Curmie Is So Old That He Remembers Something Called the Right of Privacy

The scene of the “crime.”

Over 16 years ago, in only the sixth post of this manifestation of Curmie’s blogging life, he wrote about the case of Gloria Y. Gadsden, who taught sociology at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania.  She had recently been allowed to return to the classroom after having been suspended for a couple of Facebook posts in which she obviously jokingly wrote “Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ...” and “Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete [sic.] hitman, it's been that kind of day.”  Yes, really.

There have been a fair number of other incidents of administrations not merely making stupid decisions based on a toxic combination of humorlessness and paranoia, but clinging to their fantasies long after their hysterics were proven to have no merit.  There were the professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout who ran afoul of the chief of the campus police for having a poster from the TV series “Firefly” on his office door, the faculty member at Bergen Community College  called on the carpet for posting a photo of his young daughter in a “Game of Thrones” t-shirt, the president of Oakton Community College who decided that a single-sentence May Day e-mail from a faculty member was a personal threat against her, and of course the student at Umpqua Community College who was suspended because she submitted an assignment that followed all of the stated guidelines. 

Plus, of course, all those “weapons” that, shall we say, weren’t: five of them are described here and another here.  (Those two posts were from the same year, by the way.)

Oh, and we mustn’t forget the retired cop who was jailed for over a month with a $2 million bond for posting a meme that referenced (not to be confused with “celebrated” or “threatened”) a school shooting.  (He sued and settled out of court for $835,000.)

There are dozens of others, no doubt, perhaps even including some that Curmie wrote about but didn’t link here.

But it’s that Gadsden case that’s the most relevant here.  This story is over a year old, but there was a recent article about it, apparently shortly after the release of bodycam footage of the incident  that a Friend of Curmie sent along to him.  (Thanks, Kirsten!).  And, alas, one suspects that this is a portent of things to come rather than a one-off.

Kristen Volpe was a student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois.  One of her students had closed her laptop mid-class, wiping out her lesson plan.  (Exactly how that works technologically, Curmie can’t quite understand, but that’s not the important part.)  Frustrated, she sent a private message to a total of three people, her boyfriend and two other roommates, via Snapchat.  The details of that post are unclear, or rather there are multiple versions out there because hallucinogenic pseudo-evidence and gossip will always dominate such cases, but the essence was something like “should I shoot him?”

Within an hour, she’d been arrested for “disorderly conduct.”  Say whaaaat?  Exactly how was what she did “disorderly”?  And how was the arrest anything but a violation of her 1st and 4th Amendment rights?

That bodycam footage shows that it’s clear that she believes she has nothing to hide.  That’s because no rational person would believe she did anything illegal, as the eventual dropping of charges underscores.  After she’s arrested, she says she made a “stupid post.”  Well, it wasn’t the smartest thing she’s ever done, but to Curmie’s mind it falls well short of the stupidity of literally everyone else involved in the case.  She was naïve, yes, in that she trusted that what was intended as a private vent would indeed be private.

This all started because Snapchat has some sort of algorithmic monitoring for certain messages, presumably key words: “shoot,” perhaps.  Curmie has read differing accounts as to whether there’s an intervening step involving a human at Snapchat.  If not, then there’s a lot of FBI time being wasted on messages about basketball games or filming schedules.  If there is, then whoever it was at Snapchat needs to be smacked up ‘side the head.

But the inanity only accelerates.  Someone at the FBI decided this message, obviously not intended to be taken seriously—and formed as a snarky question, not a threat—demanded immediate attention.  So, they called in the local police.  They ask for her phone, which she calmly surrenders.  Some commenters say the correct response to that request is “let me see your warrant” (there wasn’t one, of course).  They’re probably right, but that doesn’t necessarily come to mind for a post-adolescent convinced the cops had no reason to suspect her of any wrong-doing.

The cops proceed to lecture her about the alleged seriousness of her actions (Curmie can’t tell if they actually believe the drivel they’re spewing), keep her overnight (because they can, not because there was any legitimate reason to do so), and eventually let her go with no charges filed because even small-town cops can sometimes out-think an anvil.  The school administration promptly cut ties with her, probably ending her teaching career before it really started.  That’s because idiocy and cowardice are in a death struggle (oh shit, can I say “death”?) to be their defining characteristic.

There are, of course, plenty of people who place all the blame on Volpe.  The narrator of that Facebook page linked above (the bodycam stuff) is shocked, shocked!, as only Claude Rains in “Casablanca” has ever been shocked before, at the message.  He’s still not as annoying as “Mrs. Arensberg,” whose smirking commentary that “unfortunately, she had to learn the really hard way” drips with condescension.

Curmie’s got 20 bucks that says that every asshole who’s piling on Kristen Volpe has done the same thing… or worse, although perhaps not in writing.  Curmie has.  He remembers telling a stage manager that an actor who still hadn’t appeared for a dress rehearsal a half hour after call that “she’d better be dead or dying, or she’s going to be dead or dying.”  That, if you’re stupid enough, could be taken as an actual threat, not just asking for advice.  

A while back, Facebook informed Curmie that they’d taken down a message to a friend—not a post, a private message—about a year and a half after it was sent because it supposedly violated some damned policy.  A little late for that censorship to have a lot of effect, guys, especially since I’d long since forgotten what it might have been about.

There’s are three points to be made here.  One is that the level of surveillance of ordinary, innocent, people by the government and government-adjacent corporations has passed into Orwellian territory.  Curmie, being old enough to be Volpe’s grandfather, has never used Snapchat and doubtless never will.  He presumes that in signing up for an account, one has to agree to allow one’s private conversations to be surveilled, but of course no one ever reads all that lengthy legalese, and the Snapchat (and Facebook, and Instagram, and X, and Bluesky, and…) count on that.  It’s legal; it just isn’t ethical.

Second, this eavesdropping is largely if not exclusively instigated by algorithms, not people... not even idiots like those who sought to punish Dr. Gadsden in the case mentioned at the top of this piece.  At least those folks have the potential for reason, even if they choose not to use it.  The obeisance to AI means that context—including, but not limited to, sarcasm and other forms of humor—is lost.  And, of course, despite improvements over the past few months, the bots still get things very wrong, indeed: perhaps not quite to the extent of the “sexy onions” case from a few years ago, but bad enough.  There are, of course, too few checks on turning everything over to the whims of AI, and the ones that do exist are staffed by incompetents at every level, including, alas, the FBI. 

Finally, outrageous intrusions into personal privacy, whether by the government (think Flock cameras) or by some private corporation, are now routine.  The casual assumption by too many people seems to be that every over-reach by those who in Curmie’s day were called The Man should simply be accommodated.  Yes, there are lessons to be learned here about putting anything with even the potential to be misinterpreted in writing (it’s still illegal to monitor phone calls without a warrant).  It’s also true that tone of voice doesn’t translate to text, so the possibility of misunderstanding increases with the written word.

None of this changes the unethical conduct of everyone from Snapchat to the local school district’s administrators.  Unfortunately, however, blaming the victims of such snooping is now a blood sport, whether the aggression comes from ICE, the FBI, police in a small-town in Illinois, or somewhere else.  If someone who has no legitimate right to be monitoring what was presumed to be a private conversation doesn’t get the joke (or whatever), you’re in trouble. 

And we’re supposed to just go along, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as it were.  Curmie prefers Hamlet’s other option: to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.  Given the topic at hand, Curmie hastens to clarify that the “taking arms” here is intended to be metaphorical.  He’s not going to perpetrate physical violence.  He’ll leave that to the goons in the masks.