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Abstract

In a post-Roe America, abortion-rights activists are scrambling to protect reproductive rights. Communication on open social media platforms like Facebook can now be used to prosecute those seeking an illegal abortion in a frightening entanglement of technology corporations and the state. Building on surveillance studies and feminist scholarship, we analyze 22 interviews with pro- and anti-abortion activists and pro-encryption activists to answer: How will encrypted messaging apps be relevant for pro- and anti-abortion activists post-Roe? We find that while encrypted messaging apps are used by activists on either side of the abortion debate, their motivations for use range from mere convenience to supplanting state and corporate surveillance. We thus argue that encryption can act as a feminist tool to usurp patriarchal surveillance but must be used in combination with a holistic privacy framework. This framework may include care-motivated, community-centered, relational surveillance.

Keywords

abortion encryption privacy gender qualitative methods surveillance

This article is part of a special theme on Digital Resignation and Privacy Cynicism. To see a full list of all articles in this special theme, please click here: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/bds/digitalresignationandprivacycynicism

Weirdly, there are a lot of similarities between encryption and abortion. Encryption is a standard cybersecurity measure, just like abortion is a standard medical procedure. Encryption is just one component of a comprehensive data privacy and security program, just like abortion is just one component of reproductive health care. They both save lives. They both support human dignity. They’re both deeply bound up with the right to autonomy privacy [sic], no matter what a hard-right Supreme Court says. (Pfefferkorn, 2022: 2)

In a piece following the leak of the draft opinion that would eventually overturn Roe v. Wade, Pfefferkorn (2022) outlined the ideological connections between abortion and encryption, and why, now that Roe has been overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, US society must fight even harder for the right to have a space free from corporate and government surveillance, that is, encrypted messaging apps (EMAs) like WhatsApp and Signal. She argues that encryption and abortion are both privacy rights and, given this, any attempt to build a so-called “backdoor” into an EMA (for law enforcement or other oversight purposes) constitutes a threat to that privacy. Post-Roe, she notes, this threat has become even more evident.

When Roe was overturned on 24 June 2022, eliminating a federal right to abortion in the United States, experts and the general public hurried to make security recommendations related to digital communication and abortion: they recommended deleting period trackers, advised people seeking abortions to leave phones at home, and generally, to use EMAs for communication (Kelly et al., 2022; Page, 2022). It's unclear, however, how many people those recommendations reached. They clearly did not, for instance, reach a Nebraskan 17-year-old girl and her mother, who the police investigated for an abortion in August, seeking to prove intent by using their Facebook Messenger (at the time, an unencrypted app) conversations (Dewan and Frenkel, 2022).¹

People sought abortion information online before Roe was overturned (Dodge et al., 2017). They all but certainly will continue to do so, given the general importance of social media as a communication and information-gathering tool and especially in the face of how politicized abortion has become (Sullivan, 2022). Moreover, because many people do not know someone in person that they can turn to for help, they turn to resources on social media, which are increasingly being used by pro-abortion rights activists to reach those who need help (Azar, 2022; Burbank, 2022; Kitchener, 2022). Because EMAs were recommended so frequently in the days following the overturn of Roe, and because more people are looking for a private means of communication (Nicas et al., 2021), users are likely to use these platforms to discuss abortion. Will EMAs be the new venues for abortion-related speech? What are the potentials and perils of such use? This study explores these questions with an eye toward digital anonymity, data privacy, and both corporate/state and body/technology entanglements.

Literature review

A short history of encryption

Encryption is intricately connected with human rights such as freedom of expression or digital privacy (Hellegren, 2017; Kaye, 2015). Being able to encrypt communications also serves as a powerful mechanism for governments, as well as private actors, to communicate without their adversaries being able to listen in. At its core, encryption—by way of obfuscating the content of messages—“protects the confidentiality and integrity of content against third-party access or manipulation” (Kaye, 2015: 4). Despite—or precisely because of—its technological prowess, the United States is an inhospitable place for encryption, with civil society organizations and security agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) for decades warring over when and under what conditions the state should be able to access encrypted communications, with the NSA in the past having actively undermined encryption (Van Hoboken, 2013).

In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which US government agencies were conducting mass surveillance operations on US persons, sending ripple effects across the world (Bakir, 2015; Hintz and Dencik, 2016; Van Hoboken, 2013). This served as a catalyst for increased interest in encryption as a means of protection from government surveillance and paved the way for technology corporations to push back against the state spying on individuals, for instance, by focusing on end-to-end encryption in platforms’ products (Wizner, 2017). This, however, is just one event in a long history of what is by some referred to and mythologized as the “crypto wars” (i.e. Rider and Revoy, 2022), a term conveying that “security and privacy [are] being in opposition, with the state benefiting from security (surveillance capabilities), and citizens from privacy (encryption)” (Jarvis, 2020: 5).

