Man Hacks 911 System, Sends SWAT on Bogus Raid

An anonymous reader writes "The Orange County Register reports that a 19 year old from Washington state broke into the Orange County California 911 emergency system. He randomly selected the name and address of a Lake Forest, California couple and electronically transferred false information into the 911 system. The Orange County California Sheriff's Department's Special Weapons and Tactics Team was immediately sent to the home of a couple with two sleeping toddlers. The SWAT team handcuffed the husband and wife before deciding it was a prank. Says the article, 'Other law enforcement agencies have seen similar breaches into their 911 systems as part of a trend picked up by computer hackers in the nation called "SWATting"'"

Comments

Good grief

[spamking]

some people have way too much time on their hands.

Re:Good grief

[onion2k]

True, but in a good way. It's a pretty harrowing experience for the innocent victim but at least it was just a prank. A more nefarious criminal could use the same exploit to send a SWAT team to the other end of their jurisdiction while they carried out a robbery. This way the security flaw can be found and fixed with relatively little harm done.

Re:Good grief

[Korveck]

It is more than just too much time on their hands. I'd call it no sense of responsibility for own action.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

if( ( user.getAvailableTime() > user.getIntelligence() ) && (user.getHistory().eventExists(EventConstants.BREACH_OF_911_SYSTEM) ) ) {
user.terminate();
}

See? THAT's too much time on my hands being used productively.

Re:Good grief

[MightyYar]

I'd agree with you if the hackers had told the cops about the flaw and they didn't fix it - but in this case, they just exploited the flaw for their own amusement. Someone could have been killed, and then a lot of lives would have been ruined. Off the top of my head: the cop who shot an innocent or the innocent who shot a cop, the person who was shot, and possibly the hacker. Fucking with the cops is only funny in the movies.

Re:Good grief

[tnk1]

You say that, but good is relative.

What if the guy whose house this is happened to be at home cleaning his gun in his basement or in some way looked threatening to someone who was looking to assault his house? Sure, SWAT is trained not to shoot first and ask questions later, but I wouldn't be particularly happy to be flashbanged or tear gassed because some little shit can send a SWAT team to my house for no reason.

And of course, people who happened to be armed tend to look unfavorably at people attacking their home, whether they yell "Police" or not upon busting down their door. Sending a special weapons and tactics unit anywhere is a firefight waiting to happen.

Re:Good grief

[bigdavex]

True, but in a good way. It's a pretty harrowing experience for the innocent victim but at least it was just a prank. A more nefarious criminal could use the same exploit to send a SWAT team to the other end of their jurisdiction while they carried out a robbery. This way the security flaw can be found and fixed with relatively little harm done.

True enough. But couldn't he have sent them to an empty lot with a porta-potty? That sounds like more fun anyway.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all fun and games until someone SWATs someone and they turn out to be black. Try handing the SWAT guys your wallet and they might shoot you thinking you had a gun.

I think someone should SWAT the guys who do this.

(posted AC so I don't get SWATed, seriously)

Re:Good grief

[Guppy06]

"It's a pretty harrowing experience for the innocent victim but at least it was just a prank."

It's all fun and games until someone gets shot for resisting arrest?

Re:Good grief

[IndustrialComplex]

While the software can be fixed, the flaw isn't so easy to repair.

A nefarious person only needs a patsy to make a call on the opposite side of the city. $100 to a drug addict or something similar. Heck, the guy doesn't even need to stay there. Break in, call 911, leave.

In my opinion we are lucky that mostly everyone is law abiding. It doesn't take much in the way of planning to understand the flaws in our system. I suppose that is why it is a Justice System and not a Protection System since it must remain as a reactionary body. I would shudder to imagine what a protective police force would have to be like to be 'successful'.

Re:Good grief

[sholden]

Because no one has ever been killed in a SWAT raid before. Certainly never an innocent person.

http://www.cato.org/raidmap/

Re:Good grief

[Hatta]

Just a prank? Good god man! Mistaken ID gets people killed in situations like this. Frequently these searches are executed without any announcement. Just men with guns breaking through your door. What's a good law abiding citizen going to do if they live in an area where home invasion robberies aren't uncommon? They're rightfully going to defend themselves. The cops will rightfully defend themselves. Long story short, people die because of lesser screw ups than this. Don't minimize it.

Re:Good grief

[charlesbakerharris]

He'll have even more free time in prison.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. He's absolutely right and doesn't even know why--It's not at all funny that it's so appallingly EASY to fuck with people who have the power to arrest or execute someone who justifiably engages in defense of their home and family against armed invaders. In fact--it's downright distressing.

The cops should be held responsible for acting with preparation and intent to utilize lethal force based solely upon such readily compromised intelligence, and the flaw should be fixed immediately. The hacker--an idiot. But everyone knows the old saying--fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The cops have been getting fooled around the country for years and still done nothing to correct the situation.

Re:Good grief

[iminplaya]

Posting from work?

Re:Good grief

[darjen]

I'd agree with you if the hackers had told the cops about the flaw and they didn't fix it

If someone hacked their system and actually told them about it after the fact, they could very well be arrested and prosecuted like that guy who got by airport security with weapons and then told them what a crummy job they were doing. (Not sure who or when that incident was, but it was in the news not too long ago and I am too lazy and time constrained to google around for it)

Re:Good grief

[Colin Smith]

A more nefarious criminal could use the same exploit to send a SWAT team to the other end of their jurisdiction while they carried out a robbery. A more nefarious criminal would use the government to take out his competition...

Hmmm. Wonder what that particular service would be worth.

Re:Good grief

[apparently]

Wouldn't it just be easier to call the cops and rat out the competition?

Re:Good grief

[dgatwood]

You wouldn't even have to be at the fake location when you made the call.... It wouldn't take an hour to design a forwarding device consisting of a pay-per-minute cell phone, a cheap land line phone, a relay to handle answering the cell phone and picking up the other phone, and a wire between the two phones to pass voice and DTMF dial signals. Since the phone line is usually exposed at an interface box behind a home or business... you get the idea....

It would be really easy to exploit the flaws in the 911 system to your advantage. Fortunately, most of the sorts of criminals who commit crimes that would result in a 911 call are not particularly bright and usually don't plan far enough ahead to do something like that anyway. Smarter criminals are more likely to commit more subtle crimes like extortion, embezzling, money laundering, etc.

Re:Good grief

[GregPK]

I dunno, I think these days you would've found yourself under arrest if you had warned the police about the exploit. Plus, they'd likely charge you for terrorism.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

"some people have way too much time on their hands."

You just described the entire population of Orange County. Biggest waste of protein in the universe.

Re:Good grief

[CastrTroy]

Send an anonymous letter, possibly with a fake return address.

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

It's a potentially lethal prank.

SWAT are paramilitary - just like soldiers in Iraq, they're generally much more primed to 'shoot first and ask questions later'. This, while acceptable in high risk situations like clearing buildings with terrorists in them, hostage situations, and active shooter cases, you don't want them running around in active mode in normal areas/situations.

SWAT has been known to kill people when stuff like this happens.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

> A more nefarious criminal would use the government to take out his competition...

An even more nefarious criminal would use the SWAT team to go after a politician who supported no-knock raids and warrantless searches.

Re:Good grief

[stoolpigeon]

best comment of the day - hands down.

well played iminplaya

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

"Sure, SWAT is trained not to shoot first and ask questions later, "

I'm afraid that I'd have to disagree with this. At least compared with normal officers, SWAT is indeed trained to shoot first.

This can be considered acceptable if SWAT usage is restricted to high risk situations, where not using these tactics is likely to result in more deaths, but some areas have them serving most of the warrents - even on unarmed, non-violent dentists moonlighting as bookies.

Re:Good grief

[Teufelsmuhle]

I always thought it was, "Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."

Re:Good grief

[Omnifarious]

I agree wholeheartedly with this. Though I do commend the cops in question on having made the right decision and they didn't shoot the guy. But it could easily have gone the other way. With a little more knowledge by the teenager he could've set the cops up for it even more than he did and made it that much more likely.

Assassination by tricking the cops into doing it for you has now been proven to be possible. It's only a matter of time. And I bet if it had gone down that way instead of the way it did, we'd never even be hearing about this case.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

So blame the hacker for what should have been an excellent commentary on the quality of police training and use of force policies.

The police department can't say "someone could have been killed" because that would show lack of confidence in their own infallibility.

Re:Good grief

[Jehosephat2k]

"Sending a special weapons and tactics unit anywhere is a firefight waiting to happen."

It's what we have when we live in a post-911/tripwire society. Shoot first, ask questions later. The fact that teh swat can be tricked into overkill mode/business as usual like this is quite frightening.

Re:Good grief

[IndustrialComplex]

Very true. The average bank robbery results in about $5,000 stolen by the robber.

Consider that you could probably make $30,000 per year as a bus driver. You would have to rob at least 5 banks per year to come close (No taxes :p) . I'd imagine that after the 3rd bank you would jump up pretty high on the FBI watchlist.

An average 'tech' job probably earns you more than the most active bank robber.

Re:Good grief

[Belacgod]

This also proves the danger of having SWAT teams carry out routine arrests in general. We already know they go to the wrong house on the word of unreliable informants, and sometimes go in guns blazing--imagine if they'd done a no-knock raid on this house.

Re:Good grief

[encoderer]

The problem is that more of our crimes today are committed by criminals.

Re:Good grief

[Colin Smith]

That's basically what you're doing. But this way you guarantee a swat team on site. Instant escalation.

Re:Good grief

[lordsid]

A Patriotic citizen would use the SWAT team to go after a politician who supported no-knock raids and warrantless searches.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

the cop who shot an innocent

Then perhaps the cops are not really acting how they should. If they can't correctly determine the danger, maybe they should be shooting first. Perhaps they should always go in thinking that maybe they should be shooting everybody in sight and that maybe they are wrong it the first place.

I think this shows that cops shouldn't be acting as if they are if South Vietnam in the late 60's.

Re:Good grief

[pclminion]

I'd agree with you if the hackers had told the cops about the flaw and they didn't fix it - but in this case, they just exploited the flaw for their own amusement.

Tell the cops about it? Are you fucking insane? He would have been arrested and charged with some kind of terrorism. If he knows of a security issue, that means he was testing security -- a.k.a. "hacking." Sadly, this was probably the only way to point out the flaws in the system without ending up in prison. Unfortunately he didn't cover his tracks well enough.

Re:Good grief

[SengirV]

That's why those on the left want to take away your guns, so that when they sent in the troops to overrun your house, their good little jackbooted soldiers won't get one betweent the eyes.

No man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the
people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to
protect themselves against tyranny in government.

- Thomas Jefferson, June 1776

Re:Good grief

[Reece400]

Based on the article I'd assume the kid hacked in something along the lines of 'couple being held hostage in their basement, suspect armed & dangerous'

Re:Good grief

[pclminion]

What if the guy whose house this is happened to be at home cleaning his gun in his basement or in some way looked threatening to someone who was looking to assault his house?

That would have been Very Bad. This guy and his whole family could have died because a fucked-up 911 dispatch system can be hacked into by any random idiot. Placing blame on the specific individual who broke into the system misses the point completely.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they could get some revenge.

Here's my two cents worth (9/25/2005) about the American Secret Police (thank you, Mr. Nixon, for your war on (some) drugs that make people go insane. The laws that make people insane, not the drugs.

Next on Cops: Hackers on crack! Stay tuned to FOX (in the henhouse)

-mcgrew

Re:Good grief

[griffjon]

It looks like this was a close call; FTA:

Thinking that a prowler was roaming his back yard, a resident of the home, identified only as Doug B. in the district attorney's complaint filed in court, walked outside with a kitchen knife as SWAT officers from the Orange County Sheriff's Department waited with assault rifles.

"It was just a horrifying experience," said Doug B., who requested not to be identified further. "You think you feel safe in your own home. We had no idea what was going on."

