 good afternoon everyone. Now speaking we have pigeon with jailed by a Google search. The surveillance state's war on self induced abortion. All right. Thank you everybody. Really excited to see such a full room here today. I'm sure you might be curious why here at a crypto talk or crypto village talk you're seeing one on abortion and there are obviously a litany of reasons why I would ask that anybody working in any professional field support abortion access. Obviously justice, human rights, equal rights for everyone but also the fact that pregnancy is unfortunately a space where we're seeing a lot of consolidation of state power in the interest of prosecuting individuals on the basis of their civil liberties. So we can see things like what will be the topic here today which is search histories that's entered as evidence. We have the government suing for patient names as part of defending unconstitutional laws against abortion. We have DNA database testing of suspected aborted fetuses, ALPR data collection of license plates, malicious wifi network seen outside of clinics and then government funded fake clinics which could be honestly a whole talk all by itself where they use like SEO, waiting and AdWords fraud to come up instead of legitimate clinics. We also have issues with Facebook groups emerging for IDing and doxing patients and clinic staff as well as activists and clinic escorts and even the use of Twitter bots to sway votes on abortion including in the Ireland referendum to repeal the 8th amendment against abortion and to effect support for Title IX reproductive rights funding here in the United States. I really want to like hammer home if you take nothing else away from this talk is that targeting pregnancy in the interest of fetal life actually normalizes the idea that there are any good enough reasons to violate your constitutional rights. So I just wanted to also note here that this is a talk about a very common medical procedure. There will be some details included. We invite you to lean into any of your discomfort and to help us fight stigma and myths along the way. It is US centric and obviously a lot of things will vary by your state but these kind of technology challenges are shared globally. And despite my parents' best wishes for me, I am neither a doctor nor a lawyer and so this presentation does not constitute any medical or legal advice. I also like to note here at this point in the presentation that this is not part of my professional job. This is part of my capacity as an individual activist. When I say we, I refer to myself as well as a lot of really amazing individual security and technology enthusiasts and professionals, some of whom are here in this room, who joined together as part of the abortion access movement to try and strengthen all of our resources that are available to the things we care about. I hope that you feel inspired to do the same. So this is a symbol that I think we're all very familiar with and when I say self-induced abortion we have this kind of like immediate reaction that calls forth the symbol which is the coat hanger. It is outdated but it is actually in no way a myth. People did used to use dangerous methods including inserting unsafe and sanitary objects into the cervix to try and induce an abortion. However, self-induced abortion is actually more likely to look like this today, a handful of four pills. Both in clinics and in self-managed settings when we talk about somebody saying we tried to use the word self-managed often more now to talk about people managing their own abortion experience including at home. Only about 40% of clinical abortions use pills, just pills and not surgery and I think what's really interesting about that as well is that even in the clinical setting it does involve going home and most of the process will happen by yourself at home. So what is a medication abortion? It is also called mesoprostol or microstone. The drug is originally cytotac which is used for ulcers. A group of feminists in Brazil in the 1970s discovered that this drug actually could safely induce a miscarriage. It was over the counter before then and the government actually noticed that deaths from unsafe abortion were dropping like a stone. So they figured out where it came from, pulled it off the shelves and now it's regulated. Pills are placed under the like in your gums or under your tongue often sometimes on vaginal tissue. It's important the medication absorbs into amicus membrane and it presents like a spontaneous miscarriage which means cramping, cervix dilation, passing the pregnancy. I think it's very important to well you'll hear about that again that it is pretty identical. So identical that often this medication is used to assist in what's called a missed miscarriage. So if you have a miscarriage happens to you, you might remember the story of the Walgreens pharmacist who denied a woman her medication. And he did so on the basis of moral objection to its use for induced abortion. So it's important to note here that medication abortion is very safe. It can be used up to 12 weeks. Certain studies both here and abroad indicate that it can be used further past that. It's about 85% effective. You will be able to tell if it doesn't work. You will remain pregnant. It won't really do anything. It has a lower complication rate than many common over-the-counter medications as well as things like Viagra. If medical assistance is needed for rare complications they are things that an individual themselves can identify and seek medical assistance. Medical professionals cannot tell the difference between an induced miscarriage using this particular medication and a spontaneous miscarriage. And that's very important to note. For obvious humanitarian reasons it's pretty good that medication supply chains from ordering on the internet do appear pretty reliable. When you order something you are likely to get what you expect, a sufficient potency to have the effect intended and you're not going to hurt yourself in an unintended way. However the packs are unlikely to contain instructions which is going to come up again later. And it's increasingly in demand. Unfortunately restrictions in the United States mean that abortion access is more restricted than it's been at any time since Roe v. Wade which is the Supreme Court case codifying the federal right to access abortion. You