Kate Bertash
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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But we know what kind of threats face people facing abortions and those who help them because unfortunately, a lot of these threats have been happening for the last Several decades, people have been prosecuted for suspicion of ending their own pregnancies.
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We get a lot of really incredible and insightful data from organizations like If, When, How, who put out these reports that are called self-care criminalized. And they look backwards across all of the different cases that have happened in this space. And try to come up with sort of like these key aspects.
Behind the Bastards
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And one of the big things that we know that I'm sure we're going to talk about a lot through this episode is that the core way that people come to the attention of law enforcement for seeking to allegedly end their own pregnancies is through usually someone they know. reporting them or someone responsible for their care.
Behind the Bastards
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So that might be like healthcare workers, social worker, other representative agents of the state. And it can be really devastating to kind of hear and I think internalize that it's often people's family members, like ex or friends, neighbor who might turn somebody in expecting or misunderstanding that it is a crime to end your own pregnancy.
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I think one of the things that's really hard about this is that it involves some of the ways in which like, I guess it's what you would call very unfortunately typical policing practices, the way in which people's like rights are violated when they are interrogated, when they are pressured into disclosing information.
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There's something called a consent search that unfortunately ends up being a very common feature of these kinds of cases, which is where you're put in a room and you're talking to a representative agent of state or a police officer, and they sort of pressure you into agreeing to unlock and disclose often your phone and other device or to otherwise share information, quote unquote, voluntarily.
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And it's easy to see why people kind of get pressured into that. So That is something that tends to happen in many kinds of prosecutions of crimes or alleged crimes. And I think it's hard for a lot of people to imagine what that's like to, you know, be pulled over and searched in this way. Or like they're often like people are not the targeted victims of something like stop and frisk.
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And so it's sort of hard to imagine in your mind the way in which somebody's information or their data or, you know, their case comes to the attention of law enforcement.
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And so we like tend to then imagine these other threats that feel perhaps closer to our daily experience, especially as like often people who are not racially targeted by police, who are not targeted by the family policing system or have their pregnancies surveilled by the hospital systems.
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So people like to imagine then that, I think a big one that we all hear and I think we're all going to take a deep breath at the same time is period tracking apps. I thought it was kind of remarkable. That's crystal. I'm sure you hear this too. And I would love to leave space crystal for you to add any context to sort of like the threats that are, that are present versus stuff that people imagine.
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Yeah, I think one of the really tough things, right, is that like, so like neither I or Crystal are attorneys, but often people are just getting a lot of advice from attorneys.
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And some of our work here is to make sure that like when you get sort of this idea of when something might be criminalized or often like in this circumstance where we just like don't know actually how it's going to show up a lot yet. We're trying to think about sort of what are the ways we can have our digital devices and our technology sort of support us with these by default strategies.
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type of settings. One of the things that's really tough to, I think, understand until you've been through it is sort of like what it looks like when you go through any kind of investigation. I think the
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other hard kind of like context to get from the way we talk about it now is that a lot of how pregnancy is criminalized, that sort of scaffolding, that infrastructure was built during the drug war. So one of the most common kinds of pregnancy criminalization in America is drug testing people who are pregnant or come to give birth without their consent. And, you know, so we basically consider like
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being an alleged drug user to be the the sort of like primary way that our decision of like how much the digital evidence matters has like kind of come to take shape so often when an investigation is happening the police will look for where are all the sources of information i can find about this because like the human body is like not super compliant with like digital forensic evidence evidentiary processes i think it's like one of the most magical things about humans is that you know our bodies defy the letter of law in in so many wonderful ways
Behind the Bastards
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But that means that they sort of have to then go to this like digital body of evidence to kind of tell the story or as like all the wonderful lawyers that advise us like to say to sort of like be able to draw the dots or the lines between the dots and form this kind of like coherent set of facts of what happened between one moment to the next.
Behind the Bastards
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So often when we're like imagining all of the data that like lives in our phone, because unfortunately in many cases, when you are perhaps coerced into consenting to the search of a device, they will often take your phone and then have you unlock it. It gets plugged into a device that makes clone of the entire drive.