Doug B. and his wife did not feel safe in their home for weeks after the incident and wondered why their home was the one selected.

Doug B. was not able to go back to sleep for hours that night, and he rigged the doors and windows before he was able to go to bed.

If you're going to expose a flaw, a) Responsible disclosure, y'all -- find some way to alert the service provider know that they have a hole, and give them a chance to fix it. With the increasing shoot-the-messenger trends, you might do that anonymously, but still. b) if you're gonna exploit it, don't choose some random innocent. This was a family of four who could've easily lost a member or two due to a twitchy finger or false move, not to mention psychological harm to the toddlers having a SWAT team roll in. If you're gonna do something stupid and socially irresponsible like abusing a 911 system (or if responsible disclosure hasn't gotten the hole closed), at least minimize the damage you're doing; send the response to an empty lot/open field.

Re:Good grief

[russ1337]

What if the guy whose house this is happened to be at home cleaning his gun in his basement or in some way looked threatening

What if the SWAT team was sent to this man's house... then it'd be freakin hilarious.

Re:Good grief

[SIIHP]

"but at least it was just a prank."

How can you possibly know that?

Please explain how you can know that while these cops were answering this call they weren't actually needed elsewhere?

Oh, right, you can't. Yet you still seem to think it was "just a prank".

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

"What's a good law abiding citizen going to do if they live in an area where home invasion robberies aren't uncommon? They're rightfully going to defend themselves. The cops will rightfully defend themselves."

This is a problem with the system. Getting killed by those charged with protecting the innocent by merely defending yourself? Clearly the cops are in fact aggressive invaders and shouldn't be given any privileges.

Re:Good grief

[Stripe7]

This is not the only way to point out the flaw to the police. If he was afraid of being prosecuted for finding the breach, he could have just as easily used anonymous proxies to send the information to police, government officials and the press. At the very least instead of sending the SWAT officers out he could have just left them a warning on the 911 system itself. He did it for kicks and put peoples lives in danger.

Re:Good grief

[QMO]

Not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that, in general:

Criminals aren't criminals because they're smarter than average.
(Maybe more arrogant than average?)
If they were smart they'd realize that probability is always against someone trying to hide.

Re:Good grief

[KDR_11k]

Or send them to a politician.

Re:Good grief

[Anti_Climax]

And of course, people who happened to be armed tend to look unfavorably at people attacking their home, whether they yell "Police" or not upon busting down their door. Sending a special weapons and tactics unit anywhere is a firefight waiting to happen.

More than that, no-knock warrant raids have, on more than one occasion, been served to the wrong address and in the process officers have been killed by surprised residents. If a home owner does not have a reasonable expectation that a no-knock warrant may be served (e.g. not doing illegal things that might result in a SWAT raid), they may not be held legally responsible for shooting or killing an officer. Obviously there has to be reasonable evidence that they did not know it was law enforcement when they acted, but ultimately the outcomes of these situations should be put on whomever was responsible for the incorrect address being served.

Dominos can find the right house, you'd think the cops could. Then again, when it's not right the pizza guy isn't going to be kicking in the door holding a gun.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

A little early in the day to be off your meds, no?

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why those on the left want to take away your guns, so that when they sent in the troops to overrun your house, their good little jackbooted soldiers won't get one betweent the eyes.

Like the Republican administration's ability to grab anybody they want off the street, label them as a terrorist, and hold then incommunicado indefinitely and without a trial?

Its ironic how gun advocacy groups also support the: "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists" Administration?

Re:Good grief

[srhill]

possibly with a fake return address An anonymous letter with your real return address wouldn't help much now would it?

Re:Good grief

[24-bit Voxel]

Fark and Digg.com are ----------> that way. I thought we got rid of all you guys years ago. Everything goes full circle I guess. Why am I arguing anyway, what kind of person calls someone a pussy and posts as AC? (Answer: an even bigger pussy.) Who hasn't been hassled by the police for cryin out loud? You talk as if this is the disease, but it's just a symptom.

Re:Good grief

[dnormant]

If this had been me, instead of a kitchen knife I would have had a rifle and I would be dead now and my family without me. Not dangerous? Maybe not this time.

Send this punk ass to get his ass punked.

Re:Good grief

[DerekLyons]

The fact that teh swat can be tricked into overkill mode/business as usual like this is quite frightening.

So what would have them do? Ignore a 911 call? Wait around playing cards while a patrol call investigated a situation they might not have been able to handle (had the call been real)?

Re:Good grief

[nschubach]

Oh man! What am I going to do with all my whores now?

Re:Good grief

[trailerparkcassanova]

What if the guy whose house this is happened to be at home cleaning his gun in his basement

That's easy. Homes in Lake Forest, CA. don't have basements.

Re:Good grief

[mangastudent]

It's what we have when we live in a post-911/tripwire society. Shoot first, ask questions later.

HELLO???

Try "Post-Nixon's initiation of the War On Drugs".

Now, it's perhaps unfair to blame you for not knowing the entire history of something that probably started before you were born (I was in grade school, but it had an "educational" impact back then), but ... surely you've heard of no-knock warrants and their related atrocities which have been going on for decades and decades???

Bipartisian and nothing to do with the GWOT.

Re:Good grief

[theshowmecanuck]

scenario: Instead of a knife the homeowner gets out a gun (who cares what kind, pistol, shotgun, rifle). He goes outside and sees a cop in shadows under a bush and points the gun at him/her... all perfectly legal to him since all he can't tell is that these are prowlers trespassing on his property. (I am assuming California is a state that allows a home owner to actively defend his/her home with a gun. Regardless, the 'hacker' could have caused this to happen in a state where it is permissible.) The other police see him point the gun and shoot him. This could have been the result of this and would not have the fault of the police nor reflect badly on their training or on the quality of their work. It would be well within their training since they think the home owner is an armed and dangerous felon.

There are many permutations of this scenario.

Bottom line: you are wrong. Anyone, including the police can say that, 'this was an irresponsible and dangerous action the hacker took and someone could have been killed.' And by saying it, it certainly does not indicate any lack of confidence in the police training. And I don't believe the police are infallible, nor do I think that they believe they are infallible. Otherwise they wouldn't train so hard to make sure they do things as well as they possibly can. Why train if you are infallible?

Re:Good grief

[kalirion]

Send an anonymous letter, possibly with a fake return address.

Isn't the point to NOT have SWAT teams show up at random addresses?

Re:Good grief

[XdevXnull]

That how the old saying goes in Tennessee--I know it's in Texas, it's probably in Tennessee.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone could have been killed

Only because american cops are dumb hicks who think that it's okay to shoot people while they're working

Re:Good grief

[kalirion]

I'm afraid that I'd have to disagree with this. At least compared with normal officers, SWAT is indeed trained to shoot first.

In the case you linked to, the officer was only trained to accidentally shoot first. Of course if it was anyone other than a cop, they'd be arrested for murder.

It's very easy to spot the difference between an accident and intention:
1 shot = accident
multiple officers shooting and reloading for up to a minute or two = intentional.

Re:Good grief

[sd_diamond]

True, but in a good way. It's a pretty harrowing experience for the innocent victim but at least it was just a prank.

Considering SWAT teams' well-recorded penchant for violent overreaction during their raids ("It looked like he was holding a gun!"), this could very, very easily have turned into much more than "just a prank".

I can say this: if some little shit decided to put me and my family through an ordeal like that, then he'd better hope I didn't find him.

Re:Good grief

[Trailer Trash]

This problem has been going on since long before 9/11 - it's unrelated. Radley Balko has been doing the bulk of the work in exposing it, but it's more than one man can do.

Re:Good grief

[vishbar]

"just a prank"?

This boy intentionally caused a highly trained urban assault squad to burst into an innocent family's home under false pretenses that there was a murder in progress. They had been told by the "prankster" that there was someone with a live firearm inside the house--someone who had already supposedly shot the "prankster" and his sister. This was more than "just a prank"....the people in the house are VERY lucky that nobody was hurt.

Re:Good grief

[Mr. Freeman]

SWAT isn't going to shoot unless they have reason to AT THE SCENE. There is no way in hell anyone could send orders to SWAT to say "kill person XYZ". SWAT doesn't do assassinations, they are called in to prevent deaths if possible.

Even if orders do get sent to SWAT saying "kill person xyz at address abc", they aren't going to do anything because they'll immediately recognize that it's not real. The only reason SWAT members discharge their weapons is if there is an immediate danger to themselves or others (I.E. madman pointing a gun at police or shooting from a window at people below).

Re:Good grief

[crakbone]

Glad he didn't hit the fridge for a late night snack while he was holding that knife. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVcnXjUJ3C0&mode=related&search=

Re:Good grief

[pclminion]

This is not the only way to point out the flaw to the police. If he was afraid of being prosecuted for finding the breach, he could have just as easily used anonymous proxies to send the information to police, government officials and the press.

People ignore such reports, as has been proven time and time again.

He did it for kicks and put peoples lives in danger.

He didn't put anyone's lives in danger. The 911 center did, by using systems which can be spoofed by any fucktard with a cell phone.

Re:Good grief

[Hatta]

You're absolutely right. Cops have way too much power and way too little accountability. In fact, one fellow killed a cop in just this kind of circumstance. No knock, thought it was a robbery, shot the intruder, ends up on death row as a cop killer.

Personally, I'm more afraid of the police than those they're supposed to protect me against.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

It's likely that the officers in the SWAT team have some uncomfortable explaining to do. They didn't bother to find out who was the regular detective on the case before responding. That's a serious procedural mistake. It will be taken seriously, not for humanitarian reasons, but because if this had been an actual crime in progress, and an arrest had been made, the perpetrator might walk away due to errors in police procedure. Most of the asshole-ness of cops results from the fact that they get bad reviews and limited promotion opportunities if they fail to follow policy and procedure to the letter.

Re:Good grief

[Master of Transhuman]

Reminds me of an old William Burroughs article where he suggested calling in hoax calls to the cops and sending them on wild goose chases while insurgents strike elsewhere. This would be way more efficient.

A simple DoS on 9/11 would work, too. I just found this one on Google:

4-year-old does denial of service against 911
By Humphrey Cheung
Friday, July 06, 2007 06:25
Carpentersville (IL) - A four-year-old girl is in big trouble after calling 911 hundreds of times on a mobile phone. Law enforcement officials say the Carpentersville girl called the emergency number 287 times in June and as much as 20 times per shift. She was finally caught after dispatchers promised to deliver McDonalds food (Happy Meal?) to the house.

The girl used her mother's deactivated mobile phone for the calls. All carriers in the United States must provide 911 access, even if regular phone service has been cut off.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Gunfire and womens screams in the red and white building at the corner of Victoria Rd and Rainer St (Nanaimo, BC)

Re:Good grief

[Em Adespoton]

Dominos can find the right house, you'd think the cops could. Then again, when it's not right the pizza guy isn't going to be kicking in the door holding a gun.

Interestingly, Dominos appears to have a better verification system than 911 too... try calling up Dominos and giving a bogus address and credit card info.

Then again, Dominos runs SCO Unix, so maybe their system could be hacked this way too.

Re:Good grief

[Alinabi]

I'm afraid that I'd have to disagree with this. At least compared with normal officers, SWAT is indeed trained to shoot first.

