Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.
No student reported her. No parent. No coworker. The flag was entirely automated. Snapchat’s policy permits voluntary emergency disclosures to law enforcement — no warrant required — when the platform determines imminent harm exists. The algorithm makes that initial call. Think of it like your Ring doorbell deciding to call 911 on its own, except the doorbell is reading your text messages.
The amount of people in this thread that seem to think invasion of privacy is cool to police thought crime is honestly shocking. The subject and subject matter are completely irrelevant.
In addition, teachers are fucking people and venting and joking in private with close friends is sacrosanct.
My guess is most are very young. Goes to show our civil liberties worldwide, especially since 9/11, have eroded tremendously. Young people have grown up in a world where privacy is a joke and government spying is a foregone conclusion.
I work mostly with people older than myself. The younger ones are shocked by everyone’s lackadaisical privacy practices. The older ones all say, “oh well, it’s everywhere and I have nothing to hide. It’s not like you can get away from it.”
I don’t know a single young person who actually cares about Internet privacy. The vast majority of them are on social media all the time.
The idea that mass violence, which happens very rarely all things considered, justifies constant mass surveillance and automated reaction is very troubling. The new “think of the children,” I suppose.
If she was in a bar and she was venting to her friends about shooting students or shooting up a school and the bartender heard her and contacted the police, would you call it an invasion of privacy?
The real story is that people consider unencrypted messages on Snapchat “private”.
shouts death threat in public forum
“THEY CANT TAKE MUH FREEDUMMMM!”
You should fucking die if you think like that, or you may be the next fucking Hitler :3
I believe there are a few things you simply shouldn’t joke about. Killing children is one of those things. But yes, everybody has a fundamental right to their privacy and it’s insane that mass surveillance is becoming more and more common and way too many people seem to just accept or ignore it.
I believe there are a few things you simply shouldn’t joke about
And I believe that belief makes you a dangerous idiot who’ll happily support Fascism.
closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan
So what awful setup was she running where the laptop doesn’t just sleep on lid close, and the document isn’t still there on wake? Who prepares a document to work from that isn’t saved?
The rest is some 1984 bullshit, but I’m wondering what the hell is wrong with that laptop.
So the lesson to the rest of us is DO NOT USE SNAPCHAT especially for private messaging.
I use Signal, was pressed to do so by privacy-minded friends and have pressed other friends to adopt the client.
So long as you don’t accidentally include Jeffrey Goldberg in your chat, you’re okay.
Wrong lesson. All the ways to track you combined don’t leave you an outlet.
Signal is fine to make you feel better.
It’s a social problem that should be solved by social, not technical, means. Awareness, law, burning tires.
EDIT: for moral clarity’s sake - I live in Russia, I’m not spreading awareness mostly, I’m not trying to change any law and sure as hell I’m not burning tires ; but if you live in a democratic country with courts and presumption of innocence until proven guilty yadda-yadda, you might try those
I live in the United States. Crime is not about behavior or adherence to law, but who we are. Those of us who cannot afford lawyers will be framed by law enforcement or coerced into confession, or extorted into a plea deal.
And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.
So we’re not a liberal, democratic society with rule of law.
In your society you can openly protest against people calling the shots, or be rude to cops, and not expect legal (and physical) retribution. There are places where this is unthinkable.
And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.
Yes, that’s because the public has ideologies and corporate interests, and no common idea of what it means “to serve the public”.
In your society you can openly protest against people calling the shots, or be rude to cops, and not expect legal (and physical) retribution
You are obviously not watching the dozens of phone videos displaying counterexamples to this statement.
Granted, it’s true for a shrinking privileged set, and the US saw for the first time in the 2014 Ferguson Unrest, just how brutal and militant the police will get if protests or rudeness to officers occur in a minority neighborhood. It’s not that police brutality wasn’t common before, but this time there were press on the ground streaming live video to the internet, and it wasn’t being filtered through news agencies.
Conservative protests get the light touch, such as the 2017 Unite the Right rally. In contrast, the George Floyd protests in 2020 were saturated with CS gas just like Ferguson in 2014.
Granted, protestors taken to court by the current regime are usually acquitted (if a grand jury succeeds in indicting them; they’re failing a lot), but then we’re now seeing protestors accused of being part of an Antifa terrorist conspiracy, and getting sentenced disproportionately for minor crimes.