The latest iteration of the crypto wars is tethered to the US platform liability regime, and discussions around weakening it. Specifically, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 created a carve-out for platforms that host user speech to not become liable through acts of content moderation, incentivizing so-called “good Samaritan” moderation and platforms acting as stewards of user safety (Goldman, 2017; Medeiros, 2017). In 2018, FOSTA-SESTA was signed into law, amending Section 230 for the first time. The bipartisan bill aimed to reduce sex trafficking; its effects to that end, however, could not be confirmed (Jurecic, 2022; U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2021; Wiesner, 2020). Research has shown that the bill instead negatively impacts the financial and physical safety, community, and health of sex workers (Blunt and Wolf, 2020). Scholars expect future bills to be modeled after FOSTA-SESTA, despite there not being evidence of the bill achieving what it set out to do (Jurecic, 2022; Wiesner, 2020). One prominent bill in this vein is the EARN IT Act, with the aim of curbing the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), simultaneously rendering severe concerns for encryption (Hewson and Harrison, 2021; Pfefferkorn, 2020b). As encryption researchers have pointed out, backdoor proposals are ultimately dangerous and cannot be reconciled with strong encryption (Global Encryption Coalition, 2020; Pfefferkorn, 2020a).

Chat apps and end-to-end encryption

Coinciding with the latest stage of the “crypto wars” is the rise of EMAs (Gursky et al., 2022). While some apps are end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) by default (i.e. WhatsApp and Signal), others provide it as an opt-in feature that users need to activate (i.e. Telegram and KakaoTalk). Meta's WhatsApp enjoys the status of the largest chat app in the world, with more than 2 billion users (WhatsApp, 2020). In 2016, the app rolled out E2EE by default to its, at the time, more than 1 billion users (Budington, 2016; Santos and Faure, 2018). E2EE ensures that no one but the sender and the receiver of a message may view its contents, though there are varying levels of metadata stored depending on the platform. Since 2016, Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct have allowed E2EE by opt-in (Greenberg, 2016), thus offering the same level of protection as WhatsApp, but only if both users enable the function. The “trend toward end-to-end encryption” (Kulshrestha and Mayer, 2021: 893) became even more evident when, in 2019, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would bring default E2EE to all its communicative properties (Welch, 2019). Meanwhile, Signal, a non-profit E2EE app, has become popular, with an estimated 40 million users worldwide (Newton, 2021), and has emerged as a de-facto protocol standard that other apps such as WhatsApp rely on (Ermoshina and Musiani, 2019). Given the nature of communications on encrypted chat apps, content moderation looks different than on open social media—after all, a core premise is that platforms cannot see content, which necessitates content-agnostic forms of moderation (Kamara et al., 2021). Political proposals, however, often pit encryption and moderation as categorically precluding one another (Kamara et al., 2021; Mayer, 2019); as Pfefferkorn (2020a) posits, “hyperbolic claims are premised on the misconception that content-dependent techniques such as automated scanning are the only way that providers can counter abuse online” (p. 4).

As abortion is becoming criminalized across large parts of the United States, we expect speech about abortion to be another important battleground, with a synergistic confluence of interests between pro-abortion rights and pro-encryption activism emerging, fighting the concentrated state power and impetus to criminalize, prosecute, and track—including in spaces where content thus far is not accessible to law enforcement. These concerns are already evident: For example, in 2022 the office of Karl Racine, then Washington, D.C. Attorney General, promoted consumer alerts recommending that for sensitive communications about abortion services, people should use E2EE messaging services like Signal (Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, 2022).

A short history of abortion in America

From 1900 to 1973, abortion was illegal in the United States, and thousands of women died every year from illegal abortions (Gould, 2003). Those who survived were criminalized—the medical industry acted as an agent of the state to catch women in the act of illegal abortions (Reagan, 1997). Doctors who did perform abortions, even for the health of the mother, were threatened with the removal of their medical licenses (Dynak et al., 2003). But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, states began to individually legalize abortion given the data on the safety of the procedure and the oppressive climate of fear experienced by doctors. By 1973, the federal right to abortion was granted under Roe v. Wade.

Roe v. Wade survived many challenges until 2020, when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and was replaced by the conservative associate justice Amy Coney Barrett. In 2021, Texas implemented Senate Bill 8 (SB8), which bans abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected (typically around six weeks gestation) through a civil workaround that allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone who aids and abets an abortion. On 2 May 2022, a draft opinion that would overturn Roe leaked. By 24th June of the same year, Roe v. Wade had been overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The end of federal protection for abortion allowed individual states to reinstate or draft laws that limit or ban abortion altogether. As of November 2023, abortion is banned in 14 states, and seven additional states have prohibitive restrictions (The New York Times, 2023).