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And then they can sort of, with many different techniques, kind of leisurely look through it for keywords to kind of tell where there might be evidence somewhere on your phone that you, for example, went on the internet, searched for, and purchased abortion medication.
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So yes, like period tracking data might be one portion of that, but unfortunately in all the cases that we've seen, or at least in most of the ones that we're most familiar with, all of that quote unquote plain text data. So where you've just written out in your own unencrypted words into a search bar in the search engine on your phone.
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or you've sent a text message to a very close contact with somebody telling them how you feel about your pregnancy, that you desire to end it, perhaps your plan to buy pills, even the receipt that comes into your inbox. It's not necessary then to go to all these companies and go file for a warrant and get all that information because now it's in just plain text, quote unquote, on your phone.
Behind the Bastards
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And that is far more information than the like abstract information that might come out of a period tracker. So unfortunately, cops don't tend to use these in cases that we've seen because it's quite simply not necessary. That kind of like plain text admission of your state of mind or the statement of your intent has unfortunately been the sort of core evidence that comes up.
Behind the Bastards
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And I think this has like a lot of like really quite sad implications. I know in prior to prepare for this episode, we were discussing a couple of cases that I know folks might be more familiar with.
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A big one that came up is, you know, the case of a mother and daughter out of Nebraska who were having a discussion around allegedly helping the daughter to find an end for her pregnancy over Meta's Facebook Messenger.
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And I think what I find really quite devastating about it for many reasons is that these messages were actually ones that like I think any of us could hope to have with a very supportive parent or other person in our life is like why we have, you know, these conversations so that we can like feel connected and supported through such a complex and affecting process.
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It then becomes very sad to me that it becomes a criminal matter just because it was in a place that that conversation, Meta did not have this family's back in terms of encrypting those messages or ensuring that they were free to speak of what they wish when they wish by default.
Behind the Bastards
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So I think when we start to give out advice, it's been important for us at Digital Defense Fund to kind of work backwards. I know it's been an existential crisis, I think, for everybody in the digital security space to know that the list of advice I could give you
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on how to protect yourself when going through these transactions or when seeking support or just having normal questions and going on the internet and being able to Google them and get them answered. that we have to kind of like start from the basics because like you have the right to find information from reliable resources. You have the right to buy pills from a reliable source.
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You have the right to like seek that kind of connection and support from people in your life. And so we're trying to cut down on like all the infinite amount of advice that we could give and try to like narrow it to like what is actionable, what has the greatest impact potentially in the cases we've seen.
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And I know we're going to dig into it, but I would love to leave room to talk a little bit more about that whenever it's a good time in this conversation to go through our top three action items.
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I would say that's exactly right. I think I had a good friend who works in another area of security who, and this is like how we learn these things, right, is that folks who work in the parts of security that deal with, for example, intimate partner violence or the sort of quote unquote in-household surveillance threat model, I think is vastly underestimated.
Behind the Bastards
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I can't recall the figures at the moment, but one of those more recent reports from If, When, How actually had detailed just how frequently actually that sort of like How it is also this like intimate partner violence situation that comes up also in a pregnancy or abortion criminalization case.
Behind the Bastards
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And so, you know, this person challenged me to think about the exact threat model of the unlocked iPad on the family coffee table. And thinking about like when we... share information and we share devices kind of like where does it go?
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So like actually our first piece of recommendation that we often give is it can sound deceptively simple and it doesn't sound technical at all, but it is to think about like who you are telling about your experience And about like, you know, your abortion or wanting to have an abortion and then understand whether you've like been clear about your boundaries.
Behind the Bastards
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Like, do you expect them to not share or tell with others? Like, can you delete any messages with them? Would they ask if you ask them after the fact to delete things for you? Would they absolutely do that? I think it can be really challenging to kind of like zoom out and realize like, you know.
Behind the Bastards
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it's often not as easy as it sounds to like kind of do this mental inventory and think about all the different ways that like me and my best friend talk or, you know, when I mentioned things to people offhand, we don't have a really good, I think like social practice of, you know, understanding the implication of like sharing other people's information without their permission.
