This 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.
Thou 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.
There 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.
yes, 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.
Why 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.
>Why do you think a random person being affected by Pegasus-like spyware is that low?
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.
Same, this is like blogspam in the days of old that doesn't add anything to the original content and is just there to generate revenue for this site. The linked posts are better and per HN guidelines the toplink should probably be changed to one of those.
> 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
It may be turtles all the way down, but we don't want to need to visit each tier, wading through obvious slop engineered for engagement as we go. The sloppiness reveals the low effort machinery meant to sap our vital attention and time. It's probably best to build a growing resistance to it.
How 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.
Why 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.
When 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...
For 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)
This 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
This 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.
I 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.
Story 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.
Most 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.
I 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.
Edu 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.
I've had cases where I'm writing some long text in certain apps on my phone, screen goes off, and when I turn it back on that text is gone. Could be something similar, though I can't imagine any desktop app being that crappy.
Turns 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.
That 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.
Funny 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!
If 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.
Problem 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.
We 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!
It'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.
Is 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?
On 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.
People 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).
This 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.
Thou 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.
i think the lesson is to just not do it on snapchat, rather than bottle it up until breakdown.
(face to face > signal > .... > snapchat)
There 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.
yes, 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.
Why 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.
>Why do you think a random person being affected by Pegasus-like spyware is that low?
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.
This is instant uninstall for me.
Anyway, looking forward to see EU version of this thank to chat control :( :(
I 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
and there were many more
Someone 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.
Is this article written by AI? The story telling seems distinctly AI
100%
>Your Snapchat DMs feel like a locked apartment — but the building management reportedly kept a spare key.
There 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.
It's like their system prompts have a line that says, "Use analogies everywhere. Humans love analogies."
“Humans are very stupid so make sure to use childish analogical writing”
> 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.
Same, this is like blogspam in the days of old that doesn't add anything to the original content and is just there to generate revenue for this site. The linked posts are better and per HN guidelines the toplink should probably be changed to one of those.
Yup.
> 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
The linked sources exist, so who cares?
It may be turtles all the way down, but we don't want to need to visit each tier, wading through obvious slop engineered for engagement as we go. The sloppiness reveals the low effort machinery meant to sap our vital attention and time. It's probably best to build a growing resistance to it.
How 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.
What 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"
> "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.
Why 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.
I mean the FBI / cops.
Possible they also asked AI to do a "risk assessment" and just went with it.
That'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.
I mean, the FBI guys that drove to the school probably read it.
When 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...
For 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)
This 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
It is Signal, yes
This 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.
Google automated that years ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-reported-dad-police-p...
I 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.
Story 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.
Most 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.
I have these problems with Zed on my local fs. Science is hard.
I 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.
> Software is shit these days.
This is true, and we've trained end-users to pay for it, anyway.
Edu 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.
I've had cases where I'm writing some long text in certain apps on my phone, screen goes off, and when I turn it back on that text is gone. Could be something similar, though I can't imagine any desktop app being that crappy.
[dead]
Turns 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.
the 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
That 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.
indeed, all of those platforms should be avoided when you want to make jokes of that nature. they should probably just be avoided in general!
Funny 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!
Venting reduces the likelihood of acting in aggressive feelings
This is why you use end to end encrypted communications.
Switching 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-...
If 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.
It's called "Matrix".
Problem 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.
Use signal.
We 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!
That's a quick way to lose all of their customers. Inappropriate messages offering the illusion of privacy was the entire point of Snapchat.
I 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.
What's a "student teacher"?
It'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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_teacher
A student in an Education program doing their teaching experience at a school, before they graduate with a degree in Education.
> before they graduate with a degree in Education.
Before they are sacked and lose their career for venting to friends.
Yeah, unfortunately they are not in the union.
A student in a masters or bachelor’s program who teaches or assists a certified teacher.
They are in the process of getting their accreditation.
Is 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?
what would the benefit of this be over using something built for purpose like signal?
Dystopic
This is insane. Pedophiles run free but imaginary crimes are punished immediately. the world has gone mad.
It seems like authorities determined there was no threat, but she was fired anyway.
Minus points? Who's pro-big brother or pro-pedo?
On 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.
People 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).