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.
So the lesson to the rest of us is DO NOT USE SNAPCHAT especially for private messaging.
I use Signal, was pressed to do so by privacy-minded friends and have pressed other friends to adopt the client.
So long as you don’t accidentally include Jeffrey Goldberg in your chat, you’re okay.
Wrong lesson. All the ways to track you combined don’t leave you an outlet.
Signal is fine to make you feel better.
It’s a social problem that should be solved by social, not technical, means. Awareness, law, burning tires.
EDIT: for moral clarity’s sake - I live in Russia, I’m not spreading awareness mostly, I’m not trying to change any law and sure as hell I’m not burning tires ; but if you live in a democratic country with courts and presumption of innocence until proven guilty yadda-yadda, you might try those
I live in the United States. Crime is not about behavior or adherence to law, but who we are. Those of us who cannot afford lawyers will be framed by law enforcement or coerced into confession, or extorted into a plea deal.
And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.
So we’re not a liberal, democratic society with rule of law.
In your society you can openly protest against people calling the shots, or be rude to cops, and not expect legal (and physical) retribution. There are places where this is unthinkable.
And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.
Yes, that’s because the public has ideologies and corporate interests, and no common idea of what it means “to serve the public”.
In your society you can openly protest against people calling the shots, or be rude to cops, and not expect legal (and physical) retribution
You are obviously not watching the dozens of phone videos displaying counterexamples to this statement.
Granted, it’s true for a shrinking privileged set, and the US saw for the first time in the 2014 Ferguson Unrest, just how brutal and militant the police will get if protests or rudeness to officers occur in a minority neighborhood. It’s not that police brutality wasn’t common before, but this time there were press on the ground streaming live video to the internet, and it wasn’t being filtered through news agencies.
Conservative protests get the light touch, such as the 2017 Unite the Right rally. In contrast, the George Floyd protests in 2020 were saturated with CS gas just like Ferguson in 2014.
Granted, protestors taken to court by the current regime are usually acquitted (if a grand jury succeeds in indicting them; they’re failing a lot), but then we’re now seeing protestors accused of being part of an Antifa terrorist conspiracy, and getting sentenced disproportionately for minor crimes.
Americans presume they have civil rights, as per those enumerated in the Constitution of the United States, but they’re legally being stripped away by federal courts, and law enforcement (and regime-loyal paramilitaries like ICE) are disregarding those rights more and more without accountability.
Even birthright citizenship is being challenged, and that face-eating leopard is going to take a lot of Americans by surprise.
The US is failing as a liberal society.
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Why?
It’s a terrible thing that’s happened, but fuck gadgetreview for that shitty misleading clickbait headline.
Editor knew they wouldn’t get the same impact with “teacher posted in a group chat that they were going to shoot a student”, so “group” becomes “private” and the detail about the threat gets moved way down into the article body. This is a journal who clearly wants to tell you what to think.
A group chat between 4 people should be just as private of a chat than between two people. Private isn’t a quantity, you can have a private chat with 100 people if you wanted. However clearly none of its actually private.
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Questions for the ridiculous number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up their right to privacy because you believe it makes schools and other places safer:
Have you read the 50+ page user agreement for your cell phone company? How about the user agreements of every app that has access to your cell phone, your PC mic or apps that have access to your files? Late model cars have microphones too, as do TV remotes. Microsoft has access to everything on your Windows PC. I’d give 100 to 1 odds that 99% of you haven’t read any of those user agreements OR the UA for private chat apps you are using. Likewise are you sure any cloud storage you’re using isn’t scanning your documents for forbidden phrases?
Since you haven’t read every word of each and every user agreement and think it keeps schools safe, you should be just fine with the fact that EVERYTHING you say or write may be available to law enforcement, even if you’re talking to yourself while sitting on the toilet in your home. If you mutter that you’d like to kill someone or burn something misheard as a school building to the ground you are just fine with AI flagging it and the police knocking on your door in an hour, right? You’ll also be just fine with losing your career and your job never being able to find another one, right? Right? After all, other people never know WTF someone dangerous and violent is going to do.
