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.
Shout-out to all the Americans still claiming that they are more democratic than whatever other country. I take great pleasure in seeing the shit hole your country is and is still becoming. ❤️
It’s always been a shithole. The good part was the freedom, you used to be able to be exhasperated and complain to your friends. But we decided instead of improving society that some of us would rather give a bunch of facists cameras and microphones and turns out, those facists are the evil kind of facists, not this mythical “only here to protect us” kind.
There’s a reason why Donald and his friends in Washington have all of their discussions on Signal.
Man that was a stupid thing to joke about on a service like Snapchat
That’s a stupid thing to say about a child in any context on any platform. Even in jest, keep that shit tucked away in your head.
Well ya. It’s Snapchat. Why use Snapchat? Just text on your phone. SMS.
Snapchat is nothing more than a gimmick.
Snapchat, discord, Roblox, all these kinds of services are 100% monitoring everything you say and do partially for “safety” but mostly for marketing.
Also don’t say stupid ass shit like 💥 a structure where people go to learn. Jesus.
She said she was going to shoot the student and/or the school. Snapchat did the right thing. She is not the victim here.
Wanting frustration is not school shootings. Your “Justice” system is broken and your government spies massively on you.
Saying you want to shoot students or the school should not be ignored. If you were the parent of the student, would your preferred course of action is do nothing?
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.
Just the other day there was a post about whether Catholic priests giving confession should be legally mandated reporters of crimes that are confessed to them. Totally opposite vibe in this comment section.
It’s as if people think corporations should be less regulated than religions.
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 suspect a lot of the influence of Israel and the US on European politicians who again and again act against the European Public Opinon and in favor of Israel and the US, is the ton of blackmail material those two states have gathered on politicians the world over in the modern era of digital communications mainly via American systems, using portable networked pocket computers running OSes from American companies and which have everything needed to be a fully-features surveillance device, including a camera.
Every single vaguelly criminal or even just shameful action of any European politician with a chance of reaching a position of power, done via or around a smartphone or computer running an American OS and/or using American chat software, is almost certainly stored in a database somewhere.
Certainly that would explain A LOT of what’s going on in European Politics, especially when it comes to Israel turning full-on NAZI whilst European governments mainly just make believe nothing is happening or propose purely symbolic performative measures with zero effectiveness in stopping the Genocide.
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.
Oh man… The cops have to react to this.
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.
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.
The first documented school shooting in the US was in the 1920s. While they were not as prevalent, they continued happening and climbing. Then the 90s got way worse, the 2000s even worse. So, mass surveillance has been on the rise just like school shootings have been on the rise. Now read your comment again and see if it makes any sense.
That this is technologically possible at all should terrify you.
It’s been technologically possible for well over 80 years…
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
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.
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.
Very true, I know plenty of professionals that aren’t the most well versed in their specialist topic.
There’s also a case to be made for the sheer lack of funding going into education that leads to situations where teachers aren’t getting the training they need to be as knowledgeable as possible.
