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
So not Murica.
Compared to Russia it is, but there’s a lower threshold to start having rights, expressed in money you have to spend on lawyers.
In case of Russia no amount of money is enough to make it democratic and lawful even in some separate, specific, one can even say - personal, situation.
It’s the fallacy of “if it’s bad here, that means that other bad place is similarly bad”, no, that other bad place is an order of magnitude worse, but you are refusing to accept that due to lack of experience. And there’s “worse” someplace else. In many other places, actually.
I didn’t compare the US to Russia – you did.
And you know jack shit about my experience.
Bye
Are there any good countries at this point?
India
I could copy so many more, but here’s a taste of justice in India
https://youtube.com/shorts/lkrohkWRQlQ?is=pPUYmKUNnkj6Ki69
Oh yeah. It’s dogshit if you’re an SC/ST in the rural parts. But it’s nice for the rest.
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.
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.
Delta Chat is better than Signal imo.
Why?