The number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up all their rights and have their private communications monitored for something that is nothing more than security theater is unbelievable.
My gawd. People are missing the issue here. You described it pretty well OP.
Yes there are weirdos and they must be caught. Algorithms are getting out of hand though, targeting their wrong people and not the weirdos. There is a massive privacy issue here. Must every text that we send be accessible by the government? I don’t buy the argument of “I have nothing to hide”. When you are in the hot seat they will use any info they can get their hands on. make an offside joke they will use it.
Fuck this shit.
Even people who have “nothing to hide” aren’t safe.
I’ve lost track of the number of articles about people who were wrongly accused by “AI” camera systems or flagged for arrest because their (relatively common-seeming) name matches or is close to an entirely different person who is a legitimate suspect. Some of those people have been jailed for weeks and have lost their jobs over what amounts to a clerical error.
Very well said! Privacy protects the innocent far more than it protects the guilty, and no false positive rate other than zero is acceptable when ‘van bursts in to take your career away over an AI detecting wrongdoing’ in my view.
If a false positive rate of zero is not possible then not building it is the only ethical option.
Real US judges have ruled that click-wrapped ToSes are not legally binding, since they commonly are bypassed, and app developers use dark patterns to discourage end users from reading them.
Also, ToSes and EULAs are notoriously verbose and difficult to read. People with college level reading skills struggle with them.
So no, blaming the end user is not appropriate here.
People with college level reading skills struggle with them.
That’s a bigger deal than you may think it is, given that US college students are testing dumber and dumber every year, and is accelerating thanks to AI.
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.
That’s a great point. If they aren’t scanning for things, they likely wouldn’t be held responsible, but if they are scanning things, now they are the arbiters of what gets passed on or not.
ChatGPT had an issue where someone got flagged for being a risk, they assessed it in person and decided not to action it, and then something happened. They’re being sued and the Canadian government is getting involved.
What has snapchat now actively decided not to action, where something bad happens, now that we know they read everything?
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.
And in any other country that may have been correctly classed as a joke, but in the US it ain’t a joke. What a dystopia
It’s HEARTENING to Know these Platforms have the ABILITY to STOP atrocities and Almost Always choose NOT too! <3
yeah.
Its amazing how they never once stopped an actual act of violence, but someone venting about a stressful day gets a full swat deployment.
someone venting about a stressful day
It’s not that I think teachers shouldn’t vent about stress. But in this day and age, a teacher who has the poor judgment to vent about stress by expressing the desire to shoot a student, in writing, probably doesn’t belong in the classroom to begin with.
Just about every parent I’ve ever met say they want to shoot or kill their kids.
It’s a stupid thing to be sarcastic about in that moment, but no one really thinks we should be taking everyones kids away. (For that reason).
“I’m gonna kill him” is in so many American movies involving kids or someone talking about their spouse.
“I’m gonna strangle em’”. Popular phrase…
None of them should be popular phrases, but they are, lol
You know some fucked up people, I’m sorry to inform you.
So let’s just accept things, accept that whooopsie the person said it and we knew but we did not act, let’s not change things! Right.
Well to be fair you don’t know about those
Is it legal for a service to be called private when it is programmatically shared with law enforcement?
This warrantless mass surveillance technology chain can also easily be used to silence dissent, chill speech, and oppress by race, religion, gender, sexuality, pregnancy status, and any other status so deemed problematic by those with state power. This is not a power delegated to the government by the constitution, and it was not built to protect the people.
We accept impositions on our liberty for the protection of the general welfare. Did this actually protect us?
It was a power pretty heavily implied not to belong to the government. And given thet the 9th says that rights exist beyond those explicitly stated, it should be pretty clear.
