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Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message
- throwa356262 1mo agoThis is instant uninstall for me. Anyway, looking forward to see EU version of this thank to chat control :( :(
- thehamkercat 1mo agoI hate to break it to you, but this is not the first time snapchat has done this Example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68099669 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68099669 and there were many more
- lostlogin 1mo agoSomeone should have been charged and prosecuted for that, but not the arrested man. Context and audience is everything, and he had no reason to expect fighter jets and security services.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- tsmr 1mo agoIf you're looking for an alternative: I'm currently developing an open-source alternative to Snapchat :) https://twonly.eu/ https://twonly.eu/ https://github.com/twonlyapp/twonly-app https://github.com/twonlyapp/twonly-app
- josefritzishere 1mo ago[flagged]
- metabagel 1mo agoIt seems like authorities determined there was no threat, but she was fired anyway.
- josefritzishere 1mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1mo agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- metabagel 1mo agoThis strikes me as somewhat like the old stories about people being reported by photographic film processors to authorities for submitting negatives of their own naked or partially clothed little children. That is to say that it seems like an overreaction.
- janice1999 1mo agoGoogle automated that years ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-reported-dad-police-photos-sick-sons-penis-child-abuse-2022-8?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-reported-dad-police-p...
- M95D 1mo agoWhat's a "student teacher"?
- projektfu 1mo agoA student in an Education program doing their teaching experience at a school, before they graduate with a degree in Education.
- metabagel 1mo agoThey are in the process of getting their accreditation.
- teach 1mo agoIt's like an internship that people do when they are thinking about becoming teachers. Usually it is a university student who is just finishing up their coursework on teaching, and they spend ~8 weeks or so working under an existing, credentialed classroom teacher in a public school. It lets them practice working with real students under more experienced supervision. They are not paid for it, and it's a required part of their training.
- instagib 1mo agoA student in a masters or bachelor’s program who teaches or assists a certified teacher.
- gus_massa 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_teacher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_teacher
- _zoltan_ 1mo agoThis is why you use end to end encrypted communications.
- janalsncm 1mo agoSwitching to end to end encrypted chat is a technical solution to what is ultimately a social/political problem. It doesn’t work: https://www.fire.org/cases/florida-international-university-police-arrest-student-over-jokes-whatsapp https://www.fire.org/cases/florida-international-university-...
- skeledrew 1mo agoProblem is those services aren't very user friendly. After all most users want to maintain history, recover their account if they forget their password, and other things not exactly compatible with highly secure communications.
- tsmr 1mo agoYou're absolutely right. I currently develop twonly, an open-source alternative to Snapchat, where I encountered exactly these kinds of problems, such as a passwordless recovery. I came up with the following solution, happy to hear feedback :) https://twonly.eu/en/blog/2026-passwordless-backup.html https://twonly.eu/en/blog/2026-passwordless-backup.html
- pikrzyszto 1mo agoIf you do not control the application that sends messages, the application can always do E2E, only to spy on the messages on the end devices and snitch if necessary... We need E2E + no "bonus features", and to ensure both hold you need to review the code.
- zzril 1mo agoIt's called "Matrix".
- rurban 1mo agoWith the 2nd end being duplicated to the NSA? They got their own keys now. Hardly better
- Onavo 1mo agoThat's a quick way to lose all of their customers. Inappropriate messages offering the illusion of privacy was the entire point of Snapchat.
- neilellis 1mo agoDystopic
- callc 1mo agoFor those with more knowledge, what’s the best direct and group messaging platform for security nowadays? Is it signal? 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)
- teach 1mo agoIt is Signal, yes
- mplanchard 1mo agoThis may be unpopular? But Signal > iMessage > WhatsApp, is my personal ranking. Usually it’s possible to get almost anyone on one of those, and while WhatsApp is far from perfect, it’s better than SMS or another totally unencrypted service. 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
- djoldman 1mo ago> "Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor." 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.
- LocalH 1mo agoThat's a really generous presumption. The direction this industry is moving towards is to use AI to avoid human involvement. At best, their algorithm flagged it, and a human rubber-stamped it.
