receiving a tip from a woman who described herself as a friend of Celeste and who said she saw Celeste take the first pill in April, according to the affidavit.
A Mother And Daughter Are Now Charged With Abortion After Facebook Turned Over Their Chat Messages
There is a Nebraska state law that prohibits abortions after 20 weeks after the fertilization of an egg, which was enacted before Roe was overturned.
As per McBride’s affidavit, Burgess suffered a miscarriage when she was around 23 weeks pregnant, soon after taking abortion pills, which lead to miscarriage.
Upon receiving a warrant from the court in June, McBride was able to access the digital lives of the mother and daughter, seizing six smartphones and seven laptops as well as forcing Facebook to hand over chats between them.
The alleged chats are shown in court documents seen by NBC News, and in them, a user named Jessica tells a user named Celeste about “What I ordered last month”, and instructs her to take two pills 24 hours apart in order to achieve the best results.
In response to a request for comment, the Norfolk Police Department did not respond to the request.
It should be noted that most of the user information that Facebook stores on its servers is stored in plaintext, meaning that it can be accessed by the company if compelled to do so with a warrant. Law enforcement requests are routinely complied with by the company.
For this article, Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
It is important to note that Facebook Messenger offers end-to-end encryption, which means that chats between two users will be visible and readable only on their phones, and cannot be read by Facebook or any government entity that makes a legal request to Facebook.
Nevertheless, this option is only available to people who are using the Messenger app on a mobile device, and messages can only be encrypted if the user chooses to mark the chat as “secret.”
In my experience, as well as my conversations with other experienced criminal investigators, people engaged in criminal activity frequently have conversations regarding their criminal activity on several social networking sites, such as Facebook, based on my prior training and experience as well as my conversations with other seasoned investigators. “Facebook,” McBride said in his warrant application.
Jessica Burgess has been charged with three felonies and two misdemeanors, and Celeste Burgess has been charged with a felony and two misdemeanors.
There were a total of five charges related to the act of performing an abortion, concealing a body, and providing false information to authorities.
The Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, a case in which the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade, according to Elizabeth Nash, a state policy analyst at Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that advocates reproductive rights policy.
As Nebraska law enforcement has not changed its laws since the case began in April and the state has not changed its law since then, there is unlikely that Wade has altered Nebraska law enforcement’s legal ability to bring charges.
Despite this, she said, it is the type of case abortion law experts expect to see more of in the post-Roe world.
“It is possible the police could have decided not to charge them, but it appears as though they are throwing the book at the mother and daughter, charging them with everything from criminal abortion to false reporting,” Nash said.
This is the kind of response we are expecting from the Dobbs decision and the states that have banned abortions in their states.
The deputy director of surveillance at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a think tank that promotes digital rights, Jake Laperruque, says that as more states prosecute abortion-related crimes, tech companies that store plaintext information about users who intend to have abortions will likely continue to be served with warrants for storing such information.
It is likely that this will continue to happen to technology companies that store significant amounts of data and communications, Laperruque stated.
If companies don’t want to end up repeatedly handing over data for abortion investigations, they need to rethink how they collect, store, and encrypt data if they don’t want to have to repeatedly hand it over,” he said.