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.
I get she was frustrated. I get this was a joke. You don’t make bomb jokes in line at the TSA either.
She may have overestimated the degree of privacy her DMs had. That’s also on her. Other e2e encrypted services are available to make the crass jokes. But if one of the three recipients had also failed to get the joke, a Signal chat would’ve sufficed to get those deputies showing up as well.
And one shouldn’t expect that a company, even of dwindling importance as Snapchat, won’t do everything in their power to cover their asses. Imagine if this teacher did go amok and they flagged it but did nothing.
Imagine telling a friend you accidently didn’t scan an item at the supermarket.
But there was a Ring doorbell nearby that captured the conversation and your identity
The next day, police are at your door to arrest you.
That’s what they’re working towards. They want to eliminate privacy, especially online. Even the most innocent conversation will be taken out of context and used against you. Cases like this woman are being used to desensitize people to it. Slowly they’re “normalizing” this and people don’t seem to care at all.
She wasn’t in line at the TSA, regardless of what snapchats fine print says she had a reasonable expectation of privacy.
What utter nonsense.
Would a teacher venting to a friend in her apartment with the windows open be overestimating her degree of privacy if overheard by a neighbor and reported to police? How about if she’s on a phone call and law enforcement “happens” to be monitoring the call? In a pubic park? In a coffee shop? In her car with the windows open?
It is perfectly reasonable to expect a joke shared over a private chat with friends remain private without reading 50 pages of legal language.
Her fault for being too busy teaching kids and surviving on $40k salary instead of researching perfect OPSEC and going down the digital privacy rabbit hole
and thats one of the reason why one of my former co-worker refused to work in a public school district, back then it was 25-35k starting.(actually more like before the pandemic). and some places COL dont match the salary too.
So… what you’re saying is that using a smartphone is equivalent to being in the airport security line. That is a disturbing point of view.
You missed the part where that was fully automated.
With E2EE someone at the other end of the communication would’ve sounded the alarm.
But go on normalizing that authoritatian state.
I’m glad that other people see the problem that lies within such surveillance.
It ain’t smart to make jokes like that in the TSA line, but it still shouldn’t lead to anything like this, either. Being in a line for a security check shouldn’t absolve you of your rights as a human being.
For several years, I was commuting by plane and I made a joke there, every time, always the same joke, about having a weapon.
Later, I stopped doing that when I saw they were different people there. The frustrated and underpaid kind.
Why not?
People are such goddamned babies.