Most Americans support protecting abortion rights (Hartig, 2022). However, the people who do not are vocal, and often, powerful. The stigma surrounding abortion remains strong (Hanschmidt et al., 2016), and campaigns to fight it such as the social media campaign #ShoutYourAbortion have been coopted by anti-abortion activists (Kosenko et al., 2019). Yet similar strategies exist among pro- and anti-abortion social movements, for instance, in utilizing COVID-19 messaging for the purpose of pushing their respective agendas (Hunt, 2022). Previously, attitudes toward abortion crossed party lines: many Democrats opposed abortion and some Republicans were for it (Sullivan, 2022). Even religion was not a defining issue—Catholics opposed abortion, but Baptists did not. As evangelical Christians began to view abortion as a threat to the nuclear family, and as abortion-rights activists donated more money to Democratic candidates, the issue became hyper-politicized (Sullivan, 2022).

In the past, the anti-abortion movement relied upon gender essentialist narratives (e.g. that all women should be mothers) that cast abortion as an immoral act, surmising both that the fetus is a person and that abortion and even contraception promote promiscuity (di Mauro and Joffe, 2007). However, activists have been adapting messaging to capture “feminists” by claiming that abortion is disempowering to women, because the “abortion industry”² convinces women that they cannot be successful members of society and mothers (Roberti, 2021; Rose, 2011). Even before Roe was overturned, anti-abortion activists and policymakers were successful in creating barriers to abortion in many states, including instituting waiting periods that delay abortions, requiring counseling that includes misleading and even false information, and banning certain types of abortions (Berglas et al., 2017; Joyce et al., 2009). The medical procedure of abortion is safer than pregnancy in the United States (Raymond and Grimes, 2012), and nearly one in four women in the United States will have an abortion (Jones and Jerman, 2017).

The business of surveillance

The people behind social media platforms strive to cultivate narratives which tie platforms to techno-optimistic conceptions of global democracy and connection (Deibert, 2020; Gillespie, 2010). Yet the platform ideology plays a role both in protecting platforms from legal liability and promoting profit while encouraging the public to believe platforms are the new public sphere (Gillespie, 2010). As Deibert (2020) writes, social media's primary goal is in fact to garner and capitalize upon personal information. Surveillance capitalism is “a new logic of accumulation” that “aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control” (Zuboff, 2015: 75). In 2023, this personal information includes “intimate data” about our lives and bodies, including, troublingly, pregnancy data (Citron, 2023).

In general, even people who are well aware of this surveillance feel there's no escape and may take fewer steps to protect their data privacy as a result, which Hoffmann et al. (2016) identify as “privacy cynicism.” Draper and Turow (2019) argue this “digital resignation” is intentionally fostered by corporations and is a natural response to the pervasive surveillance in the big data economy, as well as the public and private spheres. Surveillance capitalism is so entrenched as a business model that people generally struggle to imagine an alternative, thus normalizing its ubiquity (Dencik and Cable, 2017), even in some cases when it comes to reproductive data (McDonald and Andalibi, 2023).

Borradaile and Reeves (2020) point out that surveillance capitalism is at times counterintuitive, in that it even capitalizes upon activities that may be “disadvantageous or ideologically opposed to capitalism itself” (p. 273). EMAs are one such activity, in that they block surveillance by both corporations and the state (Mann, 2013), thus blocking data-driven profit (West, 2022). But while instituting E2EE allows platforms to reject requests for user data from the state, given that they cannot access the data that is protected by E2EE (Santos and Faure, 2018), it also allows platforms to signal to users that they value their privacy and security (which is, in turn, good for their bottom line) (Bakir, 2015; Santos and Faure, 2018).

Feminist perspectives on surveillance

Historically, medical technology has allowed for the surveillance and oppression of women and marginalized people through assisting the state in criminalizing them for illegal abortions and prioritizing the creation of white, wealthy, able-bodied babies at the expense of others (Reagan, 1997; Roberts, 2009; Wajcman, 1991). This mirrors the surveillance technologies of today, which are systemically deployed against people of color and other marginalized groups (Browne, 2015; Joseph, 2015), but used at will by white, wealthy people (Gilliard and Golumbia, 2021). Modern-day surveillance technology remains distinctly gendered, racialized, and classed, with white, women-presenting people being surveilled for purposes of protection by men behind cameras, and (racial, sexual, and class) minorities being surveilled as potential criminals (Koskela, 2012; Magnet, 2011).

Yet surveillance may be motivated by care, rather than control, as when it is enacted upon family members by one another (Abu-Laban, 2015). West (2022) argues that encryption can allow for communities of care—free from state and corporate surveillance—to look out for those within a community. This surveillance is fundamentally different from that enacted by platforms and the state over users and citizens, respectively. Despite each type of surveillance reducing the privacy of those it is enacted upon, such surveillance within communities would be, in its ideal form, care-motivated, beneficial, and relational, in that it limits privacy for the sake of mutual protection (Abu-Laban, 2015; West, 2022). Antithetically, dataveillance—“the monitoring of citizens on the basis of their online data”—whether enacted by platforms or the state, is motivated by profit and control, rather than care (Van Dijck, 2014: 205; Zuboff, 2015). Scholars have even argued that platforms are “allied with the patriarchal order” through profiting off of the labor and data of users (Han, 2022: 3).