Americans presume they have civil rights, as per those enumerated in the Constitution of the United States, but they’re legally being stripped away by federal courts, and law enforcement (and regime-loyal paramilitaries like ICE) are disregarding those rights more and more without accountability.
Even birthright citizenship is being challenged, and that face-eating leopard is going to take a lot of Americans by surprise.
The US is failing as a liberal society.
When I say “in your society you can”, I don’t mean there won’t be pain. I mean it’s socially acceptable.
Some people live in societies with a significant portion of the population just blanket hating you (I mean, me and people of my views, for example) and thinking you (again, me) shouldn’t exist, because their TV tells them that and they are used to thinking that it’s moral and honest to believe what their TV says. There are people in Russia who think that voting for someone other than currently ruling party’s candidate in presidential and other elections is morally treason. You don’t even feel how far really degraded societies are from yours. There are literally people thinking that even doing what even Putin still allows them to do is treason.
There are political quasi-religions postulating that living and letting live, and also peacefully facing those you don’t agree with, and accepting that robbing others is bad, and accepting that some things are just not your business, - that all these things are impossible heresy and should be killed with fire.
Americans presume they have civil rights, as per those enumerated in the Constitution of the United States, but they’re legally being stripped away by federal courts, and law enforcement (and regime-loyal paramilitaries like ICE) are disregarding those rights more and more without accountability.
And that’s a level above not presuming any civil rights. And that is a level above thinking that even talking about such is weird and not normal.
And even deeper there’s preemptive obedience, where even asking someone expecting obedience from you to express that demand before you follow it is considered disobedience and you only have yourself to blame.
After that there’s worse, like today’s jihadi Syria or emirate Afghanistan or some village in India.
There are many levels, yours is mostly envied.
Questions for the ridiculous number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up their right to privacy because you believe it makes schools and other places safer:
Have you read the 50+ page user agreement for your cell phone company? How about the user agreements of every app that has access to your cell phone, your PC mic or apps that have access to your files? Late model cars have microphones too, as do TV remotes. Microsoft has access to everything on your Windows PC. I’d give 100 to 1 odds that 99% of you haven’t read any of those user agreements OR the UA for private chat apps you are using. Likewise are you sure any cloud storage you’re using isn’t scanning your documents for forbidden phrases?
Since you haven’t read every word of each and every user agreement and think it keeps schools safe, you should be just fine with the fact that EVERYTHING you say or write may be available to law enforcement, even if you’re talking to yourself while sitting on the toilet in your home. If you mutter that you’d like to kill someone or burn something misheard as a school building to the ground you are just fine with AI flagging it and the police knocking on your door in an hour, right? You’ll also be just fine with losing your career and your job never being able to find another one, right? Right? After all, other people never know WTF someone dangerous and violent is going to do.
The number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up all their rights and have their private communications monitored for something that is nothing more than security theater is unbelievable.
Christ, are we meant to feel sorry for someone who joked about shooting children now? It’s a big enough problem in the US, normalising it is not the way to go
You must not know children…I get it
Oh, I definitely get it but she had means, motive and opportunity to follow through which I think is a little different. Also unless I missed it the article doesn’t state what she actually said so people pieing it off as a joke are ridiculous.
“Frustrated joke”
I think we can infer enough here bud
Can we? Do we all infer the same thing?
I can infer from your lack of oxford comma that idc what you have to say
Please show me how an Oxford comma could be used? I like to learn;
After motive.
dont threaten violence in a school setting online. you are guaranteed to face consequences
Might have been a joke
We are talking about the USA, I fucking hope they do not take school shooting threats as jokes!
How do you differentiate between a threat and a joke?
When the stakes to this high and it happens so often: you don’t.
It doesn’t happen that often
Welcome to the brave new world.
Next step: Automated execution.
I’m glad this person’s life was semi-ruined by using big tech.
I am tired of normies using horrible platforms and then acting Pikachu-level shocked when they have horrible privacy violations.
Tech illiteracy + Big tech exploiting tech illiteracy = profit and constant surveilance
and normies are too damn stupid to get it, and every once in a while one of them gets fucked, and then… suddenly… nothing changes yet again
and these normies with their acceptance of any TOS, even the shittiest of shit, and making opting out some sort of social misstep, like “What?! You really don’t use WhatsApp?” with an ugly look, means I am glad these assholes occasionally suffer for their ignorance
You’re so unique and smart.