have some of these surveys are done either by collecting them via Google search. So inviting people via AdWords who are searching for self-managed abortion to respond. And in that one in particular it's notable that 41% of them responding and searching for self-abortion online were minors. So even though they represent a very small fraction of people who actually have abortions, about 60% of people who have abortions today in the United States are already parents. So about 1.2% of those who came in eventually to receive an abortion reported attempting self-abortion using mesoprostil at least once which is quite a tremendous number. And I'm going to sit on the slide for just a second because I think it is pretty remarkable. This source right here is like an analysis of Google search data for self-managed abortion that was done by somebody who worked there. And you're going to see these orange shaded states which indicate that they are more likely to search for things like home abortion methods. These are actually also the states if you're familiar at all with some of the news around abortion access that are likely to have things called trapped laws. These are targeted regulation of abortion providers. These are specific laws meant to make it so difficult to operate that clinics close. We are actually only I think at about 780 independent clinics left in the United States to serve more than 900,000 people who have an abortion each year. And that's if that math sounds very difficult, it's because it is. So usually these states where the restrictions are particularly onerous, maybe I have a wait time that's imposed on me or I have to travel extremely far like in Texas to access an abortion, they're way more likely to search for ways to have abortions at home. And it's kind of no surprise. Anti-choicers threaten privacy at the clinics as well. This picture I find extremely striking, this is the last clinic available in Kentucky. And you see entire crowds of people out there to yell at, harass, photograph and follow and stalk people who are trying to enter this clinic whose access is only secured by this human wall of escorts that you see in the front. It's also unfortunately extremely ubiquitous at this point for anti-choicers to document license plates. So in and out of clinics, they have a quote here it says we have a very sophisticated spreadsheet license plates car make model description of the person. And this is at a 40 days for life training session. So they're teaching other people in front of other clinics how to do this as well. This is something new and notable that we've seen lately. So there was a wifi network set up outside of a clinic. The site was a locally hosted site meant to look like the clinic site. Collected patient email and phone number to be able to log in. Once directed there, you were directed to this web page which has some medical misinformation videos about the procedures you might be just about to experience. And then the users who entered their phone number and email were then harassed and called and emailed to attempt to talk them out of being abortion minded. So where did this thing come from? Fortunately, have tools available now like wiggle, which is an amazing way to map all of the networks. You can actually go across to the wireless village and find out more about it. We're able to find other instances of where this network had been seen before. And lo and behold, look, it's covered by that little notification there. But this is the pro life sonogram bus that appears outside of the clinic every single Saturday. So needless to say they don't do that anymore. Self-managed abortion is medically safe and it can feel for obviously reasons why a lot safer than a clinic, but is it secure? This is actually a demonstration by a group called Women on Waves. They work out of the Netherlands and help to provide abortion medication to those who live in countries where abortion is not safe and legal. They actually is notable that they don't work with individuals here in the United States because it's still technically legal here. But they were demonstrating how easy it could be to just fly the pills by a drone over to Ireland. I wish it was this easy, but unfortunately for us in the U.S. it looks more like this. This is one of the many websites where one can purchase the medication online. I find it kind of amusing that it's put there right up alongside hair loss and premature ejaculation, but business is business. And there is unfortunately a pretty expensive purchasing paper trail. It is an expensive stake to make if you do not use the correct site or otherwise have trouble receiving the medication. These sites take a variety of options like credit, Bitcoin, and wire transfer. Wire transfer is not as secure here in the United States because it forces you to use your actual banking information. And it's especially alarming considering that out of the top 20 websites that we looked at, 17 of them don't use HTTPS or SSL. So you're entering your payment information into probably the least safe place. It's also true that often the medication does not arrive. Sometimes that it's damaged. There's usually things like pinpricks or crushed up pills to try and hide from the mail service that there are pills inside. And often it doesn't come with instructions, which means you're going to have to search online for how to take them to. Unfortunately as well, it is friends, family, people with access to your devices in the home, people who you live around every day who are the most likely to turn you in. Medical and hospital staff also do frequently report to police, which is always exciting because as we noted before, it is not possible to tell the difference between an induced and spontaneous abortion. The found fetal tissue prompts criminal investigation instead of rather checking if the person's okay. It's just assumed that a crime occurred. So here's an example. We have a headline. This is real. Four days ago, dead fetus found on plane was left by a teen who suffered a miscarriage. I would say that's a pretty compassionate way to phrase a very sensational headline. You can note in here it says port authority police and prosecutors are investigating. Very interesting. Two days later, we decided that this person is now mother of a fetus, so implying that it was an intended pregnancy and that they may have had a