Actually, it is alright for normal officers to shoot first and ask questions later

Re:Good grief

[TT075127]

Internet with no boundries..a lot of intelligence people out there want to test their knowledge and skills..by doing something crazy like this will give them satisfaction and it will proof that the security system still vulnerable. "Just one click to rule them all" "You are the choosen one"

Re:Good grief

[sound vision]

Troll? Slashdot groupthink disgusts me. This is why I have a +3 modifier to Troll and Flamebait in my prefs. I will have to wade through some GNAA shit every once in a while, but it's worth it when I can hear an opinion that some jackass attempted to hide by abusing the moderation system. Protecting yourself from the government is the most important reason that private citizens need weapons. But somehow, it never gets mentioned in any debate I've seen/read. Jefferson really hit the nail on the head in that quotation. Taking weapons out of the people's hands is a hallmark of oppressive governments. It was one of the first things Hitler did when he came to power. A trite example, but it's true. The best way to quell a revolution before it happens is to de-fang the populace by removing their ability to fight back. There's actually a lot of things the Founding Fathers said that seem to have been forgotten these days - states' rights for one. But I won't bother getting into that. Here, don't waste your mod points, let me do it for you: -1, Offtopic

Re:Good grief

[grahamd0]

People ignore such reports, as has been proven time and time again.

He didn't put anyone's lives in danger. The 911 center did, by using systems which can be spoofed by any fucktard with a cell phone.

[sarcasm] This young hero has shown great courage today. I think we should all commend his patriotic efforts to improve our police services and protect the public good. We can rest easier tonight knowing that pure, kind-hearted souls such as this young man are out there to protect us from these rogue paramilitary teams prowling our streets. [/sarcasm]

Re:Good grief

[Omnifarious]

SWAT isn't going to shoot unless they have reason to AT THE SCENE. There is no way in hell anyone could send orders to SWAT to say "kill person XYZ". SWAT doesn't do assassinations, they are called in to prevent deaths if possible.

Well, that's very true. But it would be stupid to do that, and I clearly somehow manage to miscommunicate my point in my post if that's what you think I meant.

To be perfectly clear, here are the steps you would follow:

1. Trick the 911 system like this teenager did.
2. Report the description of the person you want to kill.
3. Say that the person has killed a few other people and seems to be really handy with just about any weapon.
4. For even better effect, say that he has killed one person who tried to fight back in close quarters with a well placed jab to the throat.
5. Say the person is on PCP.
6. Call the person in question and say you're a neighbor and saw someone outside with a light.

Poof, there's a recipe for a likely 'accidental' shooting of an innocent person by the cops. You've basically told them there's a horribly deranged and dangerous person somewhere and then primed the person to react belligerently in the first instant the person notices anything.

It wouldn't work as well if your target were a woman because of cultural conditioning, but you might still be able to pull it off.

Even better, because the cops never, ever admit they're wrong, ever, the person then ends up framed for some bogus crime so the shooting seems justified.

Re:Good grief

[JesseMcDonald]

The other police see him point the gun and shoot him. This ... would not have the fault of the police nor reflect badly on their training or on the quality of their work.

I don't know about that. Generally I would consider someone to be at fault if they choose enter someone else's property without permission and end up shooting the owner. The owner has every right to be there, and to be armed, and to defend itself against intruders. Shooting someone for defending themselves against a threat you created hardly counts as self-defense, particularly when you're an uninvited guest on their property.

Re:Good grief

[microbee]

Well, the problem is that he chose a "random" address.

He should have chosen the address of the mayor or head of police. That'd make him a hero instead of an asshole.

Re:Good grief

[brianwgray]

If only government provided a protected disclosure almost like the Good Samaritan law. You help someone that is choking and crack a rib you're protected by law. Why this can't be applied to computers. Having a private company provide disclosures have too many issues to contend with that can not easily be resolved. Example: http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070911/why-i-never-posted-rspolicy/

Re:Good grief

[FuzzyDaddy]

"Suspect has hostage in basement and is holding detonator to instantly kill victim. Suspect is unaware they have been identified. Suspect threatened to kill hostage at the first sign of the police."

Not saying it would necessarily cause the person to be shot, but it would certainly raise the odds, don't you think?

Re:Good grief

[E 99]

You'd be arrested for informing the 911 center that their system has a security flaw?

Looks like someone gave the pot smokers have mod points again. Hey, I think the FBI knows about your stash! They're probably on their way to get you now! Better make a run for it!

Re:Good grief

[h4rm0ny]

Humorous, but I suspect they'd be much more hesitant about busting into an obviously wealthy home than one that is not - more checking of facts, etc.

Re:Good grief

[pclminion]

This young hero has shown great courage today. I think we should all commend his patriotic efforts to improve our police services and protect the public good.

Don't be fucking stupid. Nobody is calling this guy a hero, including me. His motivations are irrelevant. Lock him up if you want -- it doesn't solve the problem. FIXING THE SYSTEM will solve the problem. Had he not identified the flaw, someone else would have, with potentially even more serious consequences. This is not an ethical question, it is a practical one.

Re:Good grief

[MBGMorden]

Not for informing them per sé, but rather for messing around with the system enough to discover a security flaw (ie, you comprised it to see if it could be compromised).

It's not so much the act of informing them, but rather the act of breaking into the system in the first place.

Picture this: you come home from a days work. There's this teenager sitting at your dinner table waiting, and when you come in he says "Dude, did you know your lock is really easy to pick? Change it. I promise I didn't take anything. Later!".

I know one kid who is taking a quick trip to jail for breaking into my house . . .

Re:Good grief

[Odin_Tiger]

Better approach: Anonymously send all relevant info to a well-known security researcher or group who is more likely to know what to do with it and not easily silenced without creating a Streisand Effect.

Re:Good grief

[Basehart]

I'd have thought there'd be less chance of being caught by just killing the person manually instead of by remote control. Less chance of the trail being followed back to you that way.

Re:Good grief

[joggle]

He could have put in the address for the local baseball stadium as the Blues Brothers did.

Re:Good grief

[Kingrames]

Okay I hate to be the douchebag you're baiting for, but that map clearly shows that innocent people are raided at a very common rate, and that the SWAT teams in question are actually doing an EXTREMELY good job at determining whether there's a serious threat right off the bat, and responding quickly.

I expected a shitload more pins in the DFW area, especially with the amount of corruption in our police force, and a heck of a lot more innocents raided. And I was sorely disappointed to know that the police are apparently doing a pretty good job.

And if you take a look at New York, you see an extreme amount of innocents raided, and no deaths. Are you seriously trying to use this map to try and convince us that SWAT teams are deadly to innocents? It looks like the opposite to me.

Hell, this "Prank" probably did more good than harm. Kudos to the cracker who kept the police force on their toes without leading to the death of an innocent. If our SWAT teams can't be assured of the legitimacy of the report, they shouldn't be listening to them without verifying first.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean by "just a prank." SWAT teams kill people for a living. This could well have resulted in the death of the home owner... particularly were he other than white and at least middle class.

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

While they might do it, my point was that SWAT are trained to shoot first and ask questions later; much more so than police officers.

Most officers can justify quite a bit of force. I'll note that the officers you pointed to DID go to trial. While they were ultimately acquitted, I'd tend to say that the fact that it went to trial indicates that it was exhaustively investigated.

It varies by department and jurisdiction; there can be huge differences between county and city police in the same area. One city's SWAT might be more restrained than another city's street officers. But, on average, SWAT are much more likely to resort to lethal violence than normal officers.

Re:Good grief

[daeley]

Only because american cops are dumb hicks who think that it's okay to shoot people while they're working

Well, you can't really expect them to go around shooting people on their days off, can you?

Re:Good grief

[NormalVisual]

SWAT isn't going to shoot unless they have reason to AT THE SCENE

Like if an innocent homeowner all of a sudden finds a bunch of unknown masked men violently breaking into his house that have no reason to be there and uses legal force to defend his home?

SWAT teams are *way* overused and almost never actually needed.

Re:Good grief

[imasu]

Soon he'll have too much time on his cellmate's hands.

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

The 'accident' occurred because proper procedures were either not developed or enforced. Fingers shouldn't be on the trigger until you're ready to fire.

There have been multiple instances where the shooting has been deliberate - catching people half asleep and shooting them because they don't have both hands visible soon enough, or there's a shadow, or something.

Of course if it was anyone other than a cop, they'd be arrested for murder.

Exactly. I tend to hold police to a higher standard, because just like doctors or surgeons, the consequence of a mistake can be death or lifelong disability.

Re:Good grief

[WNight]

Oh, no! You see a problem you can't think of a solution to in the time it takes to hit reply, it will never work! Well then, I guess they should probably just commence bombardment, because the swat team could be overwhelmed.

How about getting them ready and on the way while leaving someone to investigate the issue? Was there no contact?

Nobody wanted to talk to the operator who took the call? To listen to the message? Ask for any details?

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the question here "is our children learning?".

Re:Good grief

[keraneuology]

SWAT isn't going to shoot unless they have reason to AT THE SCENE.

If the bogus orders were "the people inside the house just shot a cop!" then unquestionably the trigger fingers would have been quite a bit happier.

Re:Good grief

[alw53]

See http://www.dpft.org/dwvictims.htm for a list of innocents shot in their bedrooms and living rooms by SWAT teams.

Re:Good grief

[Beowulf_Boy]

You betcha.

I keep a shotgun under the bed. You better believe that if i'd woken up to masked men storming my house, i'd have opened fire. I shouldn't have to expect a swat team, and castle doctorine says I have the right to protect my house and person.

Re:Good grief

[Clockwork Apple]

It is offset though by the fact that more of our laws are being written, passed and enforced by them too.

Re:Good grief

[Chris Burke]

A friend of mine had the police bust into his parent's home when he was a teenager. The police had the wrong house -- iirc, it was the right street address but the wrong street -- and thought they were busting in on a major drug lab. In their zeal to uncover this den of villainy, they put my friend and his father in the hospital. Got an apology from the department and that's it. Probably could have sued, but that's not the point. The point is that they were badly hurt, and worse ever since then my friend has had non-stop problems with the police because whenever he sees a police officer he has a panic attack and runs, which surprise the cop finds suspicious.

All because of a mistaken address. A mistake. This was a deliberate attempt to trick a SWAT team into thinking they were going into a life-and-death situation with all that implies for a heavily armed police force. Anything could have happened here, and it's lucky as hell no one was seriously hurt. This should not be treated lightly -- both the perpetrator, and the flaw itself that made it possible.

Re:Good grief

[Alinabi]

I'll note that the officers you pointed to DID go to trial

And I would point out they were all acquitted. Which means that shooting an unarmed guy, who was trying to show them his ID, not once, but 47 times, was ruled to be right course of action and within the law. I don't see how the SWAT team could top that, unless they use heavy artillery or nukes, but I digress.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

You're fucked up.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Because everyone knows our cops make Rocky Balboa look like a slacker.

Re:Good grief

[Nim82]

You have a point, but your assuming fear and self-preservation to some extent don't creep into the officers minds.

Here in the UK there was a case of an innocent carrying a table leg in a carrier bag being shot dead by a SWAT team after someone thought it was a gun and dialled 999. The innocent turned when shouted, because he wasn't doing anything wrong (and didn't know what the hell was going on) and got shot by an officer believing his life was in danger. 'Drop the weapon' shouts are rather meaningless to someone not carrying a weapon.

Then there's the fact officers may fear other peoples lives are in danger from the off, two words, suicide bomber.

Take the Brazilian shot dead in the UK after the London bombing, intel mistakenly said he was a terrorist, the officers on the ground worked on that assumption and swung into a different more lethal gear, a gear where warning the suspect doesn't apply and shoot-to-kill is the order of the day.

You can't order a SWAT team to kill someone, but by sending them to a location you are dramatically increasing the chances that there could be a lethal outcome.

I'm pleased they are apparently throwing the book at this cnut.

Re:Good grief

[Clockwork Apple]

"Why train if you are infallible?"

Maybe this explains our fearless leader's missing service time in the national guard.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The only reason SWAT members discharge their weapons is if there is an immediate danger to themselves or others (I.E. madman pointing a gun at police or shooting from a window at people below).