Anyways we must make the implied right to privacy explicit
we must make the implied right to privacy explicit
I would be interested in reading more about how you imagine this might work.
To be up front, I don’t consider unencrypted messages on someone else’s server to be “private” at all; Snapchat can obviously see everything anyone sends unencrypted on their app. So, that’s where I’m starting from.
In this case it pertains to how the app spent years cultivating an atmosphere indicating discretion. That’s why last time I thought about it (a decade ago) it was mostly popular for sending nudes.
My position here is that the government has been pressuring private companies to give them all the warrantless data they want. And I think they shouldn’t be allowed to ask. Hell I think they should need a warrant to view surveillance data unless someone in the incident consents or the owner of the data is the accuser.
Now I acknowledge that those two paragraphs allow this situation. But I also think that we shouldn’t be holding a reasonable expectation of privacy to what a privacy advocate thinks, it should be what an ordinary citizen and user of a service thinks. In that case, either I’m old and out of touch since my sending tit pics over Snapchat days are long past (I am) and this woman had an atypical expectation of privacy. Or Snapchat isn’t properly expressing to users the degree of surveillance they’re under and this should be taken as private communication and Snapchat should be forced to either change their surveillance levels or work to ensure that the average user understands the level of surveillance they’re under.
So yeah I think this is mostly a consumer rights issue, but it’s also an issue of the government keeps asking for data on private citizens that they shouldn’t be allowed to collect themselves and I don’t think they should even be allowed to ask
If the government asks, they typically need a warrant. (There are exceptions, but they’re fairly narrow). Is there a specific example you’re thinking of?
This scenario, though, is Snapchat volunteering the information. It wouldn’t really make much sense to require the government to get a warrant to recieve a tip, would it?
And shouldn’t we applaud the practice? Sure, in this scenario it was a false positive, but if this student teacher were actually planning to do what she joked about and Snapchat sat on that information, I suspect many of the people poohpoohing Snapchat would be angry that they didn’t inform law enforcement.
I have no idea why people are using Snapchat in 2026; it was never as private or discreet as it pretended to be, as you could just take a picture of the “self deleting” message with another device. However, it sounds like people still using it need to demand E2EE direct messages. It worked for Facebook.
This is why privacy, no access encryption services, VPNs, etc, are becoming so popular. Not because anyone is planning to do anything illegal, but because we don’t trust the people spying on us not to show up at your door. It’s already happening, it wasn’t dramatic or unrealistic like everyone says, even just this article proves it. You should be able to exist freely, without someone over-analysing every text.
The duality of AI…one stops nonexistent threats another one happily puts you into danger
There’s a reason why Donald and his friends in Washington have all of their discussions on Signal.
Also, if you’re not already, just assume every app and device are spying on you.
Welcome to post Constitution USA.
Welcome to reality. Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook, intsagram, etc. They are not private. Just don’t use them. It’s wild how people are willfully ignorant about this.
This 100%. Everything you write on any of these chats, anything you write in email, anything you exchange digitally can be monitored if it is not end to end encrypted. People are way too ignorant about it. Just because you can’t search your chat history up on Google doesn’t mean you aren’t being tracked, recorded and monitored.
Literally no different than going to someone’s lawn they say is for public speech regardless and then getting arrested for inciting violence.
It’s PUBLIC. If you want privacy then do it via your own means.
Time to tell everyone to uninstall their apps… Oh, wait. We already did that.
It’s pretty incredible how we leave digital footprints everywhere. Like the Device IDs that Windows uses on Win 11/10. They can find you pretty easily based on just that alone.
That this is technologically possible at all should terrify you.
It’s been technologically possible for well over 80 years…
Uh what
Edit I don’t feelike getting embroiled in the argument below so ill just note that eavesdropping by intelligence agencies is distinctly different from automated escalation by a private company to local law enforcement.
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.
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
Uh…huh…
This is so disturbingly common. Remember the dad that sent a picture to his son’s pediatrician?
