The details are chilling. Police raiding a home, a teenager and her mother arrested, fetal remains exhumed from a rural burial plot. When police dragged off a 17-year-old Nebraska girl and charged her and her mother with self-administering a miscarriage, they were armed with damning documents they could only access through the incompetence and cooperation of Meta.
The intimate conversation between a mother and daughter in the days surrounding an alleged abortion was just one of the millions logged by Facebook every day, but for this family it will be devastating. After police obtained a warrant for the girl’s Facebook data, they used the information the company provided to apply for a second search warrant to raid her home. The application for that warrant included quotes from the pair’s Messenger conversation, such as “Are we starting it today?” and “Ya the 1 pill stops the hormones…u gotta wait 24 HR 2 take the other.” Perhaps most damning of all, the closing remark: “remember we burn the evidence.”
Search warrants require probable cause, particularized evidence to show that law enforcement will be able to obtain even more evidence at the place being searched. In this case,
— source wired.com | Albert Fox Cahn | Aug 10, 2022