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Facebook hands over chats to cops in abortion case

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Bloody hell, this has literally nothing to do with a "post Roe abortion case"!

Dobbs, that overturned Roe, was decided on June 24th 2022. Because of linear time, a subpoena dated June 7th 2022 can't be a result of the Dobbs decision.

And the Nebraska law that this is and was in play here criminalized abortion after 20 weeks, which is somewhere between Sweden's limit (18 weeks) and the UK's (24 weeks, the same as the Netherlands).

Now, the circumstances were inevitably tragic for the people involved, but this would, I suggest, be an appropriate set of facts for an investigation to happen, although I'd hope that a lot more discretion about whether or not to bring charges would be applied than is likely to be the case in Nebraska. But given that an investigation seems warranted (again, an investigation but not necessarily a prosecution), a subpoena to Meta would seem to be a reasonable thing to do.

Of course, the legitimate concern here is that this is a harbinger of cases where one state (let's call it Xetas) prosecutes someone for an entirely legal procedure in another state (say, Olocardo) and forces tech companies to provide evidence. And the moral of that concern is to use a lot of discretion when talking about such things, as you need a channel that does not automatically record all your traffic!

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