It is only now, in a post-Roe America, that white women are beginning to be concerned over the criminalization creep enacted by surveillance technologies (Devega, 2022). They are frightened of a surveillance police state that marginalized people have long been painfully aware of (Eubanks, 2018). Despite the normalization of ubiquitous surveillance in the US (Turow et al., 2023) and other countries (Dencik and Cable, 2017), people who can get pregnant are negotiating privacy and technology use in post-Roe America (McDonald and Andalibi, 2023). The concern that medical doctors might turn an abortion-seeker in has lessened, in favor of fears of Facebook messages, period trackers, and other technologies that entangle state and corporate surveillance. While EMAs may resist corporate and state surveillance, they do not necessarily resist person-to-person surveillance, given that they are often used for communication between known groups and community members (Riedl et al., 2022). We thus ask: What role does encryption play for people in the abortion movement post-Dobbs?

Method

Data collection

Our interview pool consisted of nine anti-abortion activists, 10 pro-abortion rights activists, and three pro-encryption activists. The interviewees ranged in age from 22 to 57, with an average age of 32.³ The majority of interviewees were white, with one interviewee identifying as Black, one as multicultural, one as Chinese-American, one as German/Native-American, and two declining to answer.

We began our outreach by seeking out prominent activists on either side of the abortion debate—those who work in the abortion sphere. From there, we snowball-sampled to access more hidden populations (Noy, 2008) of individual activists, especially those that are engaging in potentially criminal or legally risky activity. This resulted in a heterogeneous pool of activists that ranged from individuals, to members of small, community-organized groups, to representatives of organizations with chapters in many states across the United States. We did not interview people actively seeking abortions in order to protect their safety and security. We conducted interviews with pro-encryption activists to ascertain the current use of EMAs by those outside of the abortion sphere. We stopped interview outreach once we had attained data saturation, in that we were hearing the same findings regularly in interviews. All interviewees were pseudonymized for their protection unless they specifically requested to use their real names. Those interviewees, too, are identified only by first name to protect the anonymity of all participants equally, and identifying information was stored separately from data, each in encrypted locations. All interviews were conducted online between August 2022 and December 2022, lasted between 30 min and 1 h, and were semi-structured, in that the authors prepared a common set of questions for all interviewees, while still allowing for emergent questions in the flow of the conversation, based on individual experiences of research participants. Geographical information was not collected in order to protect participants who may be in states in which they could face criminalization for their activism. All interviewees gave informed verbal consent. IRB approval for this study was granted on 10 June 2022.

Data analysis

Utilizing interview transcripts, two authors engaged in grounded theory analysis of the interview data (Strauss & Corbin, 1997). Although we were guided by the idea that being pro-encryption and being pro-abortion rights have similar ideological underpinnings, to the best of our ability, we did not allow that to influence our interpretation of the data. We engaged in open coding in which we identified pertinent findings, axial coding in which we grouped those findings into subthemes, and selective coding in which we collapsed those subthemes into four overarching themes (Strauss and Corbin, 1997). The themes of “safety and security,” “convenience,” “coordination,” and “authenticity and fear” describe activists’ use and perception of EMAs.

Findings

Safety and security

Our research demonstrated that EMAs like Signal and WhatsApp are used precisely because they allow for secure communications shielded from law enforcement and corporate surveillance. Participants described the important role that encryption played for their communications, while acknowledging that safety is contextually dependent, and part of a multifaceted security calculus of which EMAs are only one component.

Why people use EMAs

The Dobbs decision loomed large in our interview data. Pro-abortion rights activists suggested they were concerned about ever-more surveillance in post-Roe America. Lily, for example, said she was anxious “particularly with more and more restrictive laws,” and Jane anticipated that after the US midterm elections, it may “become so Draconian that we don’t even know how to navigate it anymore.” When interviewees were reflecting on their motivations for using or recommending encrypted messaging platforms such as Signal, the reasons were manifold. One pro-abortion rights interviewee, Cathy, said that “it's really hard to have faith in a justice system that criminalized my body,” which is why she thought it was “a really good idea for activists to use Signal.” Danielle used the app to protect a friend who was an abortion provider, stating about the friend that “security is a huge issue for her.” Aside from questions of trust, EMAs were lauded by pro-abortion rights activists for their ability to obfuscate documentation. AJ said: “I don’t know if encrypted messages will save people from being arrested and charged … but it will definitely make it harder for the police to get the proof needed to convict them.” And Eden insinuated that using Signal was a means to evade police, “because our messages cannot get handed over in case we are at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Encrypted ephemerality

