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.
I don’t see much of it, luckily. They must be pretty far down in the comments. On Lemmy, of all places, I would expect that sentiment to be near zero. On Reddit though? I would hope it’d be low, but I have a feeling it’d be mixed, at best.
Americans would rather have thought crime and mass surveillance than give up their guns, because they need those guns to combat a tyrant or fascist.
So anyway, how’s USA’s government going these days? Surely not fascist or tyrannical with all those guns around, right?
Right?
I’m reminded a lot of the therapist rule when dealing with suicidal people (Ive had thoughts myself and others in my life so I’ve had enough discussions around this).
Mentioning suicidal ideation usually isn’t enough to warrant a call. What will is when you start planning. If you get into details of how and who you’re contacting.
Here too she just mentioned it off hand and didn’t mention having a plan to go do anything. Seems excessive to do a call on that and really into “thought crime” territory.
I take solace in this is the top comment, at least.
It’s frightening that many people are fine with this sort of invasion of privacy as long as the reason is “good enough”. This is a knee-jerk, uneducated response that only makes sense to the ignorant. I also expect they’re young, and spent more time looking at their phone than paying attention in class.
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.”
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.
In fact, we also have countries with less surveillance and less mass violence. And that’s most countries these days. There’s been only one single school shooting ever in my country and I actually knew people at that school at the time (my ex had graduated from there, but her cousin was still attending). 8th or 9th grade boy with a strict military father was being bullied by a teacher so he shot the teacher. That teacher would give him bad grades knowing his father would punish him for it (someone said he’d have to run 20 km home from school if he got a bad grade, but I’m not sure if that’s true), mocked him apparently, etc. Not trying to justify the kid’s actions, just illustrating what it took to get someone in a country other than the US to even go that far. He didn’t announce his plans to his friends beforehand AFAIK, so surveillance wouldn’t even have caught it.
Where I live there is little to no mass surveillance, and the only “shootings” in schools are the high school students shooting alcohol hidden from the teachers.
We do have crime, like every other country, but by population count, it’s not that bad.
There are cameras in most key intersection in major cities, and they are monitored by the emergency services, but no plate readers or face recognition whatsoever.
we promise
I think of it the way the ACLU thinks about defending racists: it’s totally irrelevant whether or not the joke is fucked up.
The US has worked itself into a horrible situation whereby the protection of the second amendment comes at the cost of all other rights for citizens. Trying to do this without coming out and saying so results in an enmeshment of industry and government that would make Mussolini proud.
I can theoretically understand why terrified parents who can’t think of any other way to protect their children might want this, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. They’re selling everyone out for the appearance of temporary protection from the real problem.
Exactly! The joke is fucked up, and yet we deserve the right to reasonable privacy in spaces where we’re told we can expect reasonable privacy (and the right to have spaces with reasonable privacy). Consent for mass surveillance and tyranny is built from situations like this where the question can be shifted to being about what was done under the presumption of privacy rather than the fact that it was violated.
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”.
This isn’t a bar. This is too people joking in their living room. Or at least, that’s how Snapchat conditions you into treating the space.
Your final sentence shows that you know that the first part of your comment is misleading, so It’s curious that you didn’t correct it.
“How they condition you” is irrelevant. You may be “conditioned” to think your little corner of the bar is your private space, but that doesn’t make it so.
This story isn’t a tale of an invasion of privacy, or even a tale of mass surveillance; it’s a tale of people being unable to determine what is private and what isn’t.
I can’t help but wonder if people would be messing this up so badly if it were Snapchat automatically forwarding an alert to the police because they detected an adult soliciting a non adult for sex, or if the police arrived and the teacher was making plans to shoot up a school.
In any event, I’ll save my outrage about invasions of privacy and mass surveillance (both very real concerns) for actual instances where one or both occur.
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Your Private Chats have no expectation of privacy.
In what way is an unencrypted message sent using software you don’t control on a server you don’t control “private”?
Does Snapchat even call them “private chats”? Or are they called something like “Direct Messages”?
A 22 year old should know better.
Maybe we shouldn’t bait-and-switch people by calling something private that is anything but.
This is just victim blaming. These people are victims of corporate deceit, and you’re blaming them for it. What was she wearing? Maybe that contributing to it as well!
Hey, if you want to be angry at Snapchat, be my guest. I have never used it so I don’t know for sure what they claim. I do assume that they never explicitly say your DMs can’t be read by them, because lawyers exist.
There is no victim here. The student teacher did say she was going to shoot up a school. There were no charges filed, and she rightfully lost her job for poor judgement.
If she wanted a truly private conversation, there are plenty of options. Hell, even Facebook encrypts DMs by default, iirc.
People need to learn the difference between “feels private” and “is private”.
shouts death threat in public forum
“THEY CANT TAKE MUH FREEDUMMMM!”
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.
And I believe that belief makes you a dangerous idiot who’ll happily support Fascism.
Me thinking that joking about killing kids isn’t ok makes me a fascist? I don’t quite understand how you got to that conclusion, but ok.
To be clear, I didn’t say people can’t say what they want to. I think that freedom of speech is incredibly important. It’s none of my business what you choose to say if I’m not involved, but I would not be comfortable joking around with such a serious topic. If you are, then more power to you I guess?
The relevant part of my reply was about mass surveillance being bad, and I don’t think that’s a very hot take. What I think about certain dark joke topics doesn’t matter.
Any restriction on your freedom to say offensive shit must be fascism, right?
Couldn’t you just fuck-off into the woods and enjoy all your freedoms alone?
Not what I said. But any restriction that leads to law enforcement intervention without a person complaining damn sure is.
No, and fuck you for asking. If I have to share the planet with a bunch of copsucking shitbags who believe in thoughtcrime for dead baby jokes but people saying the most horrifically racist, sexist, or homophobic bullshit is just the price of free speech, you can suck it up and deal with there being people out there who can tell the difference between “popular” and “right”.
I don’t think we could be friends. Not because I have a need to make jokes about killing kids, but because I don’t want to spend the whole time worrying about how you’ll take a joke.
That’s fine. I think we’d get along fine if you don’t make a habit of joking about killing kids, slavery, rape or animal abuse. If you think that makes me too sensitive then I’m happy to stay away.
Dark humour is half of what keeps people going in Jobs where the situation is dire. You have to let it out somehow, if you just let it bottle up you’ll explode and won’t be able to do the job anymore.
People (I suspect most if not all Americans) are unironically cheering for an automated version of what the Stasi did.
Hey Tesseract, I wholeheartedly agree with this. Fucking ban me god dammit!
Could you show a link because I haven’t seen anyone saying that.
Scroll. That was the entire thread when I posted. And they were all upvoted.
Sort by Controversial.
Scroll down to the -2 and lower comments in this thread.