Nebraska case: why end-to-end encryption is at the center of the debates

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By participating in an investigation, Facebook helped charge a 17-year-old American woman with illegal abortion. But when it came to encrypted communications, the young Ella wouldn’t have had so much trouble.

On August 11, Facebook announced that its Messenger messaging solution would adopt end-to-end communication encryption by default. Already active since 2016, this feature still has to be activated manually by each user.

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The announcement comes just days after media coverage of a case in which Facebook turned over the chat history of a 17-year-old girl to Nebraska police. Celeste Burgess was accused of hiding the body of her stillborn child. But analysis of her Facebook data revealed that it was actually an illegal abortion.

Meta would not have had access to women’s exchanges

The participation of the social network in the investigation intervened only after the presentation of a search warrant. Facebook thus provided the authorities with data about Celeste Brugess, including, among others, information about her account, images, audio and video recordings, as well as private messages.

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Had Messenger applied its default encryption feature by default, the company would not have had access to the 17-year-old’s trades. Unlike apps like Whatsapp or Signal, Meta was thus able to broadcast Celeste Burgess’s message history.

In this specific case, end-to-end encryption would not have allowed the young woman to escape justice. At the beginning of the investigation, she was accused of having cremated and made the body of her stillborn child disappear. But it is the elements provided by Facebook that have provoked the accusations of illegal abortion.

The danger of mountains of accumulated data

This case, therefore, revives the debate on the protection of personal data and the end-to-end encryption of communications. Many fear new similar cases. Following the decision of the United States Supreme Court to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, women’s rights activists warned of the danger posed by the mountains of data that technology companies accumulate about their users.

In the Nebraska abortion case, police asked the judge to order Meta not notify Celeste Burgess of the search warrant for her Facebook posts, citing the risk of “destruction or alteration of evidence.”

Women’s rights activists recommend the use of encrypted messaging so that they cannot be blamed for their communications. “If users were using encrypted messages, Meta wouldn’t even be able to share conversations,” Caitlin Seeley George, of the NGO Fight for the Future, told AFP.

Author: pierre monnier
Source: BFM TV

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