Among users of EMAs, the possibility to communicate in ways that would not leave any traces was seen as important, with interviewees suggesting that the combination of encryption and disappearing messages was particularly potent. This was succinctly expressed by the encryption activist Dottie, who said: “I think encryption combined with disappearing messages is essential on messaging apps … to make it less likely for … messages … to be used as incriminating evidence in cases.” Abortion-rights activist Ratna said that “there's relief in knowing that it's like an actual conversation in a way. You can share useful information, but then it's gone … nobody recorded it.” Danielle explained how, when she joined her activist organization, it had been an organization-wide directive to use EMAs: “I just know that they said: Hey, we’re all downloading Signal,” specifically, as she explained, because it was encrypted, and she and her colleagues could switch on auto-delete for messages. AJ contemplated the Nebraska Facebook case mentioned earlier and pointed out that chat apps could provide helpful information for law enforcement to assess whether someone wanted to get an abortion, but that “if people are using something like Signal and disappearing messages, it's going to be harder to prove the intent.” Jane, whose security recommendations primarily focused on communicating in a manner that would reduce the amount of permissible evidence in potential court cases, emphasized that using EMAs alone cannot be used against someone as an incriminating factor. She suggested that “just the fact that you’re using those things [EMAs] isn’t proof that you're doing anything illegal, because there's no content to come with it to prove either way.”

Law enforcement trying to access EMAs

While interviewees in this study explicitly stated that they would use “Signal to vent in a safe space … where we won’t get in trouble for bouncing crazy ideas off each other,” encryption experts we spoke with fervently pushed against the narrative that an encryption-compromising middle path that would allow backdoors for police but still provide security for users was technically possible. AJ said that “like [with] any backdoor, whoever is in power gets to decide who uses that.” By a similar token, Elaine said that “as soon as you build something that can be exploited, it will be exploited.” On the other side of the spectrum were anti-abortion activists who explained that they had difficulties squaring away their professed support for the First Amendment and when they would want law enforcement to gain access. Blake said, “I’m not a privacy hawk but sometimes I think that the cops need to get into people's phones because they’re doing really bad stuff on them.” Pro-abortion rights activist Lily suggested that law enforcement should be able to gain access “in extremely limited circumstances.” A pro-abortion rights participant, Cathy, pointed out how policing in encrypted spaces was misdirected—and ultimately an “effort into policing and controlling women's bodies and not protecting us.”

Recommendations for security

Though strikingly simple, one compelling recommendation that Danielle gave was “don’t talk about doing crimes,” as “everybody is watching.” Sky reflected on a phase immediately following the overturn of the Roe decision, when many people on X (then Twitter) had suggested that they would offer up space in their gardens for people seeking out “camping,” a stand-in and code for people seeking abortions out-of-state who needed refuge (Sung and Goggin, 2022): “I’m 100% sure someone has scraped all of those camping tweets, and I don’t know if anything will happen with that. But it's not a good code if everyone's using it … it loses its power when it can be identified by the police.” While these statements pertain to open social media platforms like Facebook and X, another participant, Blake, revealed that people he knew who had used Signal were imprisoned: “I know people who are in jail who organized on Signal and other similar things. … It makes you less safe to say: ‘Okay, well here is my app that I’m gonna do all of my illegal things on.’ I’m like, all right. That's exactly the app I’m opening when I’m the police.” Other people's recommendations included staggered approaches to platforms, with larger circles of people using Slack, but offering up encrypted channels to more at-risk community members: “they are also given the option to not use Slack because it's not encrypted … because we do have people in the group who, if it came out that they attended meetings, could lose their jobs.”

Convenience

Although EMAs are touted as secure forms of communication that keep the government and corporations alike from surveilling messages, some people use them simply because they are more convenient than other forms of communication. Signal can mitigate the interoperability issues that arise in big group texts between people with different hardware, it's free, and people find it well-designed.

Sky, a pro-encryption activist, said, “I use Signal for most of my communications in general. It's just a better-designed app than iMessage, which I think is a great selling point for it. You can lock a voice memo [meaning you do not have to continuously hold the button to record]. You can react with any emoji you like.” For Sky, security matters, but there are benefits to using Signal that go beyond its enhanced security features. Elaine said she started using Signal because everyone at her workplace used it: “They were like, ‘use Signal. Everybody here uses Signal. That's what you should get. It's like social media.’” After she left that job, she kept using it for a combination of security and design reasons: “I also find it to be really well-designed. … I both enjoy using it more and trust it slightly more than WhatsApp.” Some pro-abortion rights activists were unaware of why their organizations used EMAs but joined into the existing infrastructure. “I actually had no idea what Signal was … until a few months ago,” Lane said, “so I really have no idea why [my activist group] chose that. It might have just been the fact that the user interface was easier to use.”

