By Kevin Collier and Minyvonne Burke -
NBC News
Facebook turned over the conversations of a mother and daughter to Nebraska police after receiving a warrant as part of an investigation into an illegal abortion, court documents show.
The investigation, which began in April, before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade, is one of the few known cases where Facebook has provided information to help law enforcement pursue an abortion case, but it's also an example of a scenario that abortion rights experts have warned about. which will become more common as all abortions become illegal in many states.
County prosecutors say
41-year-old Jessica Burgess procured and gave abortion pills to her daughter, Celeste, who was 17 at the time, and then helped her twice bury the fetus.
The Norfolk Daily News first reported the case.
The two were charged last month and have pleaded not guilty.
An attorney for the two women did not respond to a request for comment.
The logo of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Tony Avelar / AP
According to an affidavit from Detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk Police Investigative Unit, police began with a tip from a woman who described herself as a friend of Celeste's and who said she saw her take the first pill in April.
Under a Nebraska state law enacted before Roe's repeal, abortion is illegal 20 weeks after fertilization of the ovum.
According to McBride's affidavit, Burgess
had a miscarriage when she was about 23 weeks pregnant, shortly after taking abortion pills.
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McBride then applied for and received a court order in June to access the digital conversations of the mother and daughter, seizing six smartphones and seven laptops and forcing Facebook to hand over the chats between them.
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Those alleged conversations, published in court documents seen by NBC News, show a user named Jessica telling a user named Celeste about
"What I ordered last month"
and instructing her to take two pills 24 hours apart.
The Norfolk Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
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Facebook stores most user information in plain text on its servers, which means the company can access it if forced to do so by court order.
The company routinely complies with requests from security forces.
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
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Facebook Messenger offers end-to-end encryption, which means that chats between two users will only be visible on the users' phones, and cannot be read by Facebook or any government entity that makes a legal request to the company.
But that option is only available to people using the Messenger app on a mobile device, and messages are only encrypted after they select the option to mark a chat as "secret."
"I know from my prior training and experience, and from conversations with other experienced criminal investigators, that people involved in criminal activity frequently have conversations about their criminal activities through various social networking sites, namely Facebook," McBride said. in your court order application.
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Prosecutors charged Jessica Burgess with three felony and two misdemeanor counts and Celeste Burgess with one felony and two misdemeanor counts.
All the charges related to performing an abortion, concealing a dead body and providing false information.
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Wade
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Elizabeth Nash, a state policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that advocates reproductive rights policy, said the Supreme Court's decision in June to overturn Roe v.
Wade likely did not change the legal ability of Nebraska law enforcement to bring charges, as the state has not changed its law since then and the case began in April.
But it is the kind of case abortion law experts hope to see more of in a post-Roe world, he added.
"The police could have decided not to charge them, but it appears 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 expect to the Dobbs decision and the states that ban abortion.”
Jake Laperruque, deputy director of surveillance at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a think tank that promotes digital rights, said tech companies that store information in plain text about users who intend to have abortions will likely continue to receive court orders as they more states prosecute abortion-related crimes.
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"This is going to continue to happen with technology companies that store significant amounts of communications and data," insisted Laperruque.
"If companies don't want to end up repeatedly handing over data for abortion research, they need to rethink their data collection, storage and encryption practices," he said.
