> I'm not quite sure what part of the constitution covers abortion, and I'm familiar with the ruling.

You don't seem to be asking, but for Roe vs Wade it's the 14th Amendment. Whether or not you agree with it, if you're familiar with the ruling then you must know that much.

The constitutional case there is far weaker than the case for encryption (or firearms, for that matter).

You don't have to agree with a ruling to understand a ruling. In this case, understanding Roe vs Wade means understanding that it was argued using the 14th Amendment. Whether or not you agree with Roe vs Wade is rather irrelevant.

It's very relevant; the current public abortion debate is a direct consequence of the fact that the supreme court doesn't agree with the ruling. You don't have to agree with it to understand it, nor to understand that it is incorrect.

When this future ruling comes down, I highly doubt you'll be citing it as justification for it's own existence and saying that disagreement is irrelevant. Those that are happy with it won't be either, they'll justify it by saying it is the correct one, in their opinion. Whether one agrees or not is at the core of the conversation.

>All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

That's the one people use, right?

I am aware, but anybody that takes even a cursory look at it knows that it was "legislating from the bench" as it were. And you might be OK with that, you might be happy about it because you think abortion should be enumerated. But it is plain as day that it isn't, and doesn't fall within the scope of any enumerated right, or within the direct purview of the federal government and therefore outside of that of the states.

Basically, Roe’s logic goes like this: The 14th amendment gives everyone equal protection of the law, including from their state governments. SCOTUS historically took that to mean that there are federal restrictions on state law. A few relevant to the history of Roe:

- States are bound by the bill of rights (eg. they can’t violate your free speech for instance)

- States can’t tell you where your kid has to go to school, or what they can or can’t study

- States can’t restrict access to contraceptives

Since the 9th amendment acknowledges the existence of rights NOT enumerated in the constitution, the court decided that it has to look at rights that are historical and customary, or contained in the “penumbra” of enumerated rights. Since you have a right to be safe from searches and seizures, and to be free from having the government quarter troops in your home, and whatever unenumerated rights exist, they’d several years prior agreed includes “marital privacy” to protect couples’ rights to choose whether to use birth control. Shortly thereafter in Roe they decided that women have a right to choose to get an abortion prior to the first trimester. They chose that cutoff based on historical and customary treatment of abortion in English common law as well as older western legal traditions.

That’s a pretty brief summary, but that’s how they got there.

You're missing the article's point: it's not about whether abortion should be legal or not. It's that encryption should be strongly protected because it protects people from unjust laws.

Yeah, but why even bring abortion up? It was a bad segway.

Because (as argued I'm the article), it is generally assumed by most people (or, at least say, most tech workers) in the US that our laws are, generally, "good". That is, unlike, say, laws in China or Saudi Arabia, most tech workers would be OK with a lawful, court-ordered data request from a US jurisdiction. (Related - yes, of course I realize that there are some laws, maybe even many laws, that some people very strongly disagree with, but in balance, I think most people think data requests in the US are to solve "unambiguous" crimes like assault, theft, murder, child abuse, etc.).

With abortion, though, that assumption goes out the window. Many people, especially tech workers in coastal states, strongly believe that laws criminalizing abortion are downright evil. This would be a huge shift in that, for the first time, many of these folks could be convinced that protection from sharing data with the state, even one you think has generally "good" laws, because the idea to share data to prosecute someone for aiding an abortion is so deeply abhorrent to them. For these folks, it's likely this is the first time that the importance of strong encryption will "click" for them, due to them feeling like this is a clear case where legal requests from US law enforcement are unambiguously wrong.

Seems like a stretch considering the laws against gay marriage, heck homosexuality in general, laws against drugs including marijuana and laws like asset forfeiture.

There plenty of laws that “coastal tech workers” didn’t agree with long before abortion jumped into the headlines.

I fail to see how anything has changed other than another straw on the pile of hay.

Great, lets take each of your examples 1 by 1, and I'll give an explanation of why I think overturning Roe v Wade would be in a very different category:

1. Laws against gay marriage. Gay marriage has been legal in all US states since 2015. But specifically as it relates to encryption, even if gay marriage were made illegal again, it's not quite like people would be getting "surreptitiously" married (the whole point of legal gay marriage is legal benefits and societal acceptance), so I don't think folks would think that a governmental data request would somehow "expose" someone who was gay and married.

2. Lawrence v Texas outlawed most laws against homosexuality in 2003, before most people were aware of the issues of broad data collection (and before tech companies started to go all in on it). But I totally agree, if Lawrence v Texas were overturned, I think it would absolutely be in the bucket of Roe v Wade being overturned as it relates to tech workers thinking government data requests could be "evil".

3. Laws against drugs. Even if you disagree with the war on drugs, I think most tech workers, even if they were uncomfortable with a government data request for drug crimes, could quite easily rationalize it as "OK, the government is probably going after some big drug dealer who does bad shit. They're not likely going to ask Google for a data request for someone with a joint on them." I think that's fundamentally different from them thinking "The government wants data so they can arrest this woman who had an abortion."

4. Laws like asset forfeiture. Again, even if tech workers had real problems with asset forfeiture laws, I think most people could be able to rationalize a data request for it.

And perhaps most importantly is that Roe v. Wade has been the status quo for 50 years. It's not just about "tech workers disagree with a law", but it's about "tech workers seeing an important right being removed", and the emotions involved there are very different. If personal marijuana use was legal nationwide for 50 years, but then SCOTUS suddenly decided it would be OK for governments to start throwing people in jail for it, I think that would be a much more comparable situation.

Not very convincing. Your whole argument is basically “those others things aren’t as bad”.

You obviously didn't read my post then, given that one of the points is "this would definitely be just as bad were this right revoked, too"

So your argument is that "it's worse that a right was taken away than we never had it in the first place"?

That doesn't seem logical.

For future reference, segway is a mobile transportation device used and beloved by Paul Blart, mall cop. Segue (same pronunciation, Italian origination) is an uninterrupted transition.

I never understood why it stopped being called "The Thing".

because otherwise nobody would've clicked on the link.

> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Founders covered this in their writings. The defined rights were not to be considered the extent of the rights afforded the people.

They worried about including a specific Bill of Rights as it would lead to belief rights were indeed limited to the things they included.

A right to one’s own bodily agency, to discuss and engage in medical discourse and behaviors, is not explicitly called out in the Bill of Rights but it’s also not explicitly denied. The court uses that logic constantly when it empowers elites.

I think it’s pretty obvious America is done for since the people themselves believe now the powers that be can police their speech and agency in private settings when it’s merely what they don’t agree with.