One pro-abortion rights activist, Ratna, said she thinks of Signal as “a repository of information.” Although she was very concerned about security (to the point that she never gave us her real name, as her group has been condemned by some as a terrorist organization), she did not delete all of her Signal chats, but maintained many groups for different purposes, which have different settings depending on the threat model of the people in the group and the associated conversation. For instance, she said of protest-planning:

There's dozens of chats … It seems like it's messy but it's pretty straightforward. It's all in Signal and it's easier than communicating by phone or email. If it's only people that you know in real life, then those chats actually not having disappearing messages is super convenient … It's become kind of a repository of my activist information just within that app.

Anti-abortion activists, too, use EMAs for ease of communication, even when they are not concerned about security. Phoebe, for instance, said that having a big group chat with a ton of people for coordinating protests and other activists is just easier on WhatsApp than on iMessage. Kat, like Lane, was unsure why her organization used Signal. “Something tells me, because we’re a nonprofit, that we use the platforms that we do because they’re free,” she said. Plus, “it's easier to manage … not everyone has an iPhone.”

Coordination

Our research also showed how both anti-abortion activists and pro-abortion rights activists use EMAs for coordinating activities such as protest organizing or sharing information within organizations.

Although Cathy said the protests she was involved in were “really family safe” and “always law-abiding,” she also acknowledged communicating “with other activists that are on different paths,” who would “take more extreme action” on Signal. Eden described how disappearing messages were important for organizing events: “once we’re done, we’ll delete it so basically there won’t be any traces of: ‘Oh, this was a planned event’, or whatever charges they can try to drum you up on.” In protest or event coordination, using EMAs alone was not seen as a magic bullet, but instead was combined with other security mechanisms such as Lane suggesting that “we don’t put any information on Slack that has to do with the meeting location or the meeting times,” or Kat, who said that “we don’t really talk about anything that would put ourselves in hot water, so to speak.” Eden highlighted that at times, the coordination is banal: “What do we need to bring? … Did you all pitch in for the Airbnb? Who's got snacks?”

While people on both sides of the issue described to us their use of EMAs in organizing, anti-abortion activist Lauren pointed out that the scale of where EMAs were useful was not evenly balanced, and that pro-abortion rights activists would need them more: “The pro-abortion side, I feel, has more to be afraid of mass surveillance and their use of Signal and vanishing messages.” Abortion rights activist Ratna described to us that Signal played a role in “getting referrals to abortion information,” and that—aside from activism—there were also whistleblower hotlines on Signal, that is, chats meant for sharing threatening information that can later be reported to the FBI. Aside from protest coordination, participants also described how EMAs were used to communicate about sending abortion pills across state lines. One interviewee, Faith, confirmed having seen people sending pills and talking about it through EMAs. A security expert, Jane, suggested that indeed, Signal would be advisable for communications about such potentially incriminating matters, but “talking to somebody over the phone would probably be preferable, just because those phone records are really hard to get.”

Authenticity and fear

There were several reasons that interviewees did not use, or even refused to use, EMAs. They expressed that they had no need for EMAs because they were genuinely being themselves online—and using EMAs to be secretive, for these individuals, represented inauthenticity. Others did not use EMAs because they did not believe that end-to-end encryption kept the government or corporations from seeing their messages, making EMAs no more useful than any other digital communication tool. A through-line in both of these reasons for lack of use is a lack of digital literacy. People on both sides of abortion activism were unclear on the functionality of and thus did not trust end-to-end encryption. However, some folks were aware of EMAs and the security they afford, but engaged in different, or additional, strategies to mitigate their risk of surveillance.

EMAs as inauthentic

The idea that EMAs are only useful if you have something to hide emerged among pro- and anti-abortion interviewees but was more concentrated among anti-abortion folks. Lauren, who had been arrested by the FBI in the past for conducting “rescues” of fetuses of people seeking abortions by blocking the entrance to abortion facilities, said, “I’m not ashamed of my actions. I am very proud of my actions, and I believe I show consistency of character, and I just have to keep going forward.” She was very aware of what she called the “hyper-surveillance state:” “They’re watching my emails…constantly watching everything we’re doing.” Perplexingly, this surveillance still did not entice EMAs to her. As she said, “I just take the approach … to be bold, and unashamed. And I don’t particularly have really anything to hide.” Being transparent in her activism and communication was a source of pride for Lauren, and using EMAs would be a refutation of something that she considered to be integral to her identity—authenticity, strength, and courage. Mary-Ellen, an anti-abortion doctor, reiterated this connection between identity and not using EMAs: “I will have to say, as a peacemaker at heart, and someone who always thinks the best in other people…I don’t [use EMAs]. I am such a bridge builder. … I just kind of present myself as I am.” Another anti-abortion activist connected this to religion: “People ask me, ‘Why are you not fearful? Why are you not scared? They’re going to punch you or even stab you’ and I was like, ‘Well, I know God's on my side, so I shouldn’t be afraid.’”