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And so like, you know, it's, very impactful but also very difficult and it can't be very individual for all of us to kind of think more carefully about with whom we share things and how we ask people to keep our confidence and how we can even offer each other the ability to like delete things that we don't want to exist indefinitely.
Behind the Bastards
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I think one of the biggest sort of existential struggles that that crosses over to where people get support for abortions from like organizations also includes the fact that I know has been discussed many times on this podcast that there is a difference in how much information is kept depending on where you were having a conversation on your phone.
Behind the Bastards
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So an SMS text message, those little green bubbles that go back and forth between you and possibly other people who are on iOS and Android combination conversation, your friends with an Android might have a green bubble come back to you. That basically means that that is going as an SMS text message to your phone carrier.
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And that means that it's going, quote unquote, in plain text, totally unencrypted to the cell tower. And it's being held by that phone carrier, unencrypted, readable as it is, as you typed it in, as far as we know, forever. It can vary depending on whether or not you move to a different carrier.
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But unfortunately, phone carriers have a very long history also of disclosing that information readily on request, either from law enforcement or from other agencies. And I think that it's troubling. I think like no person would really like to know that regardless of what you intend to do with your text messages.
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But it's why we often then encourage people as like sort of a second step to try and use encrypted chat with Signal or another trusted and encrypted chat. Again, sounds overly simplistic, but I think having those disappearing messages on
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especially between people who are seeking support from one another, whether it's somebody in your life or another organization that's helping you to get your abortion, there really is something to that ability to, again, speak freely, to be best friends, helping your friends, you know, allegedly get abortion medication or to being a mom, you know, there to support your child no matter what.
Behind the Bastards
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I think it's just something really wonderful about how using disappearing messages with Signal like reflects the values that we actually have already with each other and just like make sure that technology companies or corporations or law enforcement don't get to get in the way of how we want to live our lives. So, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Well, and like I bet people like, you know, when you talk to people like you're often I imagine one of the first people that they're expressing themselves to at all about what they're going through. And, you know, I know that the point is to help people get to their procedure, but often they're bringing a lot of other things. things with them and they're not sure if they're important.
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I remember you mentioning this, but just the amount of weight that is for y'all as a sport too.
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Yes. And I think it was from our peers at M&A Hotline. And then I know the other hotline that if you have questions also, the Repro Legal Hotline is a wonderful resource that I know in all the show notes will include these. We try to include along with the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline. So you have folks you can call who are professionals to ask about medical questions.
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You have folks you can call who can answer questions about legal questions about your abortion or pregnancy experience. I know that it's really hard because often when folks are in a hospital setting, we're sort of socialized to disclose everything. You know, we want to tell our doctor what's wrong and tell them everything we took. And, you know, you worry it might be relevant.
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But I was reassured, I think, by many other professionals in this space that doctors treat based on the symptoms that you present with, regardless of how they got there. You might be in a position where you don't know.
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So, you know, if you just tell folks what's going on with your body, what you are seeing, what you're feeling and experiencing, it is their job to treat you regardless of what you choose to share. And I would say that that's actually true regardless of what healthcare condition you come into the ER with. It is your right to only disclose as much as you feel safe doing so.
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So I think like that was something that I know, again, we're not used to thinking about that as like a digital security measure, but it is an information security measure and I think an operational security measure.
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that, you know, we've had to like then realize that that's actually probably almost more important to tell people before we start getting into this nitty gritty of like things to do with your phone is to understand that those principles that we believe that, you know, the human, again, the human body is very varied in how it experiences something like pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion.
Behind the Bastards
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And that, you know, folks have a responsibility to treat you regardless of, you know, what's in your phone or what happened before that, or this like statement of facts that are relevant to a courtroom and not to your care. So, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, just kind of like one more piece. It's kind of our last piece of the puzzle. So, you know, just to reiterate, because I know it's good to hear things repeated again. You know, with the actual kind of pregnancy criminalization digital security advice, we talk about understanding who you're disclosing stuff to, making sure they are clear on your expectations.
