this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605

A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.

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[–] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 171 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Just yesterday here on Lemmy, I mentioned the dangers of violating privacy, and some commenters went on about "what dangers?" Implying there were none...

Is it not enough to gesture broadly?

[–] Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No one has anything to hide, until they do

[–] waspentalive@lemmy.one 45 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I once heard that "Anyone can be charged with a crime if they can be watched closely enough for long enough."

[–] Random_user@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

I'm committing a crime right now, pairing this red wine with this halibut.

[–] Grimpen@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I remember that from Don't Take to The Police. Since gotchas I can think of is touching an eagle feather lying on the ground (endangered animals plus a market for poachers). Point being, that it's essentially impossible to say with certainty that you've broken no law.

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/d-7o9xYp7eE

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

[–] Grimpen@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago
[–] Grimpen@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago

Found the quote:

The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just what particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.

Stephen G. Breyer, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

It's used around 4:40 in the Don't Take To The Police video.

[–] waspentalive@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago

And there are so many laws that it is impossible to know all the laws that apply in any given moment. Basically, you always have -something- to hide.

[–] maynarkh@feddit.nl 1 points 1 year ago

I would like to quote a Hungarian movie classic from 1969 (it was sitting in a box for a decade until it somehow got past the censorship):

Mutasson nekem egyetlen embert ebben a tetves országban, akire ha kell, 5 perc alatt nem bizonyítom rá, hogy bűnös! Magára is, magamra is, mindenkire!

Show me a single person in this flea-ridden country who if needed, I can't prove in 5 minutes that they are guilty! You, me, everyone!

Other great quotes from the same movie:

Ahol nem vagyunk mi, ott az ellenség.

Where we are not, there is the enemy.

Ezeken lovagol maga? Amit a vaksi szemével lát? A süket fülével hall? A tompa agyával gondol? Azt hiszi, fölér az a mi nagy céljaink igazságához?!

Are you hung up on these things? What you see with your blind eyes? What you hear with your deaf ears? What you think with your blunt mind? Do you believe these are comparable to the truth of our great cause?

Just if you thought that these people are not the same as the commies were way back when. Authoritarians tend to be alike.

[–] DrQuint@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

At this point, they'll just say "yeah, but these people did a crime. I don't do crimes so I have nothing to worry about". The problem with that mentality, I would hope, doesn't need to be stated.

I stopped trying to change the world.

[–] HughJanus@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is the perfect example of why you should be worried. Because your government can turn into a fascist dictatorship at any time and you ain't getting that data back.

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How is this an example of the government turning into a "fascist dictatorship"?

[–] Gabu@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reading comprehension is hard, so I'll help you out.

This [event mentioned on the news] is the perfect example of why you should be worried. Because your government can [i.e. has the potential to] turn into a fascist dictatorship at any time [which is unrelated to this specific piece of news, being a hypothetical scenario] and you ain’t getting that data back.

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can read just fine, I'm just wondering how you correlate this with the possibility of the government turning into a fascist dictatorship. They're 2 completely unrelated things, that's why I'm confused to why you put them together. You even literally say it's unrelated to this piece of news.....

[–] Gabu@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are you serious, or being a pitiful basement troll?

Action is not illegal → Service provider has unprivateable data on action → Action becomes illegal → You now have confessed to your crime

Can't make it much more obvious

[–] waspentalive@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I thought ex post facto laws were forbidden.

[–] Gabu@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

People won't all stop doing something they did just because it became illegal. I wouldn't stop eating bread if it became illegal, for instance. Much easier to justify a search and witch hunt if there's evidence of previous action.

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you being serious, or just being a pitiful basement troll yourself?

You're saying because they did thing A it means you should be wary because thing Z might happen, even though things A and Z have literally nothing to do with each other nor does A happening give any likelihood of Z happening.

[–] Gabu@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Got it, you're a pitiful troll. I don't care that your time is worthless, stop wasting mine.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I agree that these people did a crime.

I just don't think their crime should be illegal.

If this was about murdering a full-grown adult and not aborting a fetus, nobody would be talking about privacy concerns. Guaranteed.

[–] brainrein@feddit.de 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do you know they committed a crime. After reading the article I don’t know. It looks totally as if it’s possible that she just had a miscarriage.

Maybe there’s just a prosecutor eager for convictions.

Maybe she was trying do avoid exactly this kind of trouble.

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago

She took abortion drugs.....

[–] Milk_SDF_Possum@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

We'd still be talking about the privacy part because it'd be still more concerning than the death of one random dude.

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would you be ok with someone aborting a 39 week old fetus? What about a 40 week old fetus? What about during labour?

[–] richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one 1 points 1 year ago

Slippery slope fallacy detected

[–] JakeHimself@lemmy.ml -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I agree with you, but I don't think I could explicitly state what's wrong with that mentality. Can you humor me and state it?

Edit: can someone else take a shot at it? Tge parent comment is essentially saying "people will counter with X, but everyone knows that doesn't make sense". It's clear that something is wrong with that mentality, but it obviously would have a very real benefit of stating it's flaws since the whole premise of this is that some people don't know what's wrong with that mentality.

[–] Gabu@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The obvious, unspoken part is: what is legal now isn't guaranteed to be legal two seconds in the future, and likewise to what is illegal. The law gives you no guarantee of being ethical nor moral, it's simply a collection of behaviors either sanctioned or unsanctioned by the State.

As a clear example, you may tell me how much you love breathing in fresh air. If, tomorrow, breathing fresh air is made illegal, you've just shared with me a confession to a crime.

[–] JakeHimself@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you for actually doing this.

I guess that can also be extended to things that can accidentally be suspicious. Imagine if Colonel Mustard, who "doesn't have anything to hide", let the police search their trunk and found a broken candle stick. Even though he wasn't being searched for that in particular, now he's a suspect in Mrs. Peacock's murder at the gazebo (Clue reference).