botched abortion per law enforcement officials. This is a very traumatic thing to experience in a public plane. And now this person is almost immediately like a teenager who goes through something very serious like that is now treated immediately as a criminal. Devices are then usually seized to extricate your search histories, purchase histories, and I want to put an emphasis on this last one, communications with trusted contacts. Often when people have even expressed to a loved one that they feel uncomfortable with being pregnant or a desire to end the pregnancy that is considered inclusive. So law enforcement uses stereotypes, classism and racism to decide who has had a miscarriage and who has induced their own abortion. There is very little medical evidence to support it, and so they're usually relying on ideas of who is likely to be perceived as poor, trashy, or likely to commit what they see as a horrible crime. So convictions vary actually because this prosecution is very similar to I would say like a lot of hacking cases, which is that they'll pretty much just try to grab up everything that will stick. So we'll see convictions vary a lot. Risk of investigation progressing through arrest is actually going up because we're getting a lot of conservative DA elections and lots of judicial appointments, which means all of those like crazy charges that they're going to lob against an individual are actually more likely to stick. I actually want to note out here too that with Brett Kavanaugh being nominated as our Supreme Court Justice, federal laws like not just overturning Roe but the Communications Decency Act and other things that deal with how we communicate about indecent material might be expanded to prohibit information about self-induced abortion. So we call these spaghetti charges. So just finding everything we can and trying to get it to stick. So here we have seven states actually do criminalize self-induced abortion specifically. A bunch more use harm to fetuses, illegal providers, which can include buying the pills for somebody else, and misapplied laws like chemical endangerment of a miner or concealing a dead body. So and we're seeing this new tactic now. Outside of Atlanta a fetal tissue was found in the water system and the DA took it upon himself to now run the DNA from the fetus through CODIS, which is a federal database for DNA for offenders. This is only supposed to be used when it's suspected that a crime is committed. So pretty huge violation of civil liberties. They're also talking about how with using 23andMe to capture the golden state killer that that is available as an option as well. So Catholic Hospital is actually also mandate fetal burial in Texas and if you have to end up utilizing their mass grave option, you're personally identifying information is tied to that grave forever without your consent. So you guys are all sitting in this audience being highly proficient users of a lot of really great technologies and I know you're probably thinking in your head how you would do it if you were in this situation. But it's important to remember that like if I'm your lay person most of the time I am not doing this whole process more than once. I'm also on a time sensitive crunch because pregnancy has a deadline. I'm not a lawyer. I might not be sure which part of this process is specifically illegal and I'm not sure the state does either. But trying to file legal abortion has likely already exhausted me. It's extremely high friction. Even if I see Bitcoin as a payment option I don't know anything about it or how to buy it or how long that's going to take. So how do we get these infosec best practices especially things you can do like using safer search or safer communications with your loved ones to point of search or point of sale. Not sure quite yet but a lovely group of activists here in our abortion access movement have been trying a couple of different things and I think they're going pretty well so far. Most of the time we're trying to reach out to the experts who are in contact with people who are going through that experience and getting them to disseminate the information for us. So we're talking about using infosec risk highlights in self-managed abortion awareness materials. There's a lot of nonprofits and other reproductive access organizations who focus on this specifically. We're training hotline staff who work at things like abortion funds. Look them up. Abortion funds are amazing. They help people afford maybe the last hundred dollars on an abortion that they need for themselves and their families. So we can train hotline staff on safer search recommendations not just for buying pills online but also for just seeking an abortion in general. Informing callers of your right to read miscarriage disposal. I think this is important to note as well because in many of the states even where self-induced abortion is illegal you have the right to dispose of a miscarriage for any reason in a way that you see dignified and fit. So training attorneys who work with affected individuals both on safer communication methods with their clients as well as the scope of what kind of resources are available to them in general. And of course changing movement culture. I was super happy to see in the other room that there is an encryption is not a crime poster because it's something we deal with too. The stigma that if I am using especially things like signal that implies that I'm committing a crime. We want to change that culture to help ensure that people know that it's actually just a good idea to use it no matter what. And even if you endure a little bit of that negative perception it's worth it for the protections in the long run. So I would love to then turn this out to the room and say that if you work with at-risk individuals who experience a similar risk profile if these threats and these situations sound familiar to you and you have some thoughts. We'd love to hear from more about that. We love learning from other organizations and what we can do to improve safer search adoption and safer communications among our users and just having camaraderie I think it's important that across the progressive movement that we share resources and learnings. So you can reach out to me by sliding into my DMs at Pigeon Fosack on Twitter or coming up and finding me afterwards. So thank you so much everybody.