Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message
gadgetreview.com
gadgetreview.com
Messages to a friend should be completely off limits and never shared unless they report it. Not even the police should be able access it unless they have a court order, and then the user has to be notified before it happens so they can respond and have the order revoked if it's illegal. Even if the charge is terrorism or child abuse.
When things like this happen, it puts the products' deliberate security vulnerabilities (and in this case, outright hostility) in stark relief. But then people think "I wouldn't be that stupid" or "what can I even do about it" as they go right back to continue relying on these products.
It's certainly understandable how we all have to compromise and suffer insecure systems simply in order to get things done, especially when interfacing with strangers. But for our most intimate communications and personal relationships, we should insist on secure software! This wouldn't have happened with Matrix, this wouldn't have happened with XMPP, this wouldn't have even happened with Signal. And to that reflexive thought of "that takes too much time and effort, especially for non-techies" - I'm pretty sure the person in the article sure wishes she had spend that effort now!
(face to face > signal > .... > snapchat)
but there is significantly different chances of those events happening. there is a 100% chance snapchat reads all of your messages. a random student teacher being infected by pegasus-like spyware is ~= 0% chance. a flock camera in my living room is 0% chance.
because no one is risking their exploit chain, wasting their multi-million dollar tools, on the chance that the random person they infected makes a dark joke that they can report to the fbi. when it comes to sophisticated and targeted surveillance, normal people vastly overestimate their own importance. you only get so many uses of a tool like pegasus before it expires, so you dont waste those uses on frivolous "maybe"s.
just avoid snapchat, instagram, facebook, and the other platforms that promise you that they read 100% of your conversations, and you're fine. there's enough people making charlie kirk jokes (or doing actually illegal stuff) on those platforms that ICE will be kept busy.
if you're too scared to make a joke (or vent, whatever) in your own living room, face to face with a friend, because you are worried about your friend's phone being infected by nation-state-level spyware, i sincerely urge you to take a step back and do a reassessment of the risks in your life.
So I'd boost studen-teacher to 20%
Anyway, looking forward to see EU version of this thank to chat control :( :(
Example:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68099669
and there were many more
Context and audience is everything, and he had no reason to expect fighter jets and security services.
I think the entire thing is absurd but libel usually requires falsehoods to be published. Slander is similar. It isn't just "damaged reputation"
Swatting is illegal in some states (not enough, but some). I'd liken an escalation to authorities by a corporate entity as such. The lie is about the projected intent to harm.
Presumably, the actual text of the message was reviewed by a human? So the human(s) didn't get the humor either?
EDIT: by "humans" I mean the FBI / cops.
At best, their algorithm flagged it, and a human rubber-stamped it.
>Your Snapchat DMs feel like a locked apartment — but the building management reportedly kept a spare key.
There must be people who think like that.
There must be people who will find nothing disturbing if read or hear such a sentence.
https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
While humans do write this way, it starts to get unbearable when you put it next to all the other AI patterns, including the very first sentence.
I closed the article after painfully completing the first paragraph.
> The pipeline no one told you about
> 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.
I had to stop reading after that.
Everything about this is so fatiguing that I can’t choose what irks me the most: - that it’s 2026 and Snapchat doesn’t E2E encrypt - that Snapchat automatically dispatches to LE without a human reviewer or any checks - that the story itself was automated
This must be exactly what those screamers are envisioning...
This would have been unbelievable to me before this year. Then I used PowerPoint via the browser and found this level of data loss is a regular occurrence.
This is true, and we've trained end-users to pay for it, anyway.
I could absolutely see a combo of a super short session timeout when the browser tab isn't active anymore combined with not actually saving drafts anywhere except in that session that gets deleted with prejudice.
I don’t use Snapchat but have been meaning to increase personal and family security (security from government in TFA’s case, which is a sad thing to say)
As a certified Meta hater, I would love a better third option, if anyone knows of one, but WhatsApp has such strong network effects, and it seems like a decent way to moderately* improve the security posture of non-tech-savvy family.
*The thing where they store the encryption key with the backup is terrible, and can make the improvement essentially negligible in cases of govt subpoena or similar, but even so, using WhatsApp would still prevent stuff like this SnapChat story
the tactical advice is that if you want to make such jokes, do so using a platform that doesn't scan your messages with ai and auto-report to the fbi
Next time we will advice victims to write private snapchat message!
https://www.fire.org/cases/florida-international-university-...
Before they are sacked and lose their career for venting to friends.
They are not paid for it, and it's a required part of their training.
God that's horrible.
On the other side, she did write about committing a school shooting. Its hard to infer comedy from a text chat you have no context on. If you pretend this info did not come from corporate snooping then I have nothing against the FBI investigating this.
This is a teacher in the US who would have had to sit through live shooting drills and never believed a live shooting would happen at her school (How much would you need to be paid to work somewhere where you seriously believed you had a 1 in 100 chance of being shot in the next 5 years, it wouldn't be a teachers salary for most of us).
When someone has seriously harmed you in some fashion, it's pretty normal to fantasize about harming them back in some way (without intent to actually do so) as a coping mechanism.
Basically my experience in 2026 on Facebook and other major social media: there are no jokes. You don't do satire on your personal account; you don't deadpan jokes about violence, or gender, or national security; you simply do not kid around, even in private. A few of my close friends have called out my "joking nature" and my tendency not to take anything seriously. Sometimes they urged me to have a modicum of compassion for victims of violence or disasters. It is difficult for me and others, but don't joke. Don't celebrate violence. Don't wish harm on others. It will be taken seriously.
If any "student teacher" had that ideation of "shooting students" in his or her care, I would hope that they would be taken out of the system, sooner rather than later. No educator in her right mind fantasizes, or jokes, or muses about shooting anyone, let alone their precious students.
I don’t disagree regarding the tastelessness of such “jokes”, but at the same time this is just a step or two away from Thought Crime territory, which is very disturbing.
When you write down your thoughts, and send them across a global network, in writing, to other people who can read them, they become more than thoughts. They become speech, and rather non-repudiable at that. Perhaps if an educator is having thoughts about doing harm and violence in a specific way to specific people, they could keep that to themselves and not share it, in writing, with others.
"Thought Crime territory" is just bullshit scare-mongering, when you have people deliberately writing down specific threats, and sending them out over the airwaves. People who are placed in positions of responsibility and authority. People who are supposed to care for minor children, without threatening them with bodily harm and death.