- maxerickson 1mo agoI mean, the FBI guys that drove to the school probably read it.
- skeledrew 1mo agoWhy would a human review it? That only drives up costs for the company. Easier to use algorithms for everything and maybe pay the occasional fine when something goes seriously wrong and legal proceedings result.
- djoldman 1mo agoI mean the FBI / cops.
- skeledrew 1mo agoPossible they also asked AI to do a "risk assessment" and just went with it.
- johnnyanmac 1mo agoIf a human did read it, it very likely was not someone who was a native English speaker making well below minimum wage of the area they are trying to contextualize.
- teach 1mo agoStory aside, I'm most concerned with how closing a laptop "deleted" the lesson plan! It's hard to imagine how that could occur, and I've worked with a lot of people who aren't very technical.
- computomatic 1mo agoMost likely a SaaS app that auto-saves, but didn’t save properly. Then closing the laptop caused a network disconnect, and the in-browser app did not recover gracefully while awaiting reconnect on wake-up and lost all unsaved data. 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.
- mckee_plus_plus 1mo agoI have these problems with Zed on my local fs. Science is hard.
- cwillu 1mo agoI just spent an hour this morning talking with a friend who had an important saved draft email disappear after closing her laptop. Software is shit these days.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1mo ago> Software is shit these days. This is true, and we've trained end-users to pay for it, anyway.
- monocasa 1mo agoEdu saas is some of the worst crap I've ever had to deal with. It's one of those unfortunate cases of procurement not involving anyone who actually has to use it. 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.
- 1mo ago
- smusamashah 1mo agoIs this article written by AI? The story telling seems distinctly AI
- snapcaster 1mo ago100% >Your Snapchat DMs feel like a locked apartment — but the building management reportedly kept a spare key.
- bewareofscams 1mo agoThere must be people who talk like that. There must be people who think like that. There must be people who will find nothing disturbing if read or hear such a sentence.
- Sabinus 1mo agoIt's all the 1900s 'proper English' that's in the training material. There are indeed people who talk like that. https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
- Spoom 1mo agoIt's like their system prompts have a line that says, "Use analogies everywhere. Humans love analogies."
- binary132 1mo ago“Humans are very stupid so make sure to use childish analogical writing”
- fg137 1mo ago> She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor. 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.
- freediddy 1mo agoHow is that not considered libel or slander? That seems like a home-run case to sue the hell out of Snapchat for damaging her reputation for a joke made in a private conversation.
- cheeze 1mo agoWhat part of this was lying about what she had said? I think the entire thing is absurd but libel usually requires falsehoods to be published. Slander is similar. It isn't just "damaged reputation"
- johnnyanmac 1mo ago>What part of this was lying about what she had said? 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.
- tancop 1mo agoThis is completely wrong. I can get behind "think before you post" warnings where you have the chance to not send a threatening message and you only get reported if you do it anyway, but that's only for strangers. 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.
- skeledrew 1mo agoThou shalt not vent to another. Thou shalt keep thine frustrations within, until thou hadst a mental breakdown and art permanently locked in a padded room.
- john_strinlai 1mo agoi think the lesson is to just not do it on snapchat, rather than bottle it up until breakdown. (face to face > signal > .... > snapchat)
- skeledrew 1mo agoThere could be a Flock-like or Ring-like or some other device listening in on that face to face. And the phone running Signal or whatever might already be compromised by something Pegasus-like and sending whatever happens on it off to who knows where. That's the kind of world we now live in.
- john_strinlai 1mo agoyes, and whichever god you believe in might be listening in and come down to personally smite you! 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.
- skeledrew 1mo agoWhy do you think a random person being affected by Pegasus-like spyware is that low? The EU is pushing Chat Control pretty hard, and the US is outfitting ICE with an ever expanding arsenal of surveillance tools. There's a lot of stuff that's already out there, and of course the public gets to know about it only when there's some kind of leak. At any moment you or someone you're close to may have a device that's listening in on... everything, and be none the wiser.