Some interviewees did not use EMAs because of both authenticity concerns and a lack of digital literacy. One interviewee said that secure communication was “super important” to her, but her organization relied primarily on Discord, which uses encryption in transit, but not end-to-end encryption, meaning that the data is accessible to Discord and thus, also to law enforcement. Still, she said, “I’m usually a very open person” so she felt she had no personal use for EMAs, only organizational use. She conflated transparency and authenticity with a lack of concern for messages being shared with law enforcement or corporations.

Contextual safety and a false sense of security

While some participants strongly believed in the utility of EMAs, others had their doubts, mixed with a degree of skepticism that end-to-end encryption would truly shield from law enforcement obtaining communications. We heard this particularly from anti-abortion activists. Lauren said, “I do think the police can get in like that.” Blake suggested that “it fosters an incorrect security in people” who assume that “because it's encrypted, you can just do illegal things on there and talk about doing illegal things, and you won’t ever get caught.” Mary-Ellen said, “I have very little trust when you say the government can’t see in … It seems like … they can access just about anything they want to.” Also alluding to the notion of a “false sense of security,” pro-abortion rights interviewee Faith pointed out how EMA use was only as safe as the people with whom one communicated. She said: “Your messages are only as private as the people you share them with.” And AJ said that “if your partner is not trustworthy and they have access to your phone, it doesn’t matter if it's encrypted … you have to think about the security tactics holistically.”

We spoke to three pro-abortion rights activists who were so concerned about security that they would only communicate over Instagram, but still stated that they do not use EMAs. Instead, one relied on an “anonymous” Instagram account, on which she did not share any personal information. About Instagram, though, Faith, said: “If things change in my state or federally, I’ll have to find another platform.” This perspective—of not switching platforms yet but considering it—was more common amongst pro-abortion rights activists who do not use EMAs: one activist, who at the time of interviewing lived in an abortion-supportive state, said she did not rely on EMAs yet, but was researching the most secure ways to call people without a transcript of the conversation being stored. These activists were still concerned about security, safety, and government/corporate surveillance, but they utilized different strategies to mitigate their risk depending on their respective threat models. Some of these strategies are nontechnical security tactics—using code words and using code names—or technical solutions like sending voice notes or staying completely anonymous on platforms that do not offer default E2EE.

Interviewees raised that, in addition, and to complement EMA use, non-technical security mechanisms were similarly, if not more, important. For example, Dottie pointed out that encrypted communications “is not the evidence that is currently being used;” rather, “SMS messages, phone calls, Facebook Messenger messages and communications with people that you trust, your doctor or your partner or your family” would be how information about an abortion would leak to police. Against this background, another participant, Sky, shared that “working at the speed of trust” was critical, and that while “encryption is such an important part, if the community guidelines and standards aren’t in place, it might not matter if you’re using an encrypted messaging service or not.”

Discussion and conclusion

In line with findings from other privacy scholars, we found that pro- and anti-abortion activists were largely resigned to ubiquitous corporate surveillance (Dencik and Cable, 2017; Draper and Turow, 2019; Hoffmann et al., 2016; Turow et al., 2023). Anti-abortion activists, in particular, believed that both corporate and state surveillance are so inescapable that using EMAs to avoid either is at best futile and at worst indicative of criminal wrongdoing. Anti-abortion activists did use EMAs at times, but without E2EE as the motivating reason. This is likely due to their perceived risk of criminalization (McDonald and Andalibi, 2023), which they consider to be lower than that of pro-abortion rights activists.

Both pro- and anti-abortion rights activists tended to describe surveillance in terms that indicated control, highlighting surveillance by police and corporations. Even when platforms and the state were not considered to be directly in alliance, they were implicitly cast as collaborators in their surveillance over users. Following Han (2022), we view this as patriarchal surveillance, particularly given the gender dynamics at play both in our pool of participants and in the context of the post-Roe United States. Our interviewees were majority women, fearful of structural surveillance by platforms and the state, and particularly the power that each of these institutions could deploy against them. These concerns echo those of others interviewed in post-Roe America (McDonald and Andalibi, 2023).

At the same time, pro-abortion rights activists and pro-encryption activists expressed imaginaries beyond surveillance realism—the idea that surveillance is inescapable (Dencik and Cable, 2017). They are troubled by the idea that the government can and should be able to see private communications, even if those communications contain dangerous or criminal activity. In these instances, the lack of adoption of EMAs was either due to a perceived lack of need (as in McDonald and Andalibi, 2023) or digital illiteracy, in that people cared about secure communications but still relied on platforms that do not employ default E2EE, like Slack and Discord, over EMAs. This indicates that increased digital literacy could contribute to the adoption of EMAs—particularly given what we already know about large-scale lack of knowledge about data collection (Turow et al., 2023).

