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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

Because these are massively different and we have to be fucking happy that when the courts have failed us there's at least some basic decency in companies.

Anyone working with the abortion ban of Texas should be publicly humiliated and BDSed.

This is to an extent what dual power in the US looks like.

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It looks awfully similar to me. In both cases these are private entities that allow users to confidentially submit tips about potentially illegal behavior. And the "medical procedures" bit discussed below seems like a pretty blatant deflection. If someone were doing back-alley kidney transplants, would anyone really object to that being reported to Crime Stoppers? Or perhaps more plausibly, someone illegally performing FGM on their child?

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/detroit-emergency-room-doctor...

The whole point of the website is that the stuff being reported isn't criminal, because Texas and the Supreme Court have decided that the state setting civil penalties and letting private vigilantes sue is a convenient way of circumventing instead of reversing the constitutional precedent that the state has no business excessively restricting abortion.

Violating a state statute is still illegal by definition, even if the remedy provided is civil rather than criminal. That makes the Crime Stoppers comparison still pretty fair, in my opinion.

And no, the Supreme Court didn't decide that, the people bringing the suit failed on procedural grounds and will get a chance to argue the merits when they re-file properly. My guess is that this whole thing will be a tempest in a teacup that will get sorted out in short order.

> Violating a state statute is still illegal by definition, even if the remedy provided is civil rather than criminal.

You wouldn't be "violating" anything, but if we sidestep that issue, you appear to be arguing that all behavior that someone has standing to sue over should be called "illegal". That seems like a semantic game most everyone should have a serious problem with.

> you appear to be arguing that

Careful: you wouldn't want to be unfairly misrepresenting somebody else's views! That would be libellous. (You don't want to say something illegal, now, do you?)

But yeah: not all torts are crimes, and there's good reason for that. Lumping them together under the same “illegal” banner is how IP-as-control got started.

You are misunderstanding the Texas law. There is intentionally not a criminal statute being violated because Texas does not want the law to be overturned in court.

So I should be able to make a civil law in my state that says pseudo0 cannot post on the internet under the threat of civil suit? The issue here is you don't have the right to steal, but we do have the right both to communicating on the internet and to an abortion.

Legally they are similar, from a public PR perspective they have nothing to do with one another.

This is a situation of Optics, Communications and PR.

The lawyers would be tasked with finding the grounds necessary.

GoDaddy is not at risk of public outrage over CrimeStoppers, but with the very raw politics of Abortions in Texas hitting the front page ... I can see the Marketing team just sweating bullets over this, wanting to just 'get out' of the path of a fast moving vehicle.

You're missing a massive distinction in your attempts of comparison.

Yes, your two examples are of a person commiting a crime.

The issue at hand is about the privacy of healthcare/medical status. You cannot say somebody aided in abortion if you cannot prove whomever they were around was pregnant. You cannot ask in a legal sense if somebody is pregnant, was pregnant, or is now not pregnant, and force them to give a truthful answer/disclosure, that's against pre-existing medical privacy laws. Does that make more sense to you?

And in an attempt to make slight sense of that to one of your answers - yes, the act of commiting FGM on a child, or perhaps an adult who was somewhat forcibly taken somewhere to have the procedure done against their will, is a crime committed by whoever did it. However - to convict this person of the crime, the person mutilated would have to testify. As it deals with medical privacy - they do have to and can choose not to testify. Especially with a child, it gets more tricky - the parent to a certain age can choose not to testify per their rights to their child's medical privacy. If somebody was hellbent on trying to make a child testify against the perpetrator, they could attempt a massive legal battle to get state custody of the child, who can then somewhat legally force the child to testify or face some sort of legal recourse. Otherwise, you're basically going to need video evidence of the crime being committed, or an eyewitness account from a law enforcement agent/FBI/etc for any chance of legal prosecution.

The courts haven't failed. If you are referring to the SCOTUS emergency relief ruling, that was entirely procedural.

Important thing to know is that via emergency relief, judges cannot strike down a law, they can just stop people or groups from enforcing said laws. The case that went to the supreme Court was asking for a group of eight different people that have them blocked from enforcing the law. 7 of them were state employees of various positions, one was a private citizen. For the private citizen the plaintiff asked the court to consider the that person as a group, but they did not have time to get that through the courts (I think). The private person ended up signing an affidavit saying they would not try to enforce the law.

If you go search the news, you will find a pro life group has already had a temporary restraining order placed against them from applying this law or assisting other people and applying this law.

You can also bet as soon as anybody brings a lawsuit about this, it'll be immediately dismissed as being in violation of Casey (Roe).

> there's at least some basic decency in companies

I would exercise caution with this perspective. They stand to gain a bit of mind share from this action as it's a popular position to take. I am not saying virtuous companies don't exist. In general they act in the best interest of their bottom line (in this case public image).

> and BDSed

What does this acronym mean?

Probably “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions”, which is often promoted as an appropriate response to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

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