Yeah, that's what our firearms cops said too, right before they shot the guy carrying a table leg in a bag based on nothing but a poorly executed confrontation (easy to say with hindsight, of course) after a tip-off from a paranoid guy in a bar. Oh, and that little incident on the London Underground, where they shot the guy for getting on a tube train. (Apparently he was exhibiting suspicious behaviour by getting off a bus on the way to the station, then getting back on again; the observing officer had failed to notice that the underground station he had got off to enter the first time happened to be closed that day, and the controlling officers interpreted his actions as counter-surveillance techniques. This was just one in a string of ****-ups that led to the man's death.)

I appreciate that cops with guns are in an inherently difficult position. Make the wrong call, and someone you're supposed to protect dies because you didn't take out the criminal; make the wrong call the other way, and you kill an innocent civilian. But don't ever kid yourself that just because these guys are cops with some firearms training that either their physical or emotional reactions are perfect in a high-stress situation. Humans just don't work that way, no matter how well-intentioned and well-trained.

Re:Good grief

[spirality]

However, both are great reasons to vote for Ron Paul!

Re:Good grief

[Scrameustache]

SWAT isn't going to shoot unless they have reason to AT THE SCENE. [...] The only reason SWAT members discharge their weapons is if there is an immediate danger to themselves or others (I.E. madman pointing a gun at police or shooting from a window at people below).

• Two SWAT officers headed toward the car, one to arrest Culosi and one to protect the officer, Horan said.
  The officer involved, a 17-year veteran with long tactical experience, pulled up in a car behind the undercover officer's. "As the officer came out," Horan said, "he was bringing his weapon up. In the course of bringing his weapon up, it discharged. He has no real explanation how."
  The officer's name was not released.
  Horan said the officer shouted "Police!" at Culosi. "Right after 'Police!'" Horan said, "it went pow."
  Culosi was killed almost instantly.
  Horan said the bullet entered Culosi's left side, traveled through his body and was recovered on his right side. Horan said the officer was aware that he should not have had a finger on the trigger and that he should not have had his .45-caliber H&K handgun pointed at anyone.
• At 4:30 a.m. on Jan. 21, 2005, Noel and her husband, Charles, were asleep in the master bedroom of their row house when the heavily-armed Baltimore County SWAT team stormed through her home. According to the suit, officers had found "trace amounts of drugs" in trash cans outside of the home.
  Cheryl Noel feared criminal intruders had broken into her home and grabbed a lawfully registered gun and held it pointed at the floor, the suit states.
  Artson kicked in her bedroom door with his boot and, without identifying himself or telling Noel to drop her weapon, shot her three times, including once after she already had slumped to the floor

...and many more.

Re:Good grief

[BlackSabbath]

Yeah, so instead of risking being charged with "terrorism" for telling the cops about the security flaw, he actually goes and COMMITS REAL TERRORISM (and if you don't think this was terrifying for the family on the receiving end of the raid you're an idiot).

Before, he at least had some plausible defense had he been charged. Now, if he gets caught he'll have his balls handed to him on a plate!

Yet another variation of "we had to destroy the village in order to save the village". Talk about insane!

Re:Good grief

[Chris Burke]

Yeah, people don't seem to realize that SWAT was created specifically for dealing with likely or already occurring firefights, particularly those in which regular police forces are likely to be out-gunned. In fact several departments started their SWAT programs after their revolver-and-shotgun-toting regular police got in prolonged shootouts with men with fully automatic rifles.

In this case, as far as they knew, shots had already been fired, someone was dead and more possibly to follow. They absolutely would be entering that situation with the expectation that they would be firing, and waiting to ask questions first would not be an option.

It's a testament to their skill and training that nobody was hurt. As far as I'm concerned they did everything right. The hacker, though, should have the book thrown at him, and the department needs to work seriously with the telephone companies to address this issue.

Re:Good grief

[JackieBrown]

The movies I watch say so

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

999? You brits can't even get a three digit number right!

Re:Good grief

[DerekLyons]

Ah yes, when one cannot supply a reasonable and rational reply... lather on the snark and nonense. It's always easy to make up nonsense questions and objections when one is sitting safe at home and responsible for public safety.

Talking to the operator and listening to the message would not have changed the facts one bit. Nor was there anyone to ask for details - the caller had hung up.

Fact is, they had a phone call indicating that there was one individual shot (possibly dead), another individual potentially being held hostage, and the alleged perp being high on unspecified drugs. In that kind of situation, there is not time to investigate. Waiting ends up with people dead.

Fact is, various emergency responders roll all time without an extended conversation with the caller - because callers get cut off, or have to hang up for a variety of reasons. Not treating a call as real because they got cut off or had to hang up ends up with people dead.

Re:Good grief

[JackieBrown]

I never knew that slashdot had so many pro-gun members.

(Not criticizing - I just assumed the opposite.)

Re:Good grief

[overbaud]

I think if we are going to talk about ultimate responsibility it is with the developers and vendor of the software. They failed to write secure software for a mission critical system. Their failure was a lack of foresight, testing or both. Personally I am surprised that on slashdot where ripping vedors security seems to be a hobby that the fingers weren't pointed in this direction first post. It was the brains at the start of the process that failed, not the brawn at the end of it.

Re:Good grief

[rtechie]

SWAT doesn't do assassinations Bullshit. I have personally witnessed SWAT assassinate someone. I have personally seen SWAT members shoot through closed doors. Ever hear of SWAT snipers? You don't think they shoot to kill? SWAT, developed in LA and following the LA tradition, has a long record of excessive force. SWAT members DO kick down doors guns blazing, and it's gotten them into trouble many times. For every "guilty" person shot by SWAT you can find about 10 innocent people shot by SWAT.

Re:Good grief

[Myopic]

resisting arrest is a strict liability crime. there is no excuse for resisting arrest. if you are innocent, you still don't get to resist arrest, you have to tell a judge you're innocent, and he'll let you go. if the police didn't have a good reason to arrest you, you can sue them for it. but you still, never, ever, in any situation, have the right to resist arrest. resisting arrest is a great way to get tazed or shot. if you are really aggrieved about it, then don't resist arrest, but don't help them either -- do that limp-body thing that protesters often do.

Re:Good grief

[fireforadrymouth]

You don't get out much, do you?
I was about to say "Only in America" but you guys are merely the world champs of armed stupidity. We aren't nearly as creative.

Re:Good grief

[aschlemm]

We covered this is High School Civics when I lived in California. Just because you see a guy outside in your yard doesn't give you the right to blow the guy away with a gun. If you did you'd better be sure you drag the body into your home. That was years ago before all of this fancy forensics stuff. Nowadays you probably couldn't hide the fact that you killed someone outside and dragged the body inside.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say put all that knowledge to good use. pick a crack house and send them on their way.
Let the good people sleep and crack dealers drown in pools of their own blood...

Re:Good grief

[IronChef]

It's more like this:

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, tough luck for that guy.

Re:Good grief

[KudyardRipling]

Chances are that the actor in this case is some young punk with the socially necessary musician hair, piercings, gang tattos and the never-ending cliche of the mouth gasket goatee. Compulsory military service in the USA would change that. The problem is that certain groups are woefully underepresented in the armed forces relative to their success in the marketplace which BTW is protected from enemies foreign and domestic by the same. If the name is too long for the namepatch of the uniform, why is is not too long for the swipecard of the computer room?

Something is gravely wrong when the cosmopolitan in the server room is protected by the bigot in the battlefield.

Re:Good grief

[rgaginol]

Well, the saying wasn't, but I guess it is now... I do feel sorry for Bush sometimes, many of the "Bushisms" are probably due to mild dyslexia. I only say this because it happens to me occasionally... that and inventing words occasionally. Like the time when I was after that funny kitchen implement which kind of strains and is a bit like a laddle... I asked, "Honey, where's the stradle?" She thought it was such a good word it should be kept around... so we dyslexians... we keep that ol' language thing moving... but maybe a bit fast.

Re:Good grief

[VGPowerlord]

Hey, you just gave me a great idea. I'll use this return address:
G.W. Bush
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Washington, D.C. 20500

They'll never realize it's fake!

Re:Good grief

[Descalzo]

I just read today that the average IQ of criminals is 90.

Re:Good grief

[KudyardRipling]

As a method of deleting political targets, it's less messy than crashing airliners, less problematic than car crashes and also serves as fair quality propaganda.

Re:Good grief

[grahamd0]

You said he wasn't responsible. You implied that you believed his motivations were honorable. THAT is being fucking stupid.

Of course locking him up won't fix the problem, it doesn't mean he's not a criminal. The only more serious consequence would be for innocent people to die. That was a real possibility in THIS situation. The fact that it didn't happen is due only to the competence of the officers involved.

Re:Good grief

[mrdarreng]

True, but in a good way. It's a pretty harrowing experience for the innocent victim but at least it was just a prank. A more nefarious criminal could use the same exploit to send a SWAT team to the other end of their jurisdiction while they carried out a robbery. This way the security flaw can be found and fixed with relatively little harm done. While yes, some good can come from this the means to which it was accomplished is ghastly. The household could have had a gun and fired back at what they thought were intruders - a mistake could happen which cost innocent lives while shedding undeserved bad light on the SWAT team. And just as bad, now the SWAT teams may not trust the information anymore. This would make deployment times slower, or they might think the details are bogus and assume the worst and go in shooting, or there could be another added layer of beauracry to make sure it's never a bogus prank - costing more money and time.

The kid could've alerted the person responsible for administrating the 911 system and told them of the problem, and the possible consequences. And then, at the worst, to demonstrate the problem to an unwilling ear they could've sent the SWAT team back to their own location.

Re:Good grief

[JesseMcDonald]

I think individualists in general (of which Slashdot has a large representation, particularly when stories like this come up) tend to be pro-self-defense, which generally translates into "pro-gun" sentiment. The argument applies to self-defense in general, though, not just guns.

Re:Good grief

[oyenstikker]

Guns are shiny, have moving parts, and make lots of noise. Of _course_ /.ers like them.

Re:Good grief

[Chmcginn]

That depends on how you're doing it by remote. A thick enough layer of compromised systems (or even a single system, if, for instance, you compromise a wireless access point) could make it impossible to trace.

However, this guy came up a bit short on that account.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they have to physically talk to the operator to confirm the detail, or use an instant messagenger or listen to a call that can be faked? Anything from the computer can be faked.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Messing with cops in real life is funny too. I know this one guy who was hassled by a cop one night, so the guy got revenge by posting gay personal ads on gay messageboards with the name, address, and phone number of the cop. I bet those bogus ads are still out there. :) By the way, the guy is smart enough to post through chained proxies.

Re:Good grief

[k1e0x]

Not true. Cops kill lots of people because they *think* they are armed..

Or maybe some of think its fun.. read this, you'll be sick. http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w10.html

Re:Good grief

[k1e0x]

SWAT teams are *way* overused and almost never actually needed. Well said, yeah cops like raids, they get all jacked up on adrenaline and excited that they get to use all the cool "toys" they got from the military.

Re:Good grief

[Moridin42]

Thats probably still true in most states. Even if you saw someone outside of your home, you're probably unlikely to ever be able to convince a jury that you, or others inside, were in immediate danger. Not all jurisdictions have that requirement in order to justify lethal force when on your own property. There are actually some jurisdictions where lethal force is justified in defense of property. Other jurisdictions have so-called castle doctrines, where the threat of immediate danger is assumed to be true just from the prescence of an intruder.

Re:Good grief

[KudyardRipling]

SWAT is one of those end runs around the Posse Comitatus Act. Equipped like the military, trained like the military, sworn in under the same oath, the only differences are the uniform color and the patch, ergo-therefore-conclusion said Act is not violated in letter and no one, save some of us, cares about the spirit. Why is it that the NYPD and US Marines hold joint training sessions in the practice building down at Floyd Bennet Field?