- zzril 1mo agoWhen after an actual shooting, it its found that the shooter has, at some point in his life, made a post on social media that one could - if so inclined - interpret as an announcement of what he was about to do, people will go absolutely mad screaming: "Why did they not arrest him beforehand???!?!?!?!!!" This must be exactly what those screamers are envisioning...
- gosub100 1mo agoIs it possible to write a custom android keyboard that would let you use these compromised messenger apps by transmitting encrypted base64 text (plaintext to aes binary to base64 and back) and opaquely decrypting it? Could the app act like a translator app, but really provide encryption instead?
- john_strinlai 1mo agowhat would the benefit of this be over using something built for purpose like signal?
- gosub100 1mo agoYou could use any existing apps like fb messenger or WeChat, and it would dodge the "stigma" some have about signal.
- root_axis 1mo agoUse signal.
- tsmr 1mo agoOr twonly :-)
- jwpapi 1mo agoVenting reduces the likelihood of acting in aggressive feelings
- throw234259 1mo agoFunny how justice works. When teacher rapes her student, system tries everything to cover it up. Police refuses to take report, media calls it "relationship", victim is bullied to silence etc... Next time we will advice victims to write private snapchat message!
- mindslight 1mo agoWe need a society-wide rude awakening to the terrible realities of these attractive nuisances pushed by the tech^wsurveillance industry. People get lured into using insecure garbage software because "works for me" and "everyone else is doing it", completely oblivious to the fact that party to every interaction is an uninvited guest. 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!
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- delichon 1mo agoTurns out people have little sense of humor around shooting kids, go figure. It's about as safe to joke about as telling the stewardess about the bomb in your carry on. Just as personal tactical advice and not civil rights commentary, better to joke about scenarios where people have greater than zero tolerance.
- john_strinlai 1mo agothe people the joke was sent to were not the reporters. in fact, no human reported it. 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
- delichon 1mo agoThat also leaves out Meta, Google, TikTok, X, etc. They all have policies to hand over data without a warrant for posts classified as CSAM, terrorism, self-harm or threats of violence. They have law-enforcement portals and a 24/7 emergency-disclosure process. They are protected from resulting liability by the Stored Communications Act. I wouldn't be surprised if their humor detectors are no more forgiving than SnapChat's.
- john_strinlai 1mo agoindeed, all of those platforms should be avoided when you want to make jokes of that nature. they should probably just be avoided in general!
- S0y 1mo agoI saw a very similar story on youtube. A young woman was in some trade school studying to be a hair dresser. She had a bad day and posted on snapchat something like "I'll shoot everyone" The same system mentioned here triggered and cops showed up to her school. The whole thing was totally blown out of proportion and she got suspended.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 1mo agoI mean, I would be in jail for a long time if every time I went to a friend "I wanted to shoot him" was flagged. God that's horrible.
- dgrin91 1mo agoOn one side, I agree with most comments here - end to end encryption is the only way to go, don't use snapchat, etc, etc. 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.
- greycol 1mo agoPeople joke about a fire drills at work or their neighbour in the apartment building burning the toast and setting off the alarm. We don't equate that to people laughing about dozens of people burning to death (even if that's a possible reality of a fire) because to most of us it's not conceptualized like that. 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).
- atmavatar 1mo agoI find it fascinating that some people have never themselves or known anyone else who, upon some person causing them serious loss of emotional well-being/time/work/money, joked about harming them in some way while venting to a friend or relative without any intention of doing so. 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.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo agoThat's not a joke. You simply don't joke about "shooting students" with gun emoji. Not in this climate. I support any system that takes threats seriously, even "joking threats" to strangers in personal chats. Jokes have a tendency to escalate. 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.
- baubino 1mo ago> 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.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo agoYes, it is several steps away from thoughts. When you think a thought, you are keeping it to yourself, and FBI doesn't show up to have a chat. Whisper your thoughts to a priest, and seek forgiveness. Don't type your thoughts on a keyboard unless you really mean them! 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.
- xtiansimon 1mo agoSnapchat is so cooked