Behind the Bastards
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Try to, if you can, have conversations with them. in a secure place or a private place, like signal with disappearing messages on. For our second item, we're going to make a plan for if we need to get care after the fact and ensure that we're trying to, again, have our support people also understand that doctors treat you based on the symptoms you present with.
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You don't have to tell them anything that you do not wish to disclose.
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And the third thing is that something that I think as digital security practitioners we kind of forget is super important, which is that, like, you know, I think I run into this conflict where as, like, experts or smart people, we try to, like, imagine in our mind, like, how we would have this perfectly, like, footprint-free abortion.
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You know, like, just, like, use Signal, use Tor, use Bitcoin, kind of, like… strange way of architecting privacy in our mind. And I call it the ghost abortion, like that it's a myth. You can't have one. There's no such thing as an abortion that leaves no footprint. But I think we forget then that it actually is super meaningful to delete what's within our power to delete.
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So our third recommendation for folks is to, like, be aware of what's collected and then ensure that you know that you can delete your browser history. You can delete your Google Maps history from, like, driving to the clinic. You can delete your emails. You can delete messages on certain platforms. And I think just, like, understanding that deleting what you can is actually super meaningful.
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I actually didn't know until I got this job that certain platforms, like, Even Google products, like if you delete something from it, it is purged from the servers like something like two and a half months later. So when you delete stuff, it's very meaningful. I think you get more options than ever to decide like how long you want to keep something.
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And it does make it so that that primary thing we talked about, like if somebody were to take my phone,
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from me and to like you know make a clone of it and try to look through it at least it's deleted that copy is no longer on my device even if they would have to go to like you know get a warrant later that is still great it still gives me and my council time to respond and also allows me to access my right to do process and i think so like these are like these three simple things i know that we'll give to link uh that our guide that kind of puts this all in a row in very plain language um we also have a spanish language guide for it as well but just to know that like
Behind the Bastards
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These things are within our power. I think it's really easy to get tangled up in the idea of abstract data and things that are really tough for us to always know when they're generated, like ad tracker data or who is reselling or doing something with my period tracking apps. There are great options that are local only to your phone, like Yuki app, if you are connected. concerned about that.
Behind the Bastards
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Other apps, seeing whether or not they use best practices security, if they've responded and said like how they would respond to a legal request, that's awesome. I think that just sort of taking that uncertainty away is great because tracking your period is really important.
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As Crystal would tell you, it is an essential way that you're going to know how pregnant you are and find the option that's safest for your circumstance. So yeah, with that, I'll pass it to Crystal for anything else you think our folks should know before we depart.
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Yeah, because you have the right to use safe, accessible, common sense, like amazing technology products to actually obtain the abortion that you want. We really, really do believe that like that part of autonomy, it includes digital autonomy as well as bodily autonomy. They're all part and parcel. You can't have one without the other. So thanks for having us on. Yeah, thanks, Mia.
Behind the Bastards
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Simply do not do this. Exactly. And, you know, know no matter what that there are people, again, like Crystal said, who will support you. There are amazing teams across the United States from medical support to legal support were there for you. And they would all, I think, wholeheartedly endorse as do we. Yes, please do not talk to cops. And that's a great note to end on.
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Yes, we got our own backs. We can do this together. Thanks for having us on.
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Excellent. Thanks for having us on. Yeah, thanks for having me.
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Excellent. Thanks so much. Long-time listener, first-time caller, I suppose. So the Digital Defense Fund is an organization that's been around for... Actually, since the last election, it was started in response to Trump winning for the first time.
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And we're an organization that was put together to provide free digital security and technology resources for the front lines of what then was just the abortion access movement. We've since moved to support other variety of autonomy and liberation movements. But we provide free digital security evaluations, trainings. We do a lot of project management work to help people set up
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what they'd like to change about their systems and security. And we also help people pay for it, which is a really wonderful way to get to kind of see through our values. So I'm excited to be on here today to talk a little bit more about the implications for both organizations and individuals.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I think it's a great time anytime this happens to sort of get to ask and answer the question, which is like, how do we know? And I think we're sort of lucky in this way that we know what are likely to be risks now to both people who are seeking abortions, as well as people who help them get there, folks as well like Crystal, who I know will provide some additional color to this as well.