However, we join McDonald and Andalibi (2023) in rejecting that digital literacy is the singular solution to reproductive data privacy post-Roe. Indeed, holistic on- and offline privacy solutions, such as using codewords, anonymity/pseudonymity, and identity authentication of those one shares personal information with, are crucial. Studies show that people who can get pregnant are already utilizing these tactics in post-Roe America (McDonald and Andalibi, 2023). Our study demonstrates that activists, too, are employing a more holistic privacy framework, for instance, cataloging threats on Signal, using it as a repository of information, and having varying degrees of communication security for different individuals. We conceive of this as a form of surveillance that is care-motivated, relational, and ultimately intended to be beneficial for the surveilled. Interestingly, this holistic privacy framework incorporates elements of relational surveillance, demonstrating that privacy and certain forms of surveillance don’t have to be thought of as diametrically opposed. Critically, though, privacy and patriarchal surveillance—surveillance which is enacted by platforms and the state—are incompatible. In the latter, the intent is to monitor for the purpose of monetization and control, rather than users’ individual benefits. While care-motivated surveillance monitors to protect privacy, security, and safety, control-motivated surveillance monitors with little regard for privacy. Surveillance, in this purview, is not nefarious in and of itself, but it can be depending on who is surveilling, and for what purposes.

Anti-abortion activists framed authenticity as antithetical to encryption and a desire for privacy. This belief harks back to misperceptions of technological privacy as only relevant for those engaging in criminal activity online (McCall, 2016, 2020), and reproduces the idea—propagated by Mark Zuckerberg, among others—that transparency (meaning abject openness) and privacy are antithetical to one another (Johnson, 2010). In the minds of our anti-abortion interviewees, one can only be authentic if one is fully open, transparent, and proverbially “has nothing to hide”(McCall, 2016, 2020). Importantly, this could be part of a strategy to foster engagement, as in the world of social media, (performance of) authenticity is king (Abidin, 2018; Duffy, 2017; Hallinan et al., 2022; Marwick and Boyd, 2011). These people are not merely resigned to overwhelming surveillance (Draper and Turow, 2019), but embrace it as a way of living authentically and being true to oneself—an important value in the influencer/follower relationship (Duffy, 2017; Marwick and Boyd, 2011). Rather than adopting a cynical perspective on the issue of data privacy (Hoffmann et al., 2016), these activists were proud to be “authentically” themselves.

Pro-abortion rights activists did not frame privacy in such negative terms, even when they refrained from using EMAs or taking other privacy precautions. This demonstrates that the right to abortion and the right to encryption can be understood as proximate causes (Pfefferkorn, 2022); in pro-abortion rights groups, as our data show, privacy and autonomy in any form are both considered normative goods, while this was not the case among our anti-abortion interviewees. In this case, pro- and anti-abortion groups were fundamentally opposed—the former tended to believe in the right to privacy and autonomy for all, while the latter believed in allowing a “backdoor” to encryption in certain cases in conjunction with their belief in banning the right to abortion. This may indicate a political cleavage—not only on the right to abortion, but on (data) privacy rights writ large—between these two communities.

In line with digital resignation (Draper and Turow, 2019; Turow et al., 2023), our participants cast platforms in negative terms that indicated they did not believe platforms had their best interests (including privacy) in mind. Encryption activists emphasized the need for trust and guidelines that are community-dependent, rejecting patriarchal forms of surveillance typified by hard-and-fast rules (Hall, 2015; Koskela, 2012) which would be implemented by platforms. Instead, they were in favor of care-motivated surveillance in which members of a community look out for one another through developing shared norms and contextual rules. In this way, we see corporate-deployed content moderation as aligned with patriarchal surveillance, while encryption becomes aligned with surveillance of care. These feminist privacy frameworks are an avenue for future research—where technical features fail to be sufficiently protective (McDonald and Andalibi, 2023), activists may be engaging in other practices to protect one another. In post-Roe America, there may well be a “sea change” not only in the debate over encryption (Pfefferkorn, 2022), but also in collective conceptions of data privacy (Citron, 2023; Turow et al., 2023)—and what people are willing to tolerate.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the interview participants for their willingness to speak with us and for providing critical insights. The authors would additionally like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their contributions to this work. This study is a project of the Center for Media Engagement (CME) at the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin, where research is supported by the Omidyar Network, Open Society Foundations, the Miami Foundation, as well as the John S and James L Knight Foundation.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Omidyar Network, John S and James L Knight Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and Miami Foundation.

ORCID iDs

Zelly C Martin

Martin Johannes Riedl

Samuel C Woolley

Notes

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How pro- and anti-abortion activists use encrypted messaging apps in post- Roe America

Abstract

Keywords

Literature review

A short history of encryption

Chat apps and end-to-end encryption

A short history of abortion in America

The business of surveillance

Feminist perspectives on surveillance

Method

Data collection

Data analysis

Findings

Safety and security

Why people use EMAs

Encrypted ephemerality

Law enforcement trying to access EMAs

Recommendations for security

Convenience

Coordination

Authenticity and fear

EMAs as inauthentic

Contextual safety and a false sense of security

Discussion and conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

References