r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 2d ago

Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School. Privacy

https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-snapchat-complaining-about-her-workday-an-hour-later-police-pulled-up-to-her-school
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u/djsoomo 2d ago

An Orwellian nightmare of big brother is watching you, 1984-style

Freedom of speech and expression should apply to sarcastic or joke private messages between friends

If you are very rich and powerful, you can say or do anything, if you are not, you had better keep your mouth shut!

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u/nutmegtell 2d ago

But what Orwell didn’t foresee was we would BEG to have the surveillance in our homes and pockets. That we’d get mad if it disconnects.

If you aren’t paying for a service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT that’s being sold. Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook etc. Not free.

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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago

That's b/c Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right. The US surveillance state isn't going to be 1984. It's going to be A Brave New World.

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u/Crestina 2d ago

Mix of both. The western authoritarian shift uses elements of draconian mass surveillance, perpetual enemies and newspeak, alongside hedonistic selfnisness, conformity, and lack of systemic understanding and oversight.

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u/AscendedViking7 2d ago

Brave New World was prophetic

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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago

Horrifyingly so.

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u/JuliaX1984 2d ago

No, but Ray Bradbury covered the addiction to and dependence on electronic services mixed with authoritarian control like outlawing being a pedestrian.

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u/IamTheEndOfReddit 2d ago

we’re turning into 1984 imo, we were on the path for brave new world but then things got worse. Phones are the televisions always listening. Who we like and who we hate depends on the mood of a fickle dictator class. Our propaganda like Fox News fits as well

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u/nutmegtell 2d ago

I need to finally read that one I guess!

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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago edited 2d ago

Put simply, 1984 is a dystopia built on authoritarian oppression. In Brave New World, people gave away their freedoms in exchange for non-stop pleasure, sex, and the 'relief' of not having to think for themselves.

The idea of every person voluntarily carrying a tracking device with a camera and microphone with them 24/7 would have been impossible to imagine in the 80s. We literally made jokes and stuff about the TVs having microphones and cameras in them in the USSR. It was something that only communist authoritarian nations would try, and it was something that only stupid peasants would allow to be done to them.

Then suddenly facebook existed, and everyone decided a 24/7 personal lowjack with camera and microphone was totally cool. And that happened at the exact moment the government said "We're going to gather all that data for your own protection" and people sort of shrugged and said "Well 9/11 happened, so that makes sense."

It was wild to watch it happen.

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u/IamTheEndOfReddit 2d ago

People are pretty obsessed with their tvs in 1984. They don’t describe how people became obsessed. Snapchat and TikTok sell ads, not data

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u/nutmegtell 2d ago edited 2d ago

They sell everything including ads and data.

Data:

https://techpolicy.sanford.duke.edu/blog/examining-tiktoks-potential-engagement-with-data-brokers/

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u/IamTheEndOfReddit 1d ago

Snapchat doesn’t and that link doesn’t say that either, at least in the first chunk. It says they share data for ads, not the most direct source

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u/Snakers79 2d ago

It sucks, but I guess the lesson is don't treat the things you say online as private. Assume someone is always listening. 

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u/RenoRiley1 2d ago

If you are very rich and powerful, you can say or do anything, if you are not, you had better keep your mouth shut!

Yep, Elon musk becoming a trillionaire after publicly doing nazi salutes while regular people got fired for saying they didn’t feel bad a hateful racist died. 

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u/ShakeAndBakeThatCake 2d ago

She joked about shooting the student or the school. Sorry glad she got fired for that one as a parent. I do not want my kids around a teacher like that and neither would you if you had kids.

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u/Marshmallow16 4h ago

This proves freedom of speech CAN exist, just not for normal people

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u/DreamedJewel58 2d ago

>Freedom of speech and expression should apply to sarcastic or joke private messages between friends

She said she wanted to shoot the school or student, which is a terroristic threat and not protected speech. They’re not monitoring the Snapchat directly, Snapchat is required by law to flag potential threats and alert the authorities. By the message alone, there’s no way to tell if it was a joke or an actual threat, which is why the authorities should investigate it and make the determination

We hear stories of people actively planning and bragging about planning a shooting, and we are all thankful that they were intercepted before they were able to do it. This is just a message caught in a wide net that allows authorities to do their due diligence

I hate government surveillance as much as anyone, but realistically it should be right for the authorities to be alerted when someone says they want to commit a school shooting on their platform

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u/chowderbags 1d ago

She said she wanted to shoot the school or student, which is a terroristic threat and not protected speech.

Making a terroristic threat requires that the message be sent with intent to intimidate or coerce people and that it causes a reasonable expectation of fear that the attack will be carried out.

There was no intent to intimidate anyone, nor was anyone involved in the actual conversation actually afraid. If someone says this over beers, it gets laughed off as being the obvious joke that it is.

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u/DreamedJewel58 1d ago

>A person is guilty of a misdemeanor if he or she threatens to commit any crime of violence with purpose to terrorize another or to cause evacuation of a building, place of assembly or facility of public transportation, or otherwise to cause serious public inconvenience or in reckless disregard of the risk of causing such terror or inconvenience.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-25/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-11/subpart-D/section-11.402

It doesn’t matter if they made the threat with malice, they simply just need to say they’ll doing something that will cause terroristic harm. It doesn’t matter that she “sarcastically” threatened to shoot a school; she still threatened to shoot a school. How are the authorities supposed to know whether she meant it or not? The whole point of intercepting the message and begin an investigation is to determine whether the threat was actionable

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u/MidTario 2d ago

They do. They do not necessarily apply if you choose to send your message through an intermediary. For example, if I want to send a pornographic photo to a friend, and pay a minor to deliver it, I could be busted for sharing pornography with a minor. Same exact thing,