Now if Mr Hack911 saw something truly suspicious like swarthy young male porkshunners hauling around bags of fertilizer or gallon cans of acetone and hair bleaching peroxide, then such a hacker may be a hero. Now having suggested a scenario where real homeland security can be accomplished, we will see that 911 system hole fixed postfsckinghaste. "Oh my! We can't have real terrorists being caught or real plots being thwarted, that may cause an G-G-G-GASP oil embargo! Then I could not afford to gas up my MobileTheatre-SUV!"

Trust not the State to ruin someone else; trust the State to ruin you.

Re:Good grief

[Actually, I do RTFA]

However, both are great reasons to vote for Ron Paul!

Ron Paul (or the federal government) has nothing to do with SWAT teams or 911 systems. It's a state issue. If anything, Ron Paul would oppose any federal aid to fix these systems to prevent this in the future.

Ron Paul is not going to win, which is good because his political speeches exhibit the sophistication of a 5-year-old.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

"SWAT isn't going to shoot unless they have reason to AT THE SCENE."

Innocent people who have died due to SWAT raids in recent years:

http://www.cato.org/raidmap/index.php?type=1

For example:

March 24, 1992--WA

In March 1992, police in Everett, Washington storm the home of Robin Pratt on a no-knock warrant. They are looking for her husband, who would later be released when the allegations in the warrant turned out to be false.

Though police had a key to the apartment, they instead choose to throw a 50-pound battering ram through the apartment's sliding-glass door. Glass shards land inches away from the couple's six-year-old daughter and five-year-old niece. One officer encounters Robin Pratt on the way to her bedroom. Hearing other SWAT team members yell "Get down!" Pratt falls to her knees. She then raises her head briefly to say, "Please don't hurt my children." At that point, Deputy Anthony Aston fires his weapon, putting a bullet in her neck, killing her.

Officers next entered the bedroom, where Dep. Aston then put the tip of his MP-5 assault submachine gun against Larry Pratt's head. When Pratt asked if he could move, another officer said that if he did, he'd have his head blown off.

Though a subsequent investigation by a civilian inquest jury found the shooting "unjustified," the officer who shot and killed Pratt was never charged.

***

February 17, 1988--WA

In February 1988, police in Seattle, Washington conduct a late-night drug raid on the home of 41-year old Erdman Bascomb after an informant tells them there's cocaine inside.

Police knock on Bascomb's door, wait just a few seconds, then force the door open with a battering ram. Officer Bob Lisoski confronts Bascomb in the darkened apartment, mistakenly believes Bascomb to be holding a gun, and shoots him dead. Bascomb was holding only the remote control for his television.

Police found no drugs or weapons in Bascomb's home. In 1995, a federal jury found no wrongdoing on the part of Seattle police, and awarded Bascomb's family no damages.

Police Chief Patrick Fitzsimons, who had retired by the time the case made it to trial, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that "Police work requires a lot of high-risk situations and split-second decisions. Our officers are well-trained and exercise their best judgment. On a rare occasion, something tragic happens. But there is an awful lot of tragedy in the crack cocaine world."

Re:Good grief

[i_b_don]

Give me a break... this guy hacked into the system and "told" the cops where to go. How much harder would it have been to tell the people reading the message "All your bases are belong to us"? Or Simply "I'm taking over... where is Sarah Conner?" or if those are too abstract for boring 911 or swat operators just say "I've hacked into your system and am taking over... downloading sensitive files now...".

There are sooo many fun things you can write... he didn't have to write a "real" report for the swat to act on.

How about: "Rampaging kitty in the 1200 block of Chatsworth district. Warning extremely dangerous. Shoot on sight. White, fuzzy, and answers to the name 'Snook'ums'."

Do about 5 of those and someone will get the hint!

don

Re:Good grief

[terrymr]

Try Spokane - I don't know how many times the medical examiner has to write homicide on the death certificate of somebody who just happened to die while being arrested before something gets done.

Re:Good grief

[terrymr]

Oh yeah - try googling the named Jay Olsen and Shonto Pete

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

Going by the officer's story, he attempted to run, and was reaching for something against their orders.

You don't reach for your wallet when officers are pointing guns at you. Officers aren't interested in your wallet when they're pointing guns at you. You empty your hands and hold them up. You don't move quickly, you follow their instructions to the best of your ability.

Re:Good grief

[stonecypher]

Fucking with the cops is only funny in the movies.

Bullshit. It's also funny on tv, in books, on the radio, and in Canada.

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

sworn in under the same oath

I really doubt that, where'd you hear it? I wouldn't be surprised at all if they're asked to swear an oath, but I doubt that it included:

'I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.'

Why is it that the NYPD and US Marines hold joint training sessions in the practice building down at Floyd Bennet Field?

Probably because as a result of the drug war, gangs and such are almost military forces; presenting the police with the same problems?

Room clearing is pretty much the same, whether you're a marine clearing a building overseas or SWAT clearing a drug house.

Up here in ND, I know the Minot Police department, and the Ward county sheriff's office work closely with Minot AFB. The local bomb squads work with the people on base. It makes sense to share training and facilities sometimes.

Now, while I don't necessarily object to the existence of SWAT, I DO object to their usage for every little thing; you had many areas stand up teams where they may only get a truly SWAT worthy task once a year or more, yet said SWAT team costs money continuously. In an attempt to justify the costs they end up using SWAT where normal officers would be better - such as the city who uses SWAT for all their warrants.

In many of these areas they'd probably do better to take some regular officers and give them extra training - pick one of the better shooters to double as a sniper if necessary. Pick a few of the others to learn how to use a MP5, M4, or other assault rifle/submachine gun and advanced building clearing tactics. Those officers get a little extra pay in exchange for being 'on call' for the serious stuff.

Re:Good grief

[stonecypher]

Yeah, because if there's one thing that SWAT does, it's to bide its time and take it slow. Surely the team meant for fast response to extremely dangerous situations shouldn't, y'know, go to the place and make sure that no violence happens. Because SWAT is totally unreasonable to show up at a location and handcuff people. I could see you getting all up in arms about the bad things that were done, but maybe you could point the finger away from the people that not only took the biggest risk but also did absolutely nothing wrong?

Surely, let's put the brakes on every one of the tens of thousands of high speed responses that keep people alive because there have been a half dozen or so breakins of the system over the last decade that have resulted in, at last count, zero deaths.

Power off, Einstein.

Re:Good grief

[stonecypher]

If SWAT shows up at your house, if you really haven't done anything wrong, and if you resist arrest, then I hope you get shot, to get you the hell out of the gene pool. Paranoia is one of the most pervasive and damaging things to a democratic republic, and the last thing I want are citizens fucking with the cops because they spent too much time reading blogs and think they live in an Orwellian society. The day occam's razor starts taking heads, I'm cheerleading. We need some goddamned natural selection for intelligence, and this seems as good a way as any, to me.

If you've never had the cops try to bust you for something you didn't do, then don't even bother to respond, because I've been there, and I responded like an adult. That's probably why I didn't even get sore handcuff wrists, much less shot. You keep your voice low, you ask what's happening, you cooperate, and you say "after I'm handcuffed, please show me the warrant."

If you can't handle that, I don't want you breeding. Lock and load.

Re:Good grief

[soft_guy]

And say that one of the people he killed was a cop.

Re:Good grief

[Guppy06]

"If SWAT shows up at your house, if you really haven't done anything wrong, and if you resist arrest, then I hope you get shot, to get you the hell out of the gene pool."

Except that requires actually knowing that the people busting down your door are police. This isn't some bad 1970's movie where someone stands outside with a bullhorn, TFA points out that the victim was skulking around with a kitchen knife after he "heard a noise" when he was apprehended. These kinds of raids rely on surprise and disorientation, and it's certainly within the realm of possibility for the suspects to be disoriented to the point of not knowing that it is, in fact, the police.

"because I've been there, and I responded like an adult."

The whole point to these raids is that you don't get a chance to respond, "adult" or otherwise. They are made with the explicit assumption that allowing the suspects any opportunity to respond will result in further harm to potential victims, and so a fast and overwhelming assault is made with the calculated gamble that the suspects will be incapable of responding quickly enough, one way or the other.

This isn't "Put your hands on the hood, sir," this is "GET ON THE GROUND NOW!"

Re:Good grief

[totally bogus dude]

Yeah, everyone knows it's 000!

(Or 112 from a GSM phone.)

Re:Good grief

[five18pm]

Thats insightful mods, not just funny.

Re:Good grief

[Delinquent Debonair]

the SWAT shouldn't shoot until the first shot was taken by the home owner. THAT's how it should work. So what if the home owner shoots first? All SWATS are wearing an armour for god's sake.. If a SWAT shoots after being shot, one has a strong reason to stand up for!

Re:Good grief

[stonecypher]

"If SWAT shows up at your house, if you really haven't done anything wrong, and if you resist arrest, then I hope you get shot, to get you the hell out of the gene pool."

Except that requires actually knowing that the people busting down your door are police.

Can you name even one situation under which twenty armed men break into your home with assault weaponry, flash grenades, lexan shields and riot gear, screaming "clear" at the top of their lungs? This isn't Bogota, and nobody's being taken out as a political dissident. Put down the patchouli oil and think for a minute.

I've actually been through this. You can tell me how hard it is to figure out the situation until you're blue in the face, but I've been there, and it actually isn't hard to figure out at all, even when you've done absolutely nothing wrong. (In fact, if you've done nothing wrong, you're facing 20 people whose vests are printed "POLICE" in extremely visible yellow, and you still can't figure it out, then maybe there's a second reason to remove you from the breeding population.)

This isn't some bad 1970's movie where

Yeah, I've been there. Have you? Are you maybe trying to preach something you don't actually know about? Here's a quick refresher on adrenaline. Step 1: notice gun flavor in mouth. Step 2: crap pants. Step 3: cooperate. Step 4: survive. If you're feeling something muzzle shaped against your tongue, evolution kicks in and reminds you to sit still and use the power of terror to sit still.

The whole point to these raids is that you don't get a chance to respond, "adult" or otherwise.

It turns out that you can't actually not respond. They're not freezing you in carbonite, nor are they catching you in a time dilation device. Don't confuse "enough time to formulate a prosaic essay" with "not grabbing a gun." Sitting still is a response, and you can do that with a gun pointed at you. Please stop telling me that what I've done to survive isn't possible. You haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, because you've never been closer to police action than NBC primetime. Ignorant soapboxing is only annoying when it's in a crowd of neophytes. When you tell someone who's been there that they're wrong about how a situation you've never been through actually works, you cross into the realm of offensive.

What amazes me is that I believe you actually think you know better than someone who's been through it. How you function in society is a mystery to me.

This isn't "Put your hands on the hood, sir," this is "GET ON THE GROUND NOW!"

Yeah. And if you do it, you don't die. If you reach for a gun, you do. What part of that is complicated for you? Sit still, shut up, and let the cops sort it out. That's all you have to do. I hope you figure that out before an authority figure ever deals with you. They walked out of my house in under ten minutes, apologizing, telling me the city would pay for my door.

I hope you don't get shot for your unwillingness to behave.

Re:Good grief

[totally bogus dude]

Generally I would consider someone to be at fault if they choose enter someone else's property without permission and end up shooting the owner.

SWAT teams specifically deal with "high-risk" warrants, i.e. cases where they are trying to arrest people who are believed to be armed and dangerous. Or do you think that if you commit a violent crime, you should be able to just go home and be perfectly safe from any form of police response, like in a video game?

In the situation we're discussing, the 911 system has been 'hacked' and the SWAT team are given bogus information. They don't know it's bogus: they're responding to the kind of dangerous situation that they are supposed to respond to. If someone at that premises appears to be an imminent threat to them, of course they're going to respond with force, often lethal force.

This is the reason for the outrage: you're sending people who are amped up and expecting to encounter life-or-death situations to some random person's house. If someone points a comb or remote control at them in poor lighting, they're going to assume it's a gun (they wouldn't be there if the person wasn't considered too dangerous for the regular police).

