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.
Man that was a stupid thing to joke about on a service like Snapchat
There’s a reason why Donald and his friends in Washington have all of their discussions on Signal.
I am a teacher who finished his student teaching the past school year in the Chicagoland area.
I just want to say…the FUCK? This woman was pissed because a student closed her laptop? She claims it “wiped” her lesson plan? No. I’m calling baloney on that story. Her stuff was saved in a cloud environment and would’ve been recovered easily or the OS would’ve saved the working doc.
If this student teacher was frustrated over this extremely small thing, and made a comment like that even “joking” then she is not cut out to be a teacher. At. All. This incident also just killed her career. No school will hire her with this story out there. What a moronic thing to do/say!
The tech issue of flagging this is just a whole other issue though and a good reminder to be careful of context because we are being monitored even when seemingly not.
I’d like to shoot myself after reading this stupid comment. Should I go ahead and start baking cookies for the agents. I wonder if they want coffee?
Everyone is unhinged. Get a grip.
I’m sorry, but what? I’m a dad to a teen and a new teacher as well, so I have experience in this area.
Everyone is unhinged. Get a grip.
You really don’t understand the profession of teaching if that’s your takeaway of what I said. We all get frustrated with students, but to plainly say “shoot” them, while in a literal school and over social media because a student closed your laptop?
A student teacher shouldn’t be this frustrated at this point in their career or they should consider a different career. Kids do this stuff all the time, especially to each other. Open the laptop, boot up, recover the documents/projects. It’s really not a big deal that warrants a comment about shooting a kid, even as a joke.
If you really feel that is acceptable, then thank you for not teaching kids.
It was a joke under an assumption of privacy.
Now that you know everything on Snapchat is going through active automated filtering, consider what Snapchat has chosen NOT to flag and is allowing to flow freely, like sex trafficking and the sale of minors.
As unfair and life-changing as this event has been for this young teacher, I think the actual story of what Snapchat (and every other digital communication method) is reading/tracking yet allowing is a much, much bigger story. And dirtier. With billionaires and pedophiles and all manner of nasty allowables we do not yet know.
This will ve the biggest shock to society when people discover what has been known. The only reason people are not blackmailed into compliance and slavery yet is because they have not destabilized the gov enough to get away with it.
Think if they had to explain how they know the color of your shit that day, but they can’t explain where all the cocaine came from or why sex trafficking rings still exist? How did they know everything else but not how that senator bought the crack he was caught smoking?
We can’t be more than a few years away if we continue along this path.
I can see how this is a big problem. However, having saved a man some time ago from suicide after correctly interpreting a very cryptic message I could see how one such system may be useful if it worked correctly.
She said she was going to shoot the student and/or the school. Snapchat did the right thing. She is not the victim here.
The statute is constructed in an unusual way because it doesn’t require that the threat is transmitted to someone who believes it. It says:
(a) A person commits disorderly conduct when he or she knowingly:
…
(3.5) Transmits or causes to be transmitted in any manner a threat of destruction of a school building or school property, or a threat of violence, death, or bodily harm directed against persons at a school, school function, or school event, whether or not school is in session;
Laws against transmitting threats are usually written in a manner that excludes jokes sent to friends who understand that they are jokes.
Also, use Signal. Signal will not call the cops when you send dumb jokes to your friends. There are no good reasons for most people to not use Signal.
Oh man… The cops have to react to this.
I’d had so many police visits in my teenage years in the 90s and early 00s if there were this level of automated surveillance.
We can thank school shooters for this invasion of privacy.
Ultimately we can thank lack of gun control for this invasion of privacy.So if your freedoms end where mine begin, then we can thank the NRA and 2A nuts for this lack of freedom. Not that there really is any freedom anyway.
We can thank authoritarianism for this invasion of privacy. It would have happened with our without school shooters.
That this is technologically possible at all should terrify you.
It’s been technologically possible for well over 80 years…
Uh what
The US government has been spying on “private” communications for a looooooooooong time. Idk if “well over 80 years” is accurate, but sometime around mid last century for sure.
Maybe not over 80 years if only due to the lack of technology (it would have taken a lot of agents manning a lot of switchboards to listen in on every telephone conversation), but saying “at least since the late 60s” wouldn’t be inaccurate at all
As a teacher you should be smart enough to know there is no private conversation to be had on Snapchat. She learned a valuable lesson about her lack of privacy.
To be fair to her, she’s 22, and a trainee.
Being brought up from day one in a surveillance state probably makes it easy to forget that every action is being watched
Not just that… I’ve met plenty of teachers that were almost completely tech-illiterate and that includes to some degree a few that even taught tech-related classes. Being a teacher doesn’t magically mean you know everything, even within the field you’re specialized in.
I see no issue, things worked as advertised. The AI flagged things correctly and since Snapchat never made any promises about encryption it’s on anyone to use it at their own discretion. Maybe more stories like this will help create some awareness about online privacy
Idk if you’re being obtuse, but come on lol.
The assumption of privacy is not the fault of most people.
Stop blaming the average person for the privacy damage done by corporate interests and the government.
I would be behind your statement if you said it 10, or even 5, years ago, but right now, and to use your own term, that teacher is the one being obtuse. Everyone sees all these news on privacy invasion by corporations and governments on a daily basis. Choosing to do nothing about it does not make you a victim.
It would be a different story if there were no alternatives, but that is not the case, at least not yet.
You’re not wrong but this isn’t a good case to use as an example of the tech going too far.
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.
Yeah, that’s a cursed setup, must be set to shutdown on lid close, but also it doesn’t hang if there is an unsaved document like every other time?
And no habitual Ctrl+s after every sentence or two? If the kid didn’t wipe her work, a random windows crash or forced update would have.
Might be a Windows user who set to shutdown on lid close because otherwise you open your bag to find a hot laptop with a dead battery, sleep doesn’t really work on Windows for years now.
Hmm, that is true.
I always just pressed the shutdown button if I was putting it in a bag. If I was only moving from one place to another, then I wouldn’t want it turn off for just closing it.
