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.
Uh what
Telegrams between North America and Europe ran over a single pathway, which ran through England. The British tapped that cable and were spying on German (and everyone else’s) communications sent through them, which is why Germany had to encode their messages to Mexico asking them to join in WW1 to get Texas back.
You don’t know they spied on electronic communication during WW2? That’s why it’s called wire-tap… you’d literally tap into the wire and read the signal
Go back another 20ish years and we were still tapping electronic comms, the Zimmerman Telegram was WW1
Not quite the same thing, because back then, each wire had to be listened to by a human being in order to see if there was anything actionable passing along it, making surveillance a scarce resource that had to be deployed selectively. Now we have machines listening for keywords on all communications passing through a system, and the resource is no longer scarce: they can listen to everyone, and do.
Unfortunately, people’s expectations are still stuck in the phone-tap era.
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.
Almost 110 years minimum (at least for the British), 1917
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_telegram
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
Basically the kind of manpower-heavy surveillance like the Stasi did has been done for a long time, but the full automation of it as done in countries like the US and UK has only been possible for about 4 decades for text (and for just keeping track of who people made voice calls to, but noy the contents of them) and maybe 2 decades for voice contents.
You need digitalization so that all communications are digital and computers to properly automate the tracking of people’s communications and voice-to-text software to convert voice information into text so that the automation also works on the contents of voice comms.
Mind you, what’s being done in the US and UK (and Russia, and China - it’s just that the US and UK were supposed to be Democracies) is the same as the Stasi did in East Germany, just automated and with no need to place eavesdropping devices to eavesdrop on conversations not over communications devices, as people nowadays carry their own personal eavesdropping device with a microphone, camera, full networking and fully controlled American software in it - the smarthphone - so it can just be remotelly ordered to record and conversations and images in its range.
WW2 started over 80 years ago. And they had the technology to spy on electronic communication then.
100% true, though in the same vein as I said; it would take a lot of agents personally listening in to cover the sheer volume of phonecalls and radio transmissions that occurred over just the US, let alone the level of granularity they have with today’s “every message on every service goes through a datacenter server and is analysed in realtime” mode of surveillance that leads to things like this teacher being raided for a snapchat message faster than the cops responded to Uvalde.