One big question is, why is a purely electronic hack able to mobilise a SWAT team? Surely there should be more checks and balances than that. Why is it possible to mobilise a response like this without someone in charging physically seeing and verifying a warrant?

Re:Good grief

[Alinabi]

He was running from a bunch of guys in plain clothes wielding guns. When he realized they were police officers he stopped and tried to produce his ID. I think both reactions were perfectly justified. I would have done the same. Even if I were to accept the idea that shooting him under these circumstances was justified, doing it 47 times makes it look like an execution, don't you think? Even mafia hit men show more restraint when they kill.

Re:Good grief

[Copid]

resisting arrest is a strict liability crime. there is no excuse for resisting arrest.

That depends. Do you know you're resisting arrest, or are you simply engaging in the natural response to having armed masked men charge into your bedroom in the middle of the night? If you're not expecting SWAT, I bet it's a pretty big surprise to wake up with a bunch of guys trying to break down your bedroom door. I don't know for sure, but I'd probably engage in one or more activities that might be construed as "resisting arrest" before the facts of the situation become clear.

Re:Good grief

[Copid]

I've actually been through this. You can tell me how hard it is to figure out the situation until you're blue in the face, but I've been there, and it actually isn't hard to figure out at all, even when you've done absolutely nothing wrong. (In fact, if you've done nothing wrong, you're facing 20 people whose vests are printed "POLICE" in extremely visible yellow, and you still can't figure it out, then maybe there's a second reason to remove you from the breeding population.)

Were you asleep at the time? Were the house lights on? Were you in a room where the only way in was through 1 door, allowing you to see only the first person? Yes, the majority of the time, these things work out. Don't think for a minute, though, that there isn't a long list of people who are dead because they responded incorrectly when they were startled out of bed in the dark.

Re:Good grief

[Chibi Merrow]

The only reason SWAT members discharge their weapons is if there is an immediate danger to themselves or others (I.E. madman pointing a gun at police or shooting from a window at people below).

Don't worry, they can always make up a reason for the shooting afterwards.

Normally I'm very willing to listen to the Police's side of the story when it comes to allegations of abuse on things like traffic stops and such (I said listen, not believe), because in that case it's in public and there should be a dash-cam watching the whole thing anyway. But no-knock raids are so blatantly unconstitutional and so incredibly unnecessary that it shocks me that the federal courts turn a blind eye (and don't give me "IT'S TEH BUSH FAULT!!1!!!!!", this has been going on for DECADES, he's just not doing anything to help), and with that in mind I have not one ounce of sympathy for an officer's claims of being forced into a split-second decision that leads to a person being shot in their own home.

With all the stories of people being shot WHILE trying to submit (or even asking "What's going on?"), of babies having their heads smashed in, of people being shot while "carrying a weapon" which turned out to be a TV remote or phone, you'd better believe I'm going to make sure they have a reason to shoot me. If I'm likely to get shot anyway, might as well make it worth my time. If no one cares about the innocent victims being shot, maybe a high attrition rate in SWAT missions involving mistaken identity will lead to a change in tactics.

This is rather depressing to me, as well, because I spent several years working closely with my local Police (including SWAT) and I know most of them (including SWAT) to be rather good guys. At least locally, our SWAT is only deployed for hostage situations and as a "last choice", not the first... I think some departments have forgotten that they're not the military, and that they're not in a foreign country.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point alot of police and citizens have been killed when police busted in unannounced and the homeowner had a gun.

This is kind of scary. Essentially hackers now have their own "enfoecement squads."

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Officers aren't interested in your wallet

Cops ALWAYS ask for your I.D.

Re:Good grief

[crashfrog]

If a home owner does not have a reasonable expectation that a no-knock warrant may be served (e.g. not doing illegal things that might result in a SWAT raid), they may not be held legally responsible for shooting or killing an officer.

Unless they're black. Funny how that works.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Paranoia

It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

That's probably why I didn't even get sore handcuff wrists, much less shot. You keep your voice low, you ask what's happening, you cooperate, and you say "after I'm handcuffed, please show me the warrant."


Then you bend over and kiss the shoe of the almighty cops who are arresting you for nothing. Later, you spread your cheeks for the plunger handle, and of course, in years to come, you remember to send Christmas cards.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Shooting someone for defending themselves against a threat you created hardly counts as self-defense, particularly when you're an uninvited guest on their property.

Morally & ethically, sure. Legally & practially? Well consider the case a couple of years ago in Denver where the SWAT team burst into a home and killed a man, not because of a teenage hacker, but because a lazy good-for-nothing FUCK of a vice cop was too lazy to verify the address of a house described by an informant, put the wrong address on the warrant, and lied on the warrant about having verified the address. Result: one dead Mexican illegal and a whole lotta evidence gone missing from the scene, and, uh, well, nothing much else really. Just a dead Mexican and few newspaper articles and life goes on. Well, at least for everybody except the Mexican, and his family.

Re:Good grief

[Guppy06]

"Can you name even one situation under which twenty armed men break into your home with assault weaponry, flash grenades, lexan shields and riot gear, screaming "clear" at the top of their lungs?"

Again: the whole point is to deny the suspects the opportunity to think.

"In fact, if you've done nothing wrong, you're facing 20 people whose vests are printed "POLICE" in extremely visible yellow, and you still can't figure it out, then maybe there's a second reason to remove you from the breeding population."

TFA points out one of the suspects was in his yard, at night, holding a deadly weapon, in response to a suspicious noise, i. e. while the police were still preparing to launch the raid. The police had not yet announced their presence (indeed, were still actively trying to mask their presence). There was nothing "extremely visible" to be read until the police made their move, and doubtless they did it with bright flashlights in the dark night, to dazzle the (presumed violent) suspect from having a visible target to lunge at with the deadly weapon that was already in his hand.

"Step 1: notice gun flavor in mouth. Step 2: crap pants. Step 3: cooperate. Step 4: survive."

You get knocked down like that to prevent you from producing a weapon. The suspect here already had a weapon in his hand.

"Don't confuse "enough time to formulate a prosaic essay" with "not grabbing a gun.""

"Grab a weapon," sure. But not "grab a weapon and figure out where to use it," at least not before the police figure out exactly where to use theirs if they need to. Of course, again, the suspect already had a weapon in hand, which means he only had to figure out Phase 2. Entirely different situations prompting entirely different tactics by law enforcement.

"Please stop telling me that what I've done to survive isn't possible."

You've made repeated reference to the fact that you have an anecdote, but have yet to share it. Why not share it so that it can be properly compared and contrasted with this particular incident?

"Yeah. And if you do it, you don't die. If you reach for a gun, you do."

No reaching involved. Knife in hand. Sharp. Stabby-stabby.

"Sit still, shut up, and let the cops sort it out."

If he knew they were cops skulking around in his back yard, do you really think he'd have gone out there with the knife?

Re:Good grief

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Fucking with the cops is only funny in the movies.

Fucking with the cops is only part of it; but of course, that's rather the problem isn't it? These silly twats can't see far enough past their own navels to realize that there could be real repercussions as a result of childish "pranks" like this. If they stopped to consider... erm. Well, really, that's it. If they stopped to think/consider at all, and if they were capable of looking past their own navels, this wouldn't happen.

Reminds of the time I was driving through NYC on 95 in heavy traffic; an ambulance tries to come through with full lights and sirens. The traffic was heavy, but there was enough room for cars to /move/ and let the ambulance pass. The problem is -- except for two others and me -- not a single made any effort to allow the ambulance to pass. All I could think was, "You selfish pricks; how are you gonna feel when you get home and find that maybe it was someone close to you that died because you couldn't be bothered to make the effort?"

Same basic problem in both cases. On the surface it's just some stupid kids playing a prank. But more than that, it's just another symptom of a very unhealthy society.

Re:Good grief

[agent_no.82]

Wow, that site in your sig doesn't use loaded questions at all.
Although I know that firearms are necessary and should be allowed (I quite enjoy target shooting,) those questions disallow more nuanced positions, implying that there's no middle ground between gun ownership and complete victimization. (Not to mention the number of posters using blatant propaganda techniques.)

Re:Good grief

[dbrutus]

Try telling Radley Balko that sometime. He specializes in reporting on bad police raids. They happen, and with alarming frequency. You can set up a call that will result in the most dangerous type of raids, a dynamic "no knock" entry. The odds of mistakes and people getting killed go way up on those sorts of raids. A few easy keywords/phrases, methamphetamine, heavily armed, dangerous, wanted in police slaying in another jurisdiction, child sexual predator, the list can go on and on, socially engineering cops to be especially quick on their triggers. On the other side, you can prime the victim with threatening messages and calls so he thinks that loud shouts of "police" are likely to be false, so he goes to bed armed, etc. setting him up to be trigger happy.

Is it a guarantee? No, it isn't. Is there a good chance such an assassination by social engineering plot would succeed? I think the answer's pretty obvious.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

...But you'd get better locks, too, right?

Re:Good grief

[illumin8]

Isn't the point to NOT have SWAT teams show up at random addresses?

Haha, your post reminded me of that prank call Bart used to play on police chief Wiggam. "123 Fake Street, eh? Let's go get 'em boys!"

In a way, this guy just pulled a prank Bart pulled in the Simpsons a few time, but on a much larger scale, when real people's lives are at stake.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

"You selfish pricks; how are you gonna feel when you get home and find that maybe it was someone close to you that died because you couldn't be bothered to make the effort?"

I'd feel confused- why was the ambulance taking I95 when everyone knows local streets are faster?

Then I'd sue.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking with the cops is only funny in the movies.

And funny when it happens in America.

I.E A country full of gun running tossers who cant keep their economy afloat because their too busy buying, selling and abusing their penis extensions.

Fucktards you deserve messes like this.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally know someone who had a family member shot and killed by the police in just such a situation. They were raiding his apartment looking for drugs that weren't there and he happened to be playing with a pellet gun when they came in the door.

Re:Good grief

[Omnifarious]

That would definitely increase the police brutality factor might be a good idea, but I think it might be hard to work into the framework of a believable 911 call. If you tried to say that it was an on-duty cop it would be really easy to cross-check even from memory. And if it was an off-duty cop you'd have a hard time explaining how in the midst of all the excitement you knew they were a cop.

Re:Good grief

[dbIII]

SWAT isn't going to shoot unless they have reason to AT THE SCENE. There is no way in hell anyone could send orders to SWAT to say "kill person XYZ".

There's a brazillian ways this could happen.

Sorry - incredibly tasteless pun but a chain of false information has ended up with the death of somebody that was not behaving suspiciously and the police had no proir information on when the TERROR card was played.

Re:Good grief

[saintm]

Utter bollocks.
There are a multitude of ways that the authorities could of been informed of the flaw without terrorising a random family.

The guy is a grade-A tosser and I hope he gets severely punished.

Re:Good grief

[rinaazlin]

yes, and sometimes they want to make us say yes that we are terrorist. I think they should investigate before taking any action. Not saying I'm sorry after shot an innocent people.

Re:Good grief

[rinaazlin]

I will absolutely put the boy in jail!make other person in danger. But it still show the officers didn't investigate it before making decision. Just put the hackers and the SWAT in jail.

Re:Good grief

[KDR_11k]

Depends on how the mission is stated. If they're told that criminals have entered that wealthy home and are holding the owner hostage the wealth won't be a reason for them to doubt the accuracy of their data.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

the controlling officers interpreted his actions as counter-surveillance techniques.

So, nowadays you are not only under continuous undiscriminative surveillance, you are also shot dead if there is *a suspicion* you tried to evade it!

Walk slowly, keep your neck down between your shoulders, limp a little, don't make any sudden moves... have uninterested, bored look on your face, ... bloody "1984".

Re:Good grief

[Cheesey]

He should have told the SWAT team to raid the White House, or a police station, or indeed any address that would never show up on the 911 system and would have been recognised as fake. That would have been an amusing prank rather than a potentially lethal one.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that was Marge after cutting off Homer's thumb. But yeah, same idea :)

Re:Good grief

[Racemaniac]

you know, there always is the option of not putting NO return adress on it :p

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until someone else sends a SWAT team to the little fscker's house before you fix the system.

Re:Good grief

[MikeTheMan]

I think you might've learned from a guy who's made a lot of mistakes like that.

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

NO, they don't.

Sure, during a routine traffic stop or such they'll ask for ID.

Once it's moved into 'felony arrest' territory they're going to restrain you first, then look for ID themselves. Your hands will be behind your back in cuffs.

Re:Good grief

[bkr1_2k]

The security flaw could be found and fixed, but that's not what the hacker did. This/these person(s) should be found and jailed for making false "claims". At the very least something like "malicious intent" or something.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you retarded? We aren't talking about the movies here. In real life, swat teams aren't as stupid as you are.

Re:Good grief

[Johnny5000]

I do feel sorry for Bush sometimes, many of the "Bushisms" are probably due to mild dyslexia.

I think this guy said it well:

"George Bush is not stupid. He's evil. OK? There's a huge difference between stupid and evil."

"George Bush can speak perfectly well, just not when he's being caring or compassionate or concerned about human beings. That's when he stutters and says shit like 'Hey it's hard to put food on your family.' Which he actually said, he said it's hard to put food on your family. Do you know why he said that? 'Cause he could give a fuck how hard it is for you to put food on the table for your family. But you know when he gets really downright poetic and articulate and focused is when he's talking about war and death and murder and retribution. All of a sudden he's Dylan Thomas."

"Here's the thing, if you gave Darth Vader a big basket of puppies he'd look like a fucking imbecile. 'Hey Darth, how do you like those puppies?' 'Uh, well they're round...furry...to, uh, pet...here I don't really like puppies, here, take these.' 'What are you gonna do to Alderaan?' 'WE WILL DESTROY YOUR PLANET, YOU WILL BE DUST BENEATH THE HEELS OF OUR BOOTS!' That's George Bush! I know a supervillain when I see one!"

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Cops held responsible? You really ARE an idiot, aren't you? Cops get a call saying someone is in imminent danger - what would you expect them to do? First of all, police departments are independent entities, some as small as ONE guy. Second, the municipality hires a company to do the IT work necessary to get the system up and running. Neither the cops nor the municipality know anything about IT security: they only know what they are being told by the IT contractor. While I agree that there is an urgent need to secure 911 systems, the individual departments are at the mercy of the local municipalities and the IT guys they hire.

Yes, it's "appallingly" easy to "fuck" with people who have the power to arrest or use deadly force if needed. They are trained to handle these kinds of situations. The fact is, police officers are just people; people with one of the dirtiest jobs in the world because they have to deal with idiots like you who think they know better.

It's fantastic to sit here reading your whining post about "cops getting fooled for years and still nothing is done" because there is a chance, ever so small, that someone will hack your local 911 system and send them to your house. The news report that night will feature a story about a clueless idiot "defending" his home against the response team, who accidently blew your head off with a shotgun because they thought you were the perp. My sympathies would lie with the police officer who had to live with the knowledge that he killed an innocent man because some other idiot "fucked" with him.

Re:Good grief

[Ash Vince]

How about: "Rampaging kitty in the 1200 block of Chatsworth district. Warning extremely dangerous. Shoot on sight. White, fuzzy, and answers to the name 'Snook'ums'."

Do about 5 of those and someone will get the hint! Either that or there will be 5 (ex)cat owners wondering why their little 'Snook'ums' isn't begging for his food bowl to refilled as soon as they get home.

Re:Good grief

[WileyC]

I'm sorry, but this goes beyond a prank. You take a bunch of tense people with guns and if one little thing goes wrong, there are bodies everywhere. Every person caught doing this should spend about fifty years in jail.

Disclaimer: I've got nothing against guns, per se. They are a useful and necessary tool... but also a DANGEROUS one. That's why the punishment for this 'prank' should be extremely harsh.

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

He was running from a bunch of guys in plain clothes wielding guns.

This is a tossup. Having people chasing you with guns is always dangerous. If they aren't police, letting them catch you is highly likely to be fatal. Running away is dangerous regardless. I won't make a call here.

When he realized they were police officers he stopped and tried to produce his ID

Like I said, stupid move. The correct action would have been to keep bare hands in sight and follow their spoken instructions. There are guns that can look like wallets, there are guns that can be fired in holsters shaped like wallets, heck, there are guns disguised as wallets, pens, and cellphones.

I do have concerns about the use of plain clothes police. There's a reason that police and military have distinctive uniforms. This is for identification - there have been multiple police officers killed by other police officers when they attempt to arrest somebody while in plain clothes - and a uniformed police officer shoots and kills him because he's a threatening man with a gun.

Heck, I'm a CCW permit holder, I realize that I could get shot by responding police, so if I have to use my weapon, my goal is to use it as quickly as possible, then get it back into the holster. If I'm forced to use it, I also expect a felony arrest to be made - at least the initial stages(IE taken to ground and handcuffed).

Even if I were to accept the idea that shooting him under these circumstances was justified, doing it 47 times makes it look like an execution, don't you think? Even mafia hit men show more restraint when they kill.

Actually it makes it look like a messed up self defense situation. Execution actually tends to take fewer bullets than combat(self defense) shootings.

Here's a little hint: Mafia hit men tend to be more restrained because they fire because it's not a combat situation for them. There also tend to not be four of them, or if there are, only one is assigned to be the 'shooter'. The target may be restrained.

The shooting you linked to was 4 officers, and a total of 41 rounds fired. That's 10 rounds each, with one extra*. The most common magazine for a .40 caliber semiautomatic pistol* is 10 rounds. It takes ~2 seconds to fire those ten shots.

The thing about police is that once shots are fired they tend to follow along, as they figure if one's opening fire he's doing it for a reason. The yell 'Gun!' works almost as well, especially if the officer yelling it is also opening fire. The second tendency is that they will empty their magazines and assess whether the threat is still existent while reloading.

There have been other circumstances where more than 41 rounds were fired by NYPD, resulting in no injuries to the target. This obviously wasn't one of them.

The city admitted they were wrong - they paid the $3million settlement. The police officers acted as they were trained and taught, that's why they were aquitted.

*IE 3 of the officers insert 10 round magazine, cycle slide to load round. One officer, slightly more 'tactical', either pre-loads a round by hand or pulls magazine and loads a tenth round back into the magazine, resulting in a gun with 11 rounds loaded.
*A very common police caliber

Re:Good grief

[information_retrieva]

Um, excuse me, but the hacker/idiot did not fuck with people who have the power to arrest or execute someone , he fucked with an innocent family of four. As far as I'm concerned, this moron is guilty multiple counts of assault with a deadly weapon. If someone had been seriously injured, it could quite possibly have been manslaughter.

The police were NOT the victims of this so-called prank. Someone who would risk the lives of a set of complete strangers for his own amusement is clearly a menace to society and should do jail time.

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

Well, Oleg Volk is from the USSR, and his feelings are quite strong about the matter. I think he's used to propaganda being heavy handed.

The questions are designed to make you think, the results are not stored or used.

Which question do you have a more nuanced answer for? Would it fit in the multiple-choice type system?

A spiffy tag for my beliefs would be 'I believe in criminal control, not gun control'. It's not perfect, but I believe that we would be better off going after criminals - not firearms.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Just fyi, there's no accent on the e in "se"; it's Latin, not French.

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

Yeah, people don't seem to realize that SWAT was created specifically for dealing with likely or already occurring firefights, particularly those in which regular police forces are likely to be out-gunned. In fact several departments started their SWAT programs after their revolver-and-shotgun-toting regular police got in prolonged shootouts with men with fully automatic rifles.

Bingo.

It's a testament to their skill and training that nobody was hurt. As far as I'm concerned they did everything right. The hacker, though, should have the book thrown at him, and the department needs to work seriously with the telephone companies to address this issue.

Agree, 100%. It still doesn't change my position that being anywhere near a SWAT raid is dangerous, because SWAT is dangerous. Justifiably dangerous - used right, trained right, equiped right. It's just that you use them when you expect people to be killed or seriously injured - using SWAT increases the likelyhood of it being the bad guys.

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

Armor still gives them a hefty advantage, but there's plenty of area not covered by it - such as the arms, legs, and face. They can still take a fatal injury with a single shot.

So their goal is no shooting, but the fallback is to be the first if there is going to be shooting - they're on a hair trigger.

It gets more interesting if the occupants have rifles - then only trauma plates will save them, if they're lucky.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right - it just goes to show that these days, in the words of our mutual political hero, "the illiteracy level of our children are appalling!"

Re:Good grief

[someone1234]

But gun possession is easy in the USA, and a person is likely to shoot at someone who just broke the entrance, no?
And then the SWAT team 'rightfully' shoots the homeowner.

Re:Good grief

[aulou05]

No, he didn't commit terrorism. Can we all please stop misusing this term? Seriously, it's the fact that everyone is trained to break out the "T word" for every little stupid scenario that gives the idea so much power in the first place.

Is this kid a criminal? Check. A lunatic? Check. Sadistic? Probably. An asshole? Definitely. But a terrorist, I think not.

Just because you cause somebody to experience fear does not make you a terrorist. If you believe that, just about any violent crime is terrorism. The thing is, I agree with what you are saying, but you've fallen into the trap of perpetuating the fear mongering that makes living in a post 9/11 world suck so much.

Re:Good grief

[Cro Magnon]

Here's a scenario: You live in a rough part of town. There have been several well-publisized home invasions. It's 2AM and several masked men break down your door. One of them yells something, but you don't understand what he said. You have a gun in easy reach. Resisting arrest? What arrest? I was just defending myself!

Re:Good grief

[fredrated]

Writing perfect software is not possible, even if the software is tested over and over again. Software is written by humans and tested by humans, and until they (we) become perfect, or are replaced by perfect software generators, it isn't going to happen.

Re:Good grief

[hey!]

You left out (7) Leave a gun lying around outside where the victim is sure to pick it up. A toy gun would be ideal, innocent enough looking on close inspection, but not so innocent looking from a few yards away to somebody primed for a firefight.

Of course, this would the most dad-blamed complicated and unpredictable assasination attempt in the history of crime.

However, if you weren't so much as homicidal hater as a sadistic hater, it might have its attractions. And therein is the problem I see: the degree to which we can use faults in systems to harass people. If your neighbor mows his lawn early on Sunday morning, get back at him by getting him put on a terror watch list. He'll never fly again without a pat down. Lead the police to think he is a drug dealer. Get his house raided. Screw with his credit rating.

This kind of petty hatred is as old as the poison pen letter. The authorities take murder very seriously, so few people attempt it unless they are inflamed by passion, are stupid, or are foolish enough to think they can manage the risks by being clever. On the other hand, the authorities have their hands too full with people like that to bother much with people who just want to suck the joy out of your life.

Re:Good grief

[spirality]

Oh come on. The federal government is certainly responsible for at least a portion of the funding SWAT teams and 911 systems. It is definitely responsible for the "war on drugs". And as far as the "war on terror" goes, again come on. In fact the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" were the "both" that I was referring to.

As far as his speeches being infantile. I have to disagree. He is principled and coherent. I'm not sure where you're getting your information from. Perhaps the "debates", which are nothing but advertisements for Rudy and company. Anyway, I would urge you to read some of his writings or perhaps look up "Freedom is Popular" on YouTube.

Ron Paul is the last best chance for restoring liberty in our country. He will win if we vote for him, and if he doesn't I see very little difference between any of the other candidates running for government. They all intend to use the state to impose their will upon us.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

The case with Amadou Diallo was not in 'felony arrest territory'. It was 4 racist cops who saw a darkie in a building vestibule and decided he was up to no good, despite not havign any evidence.

