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.
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 job as well as your career and never being able to find another one too, right? Right?
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.
know what platform doesn’t have this problem? simplex.
that’s why neonazis are using it and why you should too.
Is it legal for a service to be called private when it is programmatically shared with law enforcement?
Welcome to post Constitution USA.
Hate to be that guy, but this is a skill issue.
Sending something that could be misinterpreted by an algorithm or law enforcement over unencrypted channels like this is just a terrible idea.
And this is why I’ve moved away from snap, and most other platforms, I’m back to texting and using carrier pigeons.
Who the fuck still uses Snapchat?
Ditch that shit.
I fully agree with how all of this is authoritarian bullshit but I can’t escape that nagging feeling that this too is about the US, the only country in the world where these shootings are daily occurrences; I get that people get ichy about even jokes like these
Marvel at how AI stopped this non-existent threat, while also giving advice on the best way to kill yourself, or get the highest kill score in a mass shooting, or hack into other corporations.
Sure, this tech isn’t ever going to start directly killing people it has determined are a problem, flipping off life support machines, crashing autonomous vehicles, etc.
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.
We wouldn’t know about the acts of violence they stopped, though, would we?
You think authorities wouldnt be on prime time news gloating about stopping attacks before they happened and justifying the privacy destroying bullshit they use as a necessary sacrifice for safety?
Joke aside, every time there were actual review of laws pushed to protect [insert whatever potential victim] from [insert whatever potential threat] at the cost of losing a tiiiiiny bit of freedom, the conclusion is always dire for the said bill/law/mechanism. All countries.
It is never ever about protecting the people.
They’d never let us stop hearing about it if it happened
Sort of the joke in this. Crime in western countries has declined as police hyper-surveillance has increased. I don’t think it is unfair to say that a suffocating perpetual dragnet created by a public-private Big Brother network has contributed to depressed rates of stochastic violence. Or that the few groups capable of committing crimes and getting away with it are the police and sheriffs offices, the individuals in their employment, and the turncoats they use to influence and infiltrate other groups.
We don’t count “preemptively solved crimes”, unless we’re trying to make headlines with “foiled assassination/terrorist plot” to inflate some bureaucrat’s reputation. We also don’t count false positives - people who had their doors kicked in and their family roughed up and their dog shot in the dead of night - when we’re tallying police effectiveness. Out of sight, out of mind.
The only thing we really see is active shooters on the evening news and burglary footage on the local. So we’re always having a “crime problem”. The current police state is never big enough. Surveillance isn’t “real” enough to impact the news cycle, because something is always happening somewhere that can be reported on as the next big Crime Wave.
Yea, seems a bit like survivorship bias. Do I believe this person would’ve done something horrible? No, then again, I don’t know them… But do we hear about every angsty teenager who has gotten reported through something like this? No. Why don’t they flaunt how much they may or may not stop violence? Because you can’t really brag about data that is intirely comprised of “maybe this could possibly have happened i guess”.
Well to be fair you don’t know about those
Yeah, I can’t feel bad for her. If you’re a teacher in the USA, you should NEVER be “joking” about shooting your students!
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.
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.
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. ❤️
take great pleasure in seeing the shit hole your country is and is still becoming. ❤️
That’s a pretty weird thing to take pleasure in, right? Wouldn’t you want the whole world to snap out of it and become better/united?
I’m not offering an opinion on the matter, I’d just like to point out that taking pleasure in one does not exclude the ability to take pleasure in the other.
Fair
Fuck that kumbayah shit
Why is stirring up conflict here beneficial though? I’m intensely critical of the current US government but me and the average American still have more in common with each-other than either of us have with our respective ruling elites in terms of material interest and daily life.
Yes their crowing about being the most democratic country on Earth is a bit silly but that doesn’t mean they deserve to become an outright plutocracy, nobody deserves that. You can object to Washington’s lofty perch in the global pecking order and to Americentrism in general without wishing ill on a whole nationality the vast majority of whom have done nothing to wrong you personally. The only thing I wish for the Americans is for them to fix their backsliding democratic institutions and to adopt a more realistic view of their country’s place in the geopolitical landscape; I don’t doubt these are goals many Americans support at this point.
Can that wait until after I get a bunker with a solid arcade in it?
We have lost more people to gun violence in the last thirty years than every US soldier killed in every war. Death by firearm is now the number one killer of US children. I have personally lost several people I grew up with to gun violence.
Almost 50% of US males have a criminal conviction and minorities have a close to a 30% felony conviction rate. Millions of minority and poor families have been destroyed by the war on drugs. People regularly get convicted of crimes they didn’t do because they are manipulated into plea bargains with the threat of massive time behind bars. The US jails more people per capita than just about any other nation.
The unemployment rate for those under thirty is around 40%. Most working class families are priced out of home ownership and going to get a higher education will often indebt you for decades. You are expected to constantly change careers or you will be quickly left behind with median position length of just under four years. Many Americans have up to ten or more jobs in their lifetime due to instability in our economy.
I raised my family for over twenty years with zero health insurance. Going to the hospital is a financially life ending event with bills easily reaching $10k + for even basic procedures unless it is just a few stitches. Medical bills account for 40% of bankruptcies and half a million people go bankrupt every year from medical debt.
I find it amazing propaganda can manipulate rubes so easily into hating each other. The wealthy have truly won.
Yeah, 100% agree. The wealthy also manipulate rubes into thinking that there is no viable alternative, that other countries (mainly China) are so bad and oppressive that the tubes believe they’d rather keep getting fucked than to follow in the footsteps of the Chinese. It’s so prevalent on this website and on Reddit that you’d see Americans claim they’re more free, and this comment was meant for them.
I think we both can agree on what is happening even if we see some things differently. I view the three major fascist leaning states as the US, Russia, and China in that order. While China has done some amazing things there is plenty of valid criticism outside of just western propaganda.
China is great because of the US not despite it. They have made the wealthy more money in a shorter amount of time than any country before it in history working together. China has produced more billionaires than any nation for the third year straight showing zero signs of slowing.
China is currently running cover for the entire industrialized world. If they were really at odds with all the western nations who dog on them then I don’t think they would have cut their oil consumption by almost 5 million barrels a day, thus staving off a collapse of global markets.
American freedom is misnomer and is merely a function of a lot of land spread out that creates a feeling of less government interference which is compounded if you are a privileged white male.
The US government is the universal destroyer of freedom, not the creator of it. I totally agree there are a ton US citizens that are absolutely clueless that they live in the most violent anti-freedom fascist nation in the world.
Speaking of following in the footsteps, this current administration has done several things to come closer to Chinese policy from trying to become more neo-authoritarian to allowing the government a more active role in business. If the current administration succeeds in its current goal the US could become even more of a one-party system than it already is.
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.
The freedom was always kind of dicey. Sedition act of 1798, for example.
Women also historically had a bad time of it. And the native peoples. Queer folks, too. Religious freedom is hit or miss.
It’s been pretty good for wealthy people, historically. They’ve been pretty free.
The good part was the freedom
Except for the slaves, which as you know, are explicitly allowed in the constitution.
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Slavery is outlawed
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Except for prisoners
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Invent a bunch of laws targeting the lower class, those in poverty, and those with substance habits
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Enforce the laws selectively against those with the least agency and socioeconomic means
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Make incarceration so dangerous that prisoners feel the need to commit further crimes on the inside to survive
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Game the system so that if you don’t want someone out, they don’t get out
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Enjoy your slaves in an emancipated country
You forgot a step, privatize prisons for profits.
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Sure, let’s whataboutism the discussion, love that.
I don’t know when it was but realising the American dream was garbage, and I don’t want to travel to the USA was strange.
It wasn’t like a big hit to the face, it was just a slow crumbling of the idea from media.
When you watched friends and saw people in these massive apartments, or huge mcmansions in other shows, it was always something to strive towards, now I actively dislike it. I would hate to live somewhere like that.
There are(were at least, who knows how much longer they will last) some incredible and beautiful places in America, but I also don’t want to risk my life flying there (and it isn’t the planes).
For me at least I feel like it was when the American dream turned from “anyone can do it with hard work and dedication” to “anyone can do it if they exploit others, get lucky, or come from money”.
The dream used to be “work hard and this will be yours” and it seems to have been turned to “work hard and dream about it someday, and maybe you can get close”. And it definitely changed over time. People often forget when the “American dream” came about it wasn’t “get a degree, and be a white collar worker for a chance” like it was with people my age. It was “go to work, wherever, with whatever skill set/background, contribute and you get a piece of the American apple pie”. Over decades though those goal posts have been shifted further and further.
Earning the American dream used to be a given for everyone if you worked hard and contributed, but over time it has devolved with a bunch of extra conditionals of “well that doesn’t count either” until we are left with “the dream exists, but only for a few who can actually get it.”
People these days are turning to betting, day trading, side hustles, and extreme budgeting to even be comfortable in some cases. That’s not how it used to be. You could work any job, minimum wage or not, and the benefits were supposed to be for everyone. That’s not the case anymore, and the American dream has faded along with it
The “american dream” has always had a problematic contradiction. You should work hard. Working hard is good. You should work hard so you don’t have to work anymore. Working sucks and you don’t want to do it. You want to be the guy on a golf course getting money while those hard working people assemble widgets for you.
Well, which is it then?
If freedom is the ability to complain, lots of countries with stringer regulations have that. They have it but better, even, because they have a much greater ability to stop it going away.
You do realize that Snapchat is a corporation that has nothing to do with the democracy, right? Your comment is more dumb than an American redneck
Oh honey, but it does. Real democracies have real privacy laws because you need the latter to maintain the former.
Everybody, wait till he learns abut Chat Control and that the same ghouls are lobbying for this kind of legislation worldwide. It’s not JUST America, it’s the underlying capitalist machinery that let’s them subjugate the masses everywhere.
We in America aren’t special.
You are unfortunately the country that has led the rest of the world down this evil path. You deserve to be especially shamed for it. Stop being such a bitch and own up to it.
I’m not downvoting you. I am going to tell you that a lot of the world’s troubles can be laid at the feet of the US hegemon, but that the EU and UK’s recent horniness for privacy violations has nothing to do with the US populace.
I would fight just as hard against it, as I am over here trying to educate and rouse the sleeping voices here in my states.
Let me has the chance, the small opportunity, to be a Rally Point for building up our communities. How can you and I do that, today?
That’s the problem though - corporations have too much power and are partly running the country, or at very least assisting political parties and governments. That’s not a sign of democracy
Snapchat had the ability to summon American law enforcement within a short timespan. Or is the law enforcement in question private?
Also, who was front and center at Trump’s inauguration, if not corporations?
In other words, stfu yank
Reading your other comments I can see you’re just a pathetic person incapable of intellectual discourse
You’re not even worthy of it. Go let trump destroy your country while crying about how enough ppl didn’t vote or whatever. Doomed to serfdom and deluded by your own hubris. Burn in hell.
“Hell”… lol… so you’re a religious psychopath too
Because I used a figure of speech? If you were to say “oh my god” then does that make you a religious fanatic too?
I don’t even live in America. You’re wasting your time with someone not even in the US. That’s how fucking stupid you are lmao
And liberals and leftists still support the narrative about Venezuela elections being unfair and that the US puppets should rule the country and turn it into a neoliberal hellhole. Including the Swedish Nobel price committee for empire advancement. They will never learn.
What the absolute fuck are you talking about you idiot
Lmao buddy what the fuck are you smoking?
A large fraction lemmy.ml literally cannot participate in a thread without bringing up western imperialism. Like, it could be /c/superbowl picture of an owl, and somehow it would devolve into that.
Yeah because western imperialism ruins everything.
It certainly ruined Venezuela, because liberals and leftists still believe the US is democratic and has the moral high ground to denigrate and interfere.
Who’s running the WH currently? I’ll give you a hint, it’s not liberals or leftists (they are also not even remotely similar).
You do know that liberals are not leftists, right? And that no serious leftist thinks the US is democratic? I’d call myself left and I abhor the US
I literally say when the shit with Venezuela started that a ton of “leftists” as in “left wing politics” or people still fans of Obama - they supported the US action against Venezuela. How does that make sense if they do not think the US is still a democratic country. If you think your country isn’t “A” and accuses another country of not being “A” you’d call it hypocritical and not believe it. But they did.
There is a serious disconnect there, and I believe it starts with doublethink or a type of disconnect where people know the US is not democratic, but still believe the US is democratic and fighting the good fight against “authoritarian” regimes.
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.
One of my friends is some sort of neurodivergent and just… won’t install signal. It’s “too much”. I don’t understand this. It’s 30 seconds of “click this link I sent you, then click install”.
What (if anything) does that friend use for messaging?
WhatsApp, sms, and Google chat (hangouts? Meet? The thing built into Gmail)
None of them are great.
It would be less surprising to me from someone who doesn’t understand how computers work at all and only wants to use SMS. It’s weird from someone who already uses several messaging apps.