Re:Good grief

[angus_rg]

The problem is, everyone wants one scapegoat to blame, not two. Responsibility should fall in both courts. Whether you think more should be in the hackers court or police's is up to you.

It's like a car accident. I've heard countless time, even if it isn't your fault, often, you still could have avoided it. Not always the case, but there is some truth to it.

The guy was just lucky he brought a knife to a gun fight, otherwise, someone probably would have been shot.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me a break. The ultimate responsibility is with the criminal that hacked the system and put innocent people in danger of getting killed by a swat team. No software is perfect, it's impossible to produce. Never has been and never will. Justifying criminal activity because of a software flaw, then blaming the software developer just doesn't work any more.

By that logic it's the QA team's fault for not finding the flaw, the sales person's fault for selling a faulty product and the end user's fault for not properly securing their system by running imperfect software.

This is probably the dumbest thing I've ever read on Slashdot and that's no mean feat.

It's like saying it's ok to rob a house because the person didn't have riot gates over the windows and a $20000 safe door with swiss made timer lock on it.

It simply doesn't fly. Granted people need to try harder to find security flaws, but you can't blame your criminal actions on someone else. It doesn't work.

"Your honor, my client shot the man because guns are imperfect and they have a security flaw: anyone can pull the trigger. As well the victim should have been wearing body armor. It's the victim's fault for not securing their body and the gun company for making an unsafe weapon."

I call this asshat logic. It shows a serious unwillingness to accept responsibility for your actions. A non criminal would discover the flaw, and tell the police about it so they get it fixed.

-AC

Re:Good grief

[pk077299]

Its amazing how teenagers of today can manipulate systems to play prank on others...They are intelligent but not really that smart

Re:Good grief

[Thyrteen]

I believe the hackers and fish can coexist peacefully.

Re:Good grief

[hexmem]

For every "guilty" person shot by SWAT you can find about 10 innocent people shot by SWAT. Bullshit! Prove that statement. Does SWAT screw up sometimes? Yes. It's sucks, but they don't screw up as much as your saying.

I've done civilian trainings with SWAT and those guys are damn good. If I'm ever in a hostage situation, I want SWAT there because I have full confidence in them saving me. I've seen them in action. They are awesome.

It does suck when an innocent person gets hurt or killed. But your just flat out wrong.

Idiot.

Re:Good grief

[Torvaun]

Then the kid should leave a note on the table that says "Change your lock." An anonymous letter that clearly demonstrates that what is in the letter is true.

Therefore, someone should hack into the 911 system and leave a report of bad security on 911 systems. It is undeniably true, and completely anonymous if you covered your tracks well.

Re:Good grief

[Actually, I do RTFA]

As far as his speeches being infantile. I have to disagree. He is principled and coherent.

Principled and coherent perhaps. I have looked at his speeches. And it is his positions that I am commenting on when I say that his level of sophistication is at what I would consider a five-year-old level. For instance, advocating a return to the gold standard is a juvenille position based on the need to have a shiny object to represent an abstract concept. Gold is just as arbitrary as silver or platinum. The only real difference is that gold is starting to (as of the past 50-ish years) have industrial uses. But so does tungsten (and platinum for that matter.) But there is nothing instrinsic that makes gold better than paper money except it's an older arbitrary standard. In fact, it is substaintially worse because of inflationary periods brought on by discovering new sources, difficulty regulating the money supply, etc.

Most of his other positions seem just as bad. A Ron Paul presidency, aside from being unable to affect any change, appeals to me about as much as putting a senile old man in power. Of course, both would be preferable to Rudy.

Re:Good grief

[hexmem]

He didn't put anyone's lives in danger. The 911 center did, by using systems which can be spoofed by any fucktard with a cell phone. How about you don't be so fucking stupid????

The only one to blame here is the hacker. The dumb ass hacker put innocent peoples lives in danger. Not the cops, not SWAT, not 911 dispatch! No one but the hacker. He's an idiot. I hope he gets 25 years for this.

Congratulations to SWAT for being able to end the situation without killing anyone. It shows how well trained they are.

Re:Good grief

[hexmem]

But it still show the officers didn't investigate it before making decision. Just put the hackers and the SWAT in jail. Did you even read the article? Your an idiot.

SWAT did an awesome job. Way to go SWAT!!!!

Why don't you tell us how SWAT should have "investigated" this?

FTFA:

A supposed teenager stated someone had overdosed on cocaine. The teenager then stated he had been shot in the shoulder and that attackers were going to go shoot and kill his sister. How else should SWAT have responded? What reason should they have had to stop and go, "hmmmm.... this sounds fake. Let's just send a patrol car over to check it out."

I'm sorry, but anyone one Slashdot blaming SWAT, the Police, 911 Dispatch, or anyone other then the hacker is a fucking moron.

Re:Good grief

[rtb61]

Nobody is above the law. Do the crime do the time. When law enforcement kills an innocent person they have committed murder, a whoops doesn't cut it. You want restraint upon the behaviour of excessive force by low IQ ignorant thugs in uniform, then you had better make sure they are held fully accountable for their actions.

So where is the fine line between a law enforcement officer getting shoot from not firing soon enough or a innocent victim getting shot and murdered because a law enforcement officer knows they wont get punished and any bull shit excuse will do, so why take any chances.

So when law enforcement makes a mistakes and takes a life, then they should pay for it no excuses.

Re:Good grief

[halcyon1234]

And if had any intention at all to do good instead of harm, he would have sent the SWAT team to an address that ended up being the IT department responsible for 911 security.

He'd also have five pepperoni pizzas waiting for them, an ten page document that outlined, in detail, exactly what he did to get everyone to this point, and how it can be fixed.

And, of course, he'd have done it all anonymously.

Re:Good grief

[hexmem]

No, your wrong. The blame should solely be on the specific individual who broke into the system.

No one else did anything wrong!!!! SWAT responded correctly. Legally, morally, and ethically.

Next time read the article. All he did was change the address of where the call appeared to be originating from. He still physically called 911 on his home phone and told them people were being murdered AT THAT VERY MOMENT!

How else should they have responded??????

Re:Good grief

[MightyYar]

You could report the vulnerability anonymously...

Re:Good grief

[nsayer]

I don't know how many times the medical examiner has to write homicide on the death certificate of somebody who just happened to die while being arrested before something gets done.

That word doesn't mean what you think it means. "Homicide" simply means one person dying at the hands of another. No value judgement is involved. "Murder" is a sub-set of "homicide," but that's not the ME's call to make.

Re:Good grief

[choongiri]

why is a purely electronic hack able to mobilise a SWAT team?

It isn't. The "hack" was faking the caller ID on his telephone. The part of the "hack" that led to SWAT being sent was entirely social engineering - he acted on the 911 call and pretended this armed-and-dangerous situation was occurring. The only "electronic hack" was faking the caller ID so that when the police dispatcher (correctly) mobilised SWAT given the situation at hand, they (incorrectly) sent the team to the wrong address, based on the caller ID of the telephone they believed the call was coming from.

Re:Good grief

[nsayer]

Just because you cause somebody to experience fear does not make you a terrorist.

No. It's the motivation that defines terrorism.

Terrorism is the threat or carrying-out of violence with an intent to cause political change to your target population. It's the same as extortion, but the demand isn't monetary.

This kid is not a terrorist because his motivation was the same as a graffiti artist - to have a little fun at someone else's expense.

IF he set out to expose how shitty the security of 911 is and followed up with messages sent to the media threatening to engage in a campaign of SWATting until 911 got fixed... That would be terrorism.

Re:Good grief

[JesseMcDonald]

In the situation we're discussing, the 911 system has been 'hacked' and the SWAT team are given bogus information. They don't know it's bogus: they're responding to the kind of dangerous situation that they are supposed to respond to.

I agree. For the record, I never said there was anything wrong with what they actually did, although they should've taken into account the fact that their information could be falsified even without an ANI 'hack'; I objected to the idea that shooting someone on their own property could be justified solely on the basis of an unverified anonymous tip, when they could quite reasonably be acting in self-defense. The situation would've been different if they'd verified that someone was actually in danger.

If someone at that premises appears to be an imminent threat to them, of course they're going to respond with force, often lethal force.

If anything, the SWAT team poses a far more imminent threat to the property owner than visa-versa, judging by relative numbers and armament. Any threat to the SWAT team itself is due to their own uninvited and highly suspicious presence; if one or more members of the team gets shot for impersonating a group of well-armed bandits it would be entirely their own fault.

Moreover, if the SWAT team hasn't yet verified the caller's claims first-hand, then they have to assume that the owner is merely acting in self-defense. If they shot someone acting in reasonable self defense on their own property, that too would be their responsibility, since they created the situation in the first place. Even for a SWAT team there must remain a presumption of innocence on the part of the accused; no one can be above the law in a free society.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, the old "I didn't happen to me so it doesn't happen to anyone" argument.

A simple Google search will show you many innocent people who died at the hands of SWAT. Of course, you are just happy they are out of the gene pool. I would be happy if assholes like you were out of the gene pool.

Re:Good grief

[aulou05]

No. It's the motivation that defines terrorism.

Terrorism is the threat or carrying-out of violence with an intent to cause political change to your target population. It's the same as extortion, but the demand isn't monetary.

This kid is not a terrorist because his motivation was the same as a graffiti artist - to have a little fun at someone else's expense.

Exactly. Terrorism is politically motivated. This guy is just your run-of-the-mill sociopath.

IF he set out to expose how shitty the security of 911 is and followed up with messages sent to the media threatening to engage in a campaign of SWATting until 911 got fixed... That would be terrorism.

Or, IF certain elements of a certain government were to perpetuate a certain climate of fear and uncertainty, in order to erode civil liberties thus causing profoundly detrimental social and political change... That would be terrorism, no?

Misusing this term and needlessly invoking it to trigger a psychological effect, for nothing more than rhetorical emphasis—purposefully or otherwise—is indicative of how bad this problem has become. We should be aware of what we say, otherwise we're just perpetuating the very problem.

Re:Good grief

[RichardX]

Bullshit. It's also funny on tv, in books, on the radio, and in Canada.

But if you die in Canada you die in REAL LIFE!

Re:Good grief

[hexmem]

Boy your an idiot.

When law enforcement takes a life, they should not pay for it. They have to make a decision in half a second while assholes like you get to sit around for 6 months afterwards and decide if it was "justified".

Cops are taking risks that your not willing to take in order to keep you safe. They deserve the benefit of the doubt. Yes, sometimes there are some cops who go to far on purpose and they do get punished for it. But it's stupid to lump all cops in that category.

At the end of the day, I want all cops to go home to their families. If that means I accidentally get shot and possibly killed, so be it.

Re:Good grief

[gknoy]

I think it's not just the brains at the start of the process, but those all along.

Re:Good grief

[Alinabi]

Actually it makes it look like a messed up self defense situation.

Messed up indeed. Self defense means, usually, that you defend yourself from an attacker. This guy did not show any sign of aggression.

The shooting you linked to was 4 officers, and a total of 41 rounds fired. That's 10 rounds each, with one extra*. The most common magazine for a .40 caliber semiautomatic pistol* is 10 rounds. It takes ~2 seconds to fire those ten shots.

The thing about police is that once shots are fired they tend to follow along, as they figure if one's opening fire he's doing it for a reason. The yell 'Gun!' works almost as well, especially if the officer yelling it is also opening fire. The second tendency is that they will empty their magazines and assess whether the threat is still existent while reloading.

And this is the heart of the problem. The NYPD has, basically, the same rules of engagement that the military is using in Baghdad, as if NYC was a war zone. You think that is justified. I don't.

Re:Good grief

[cayenne8]

"SWAT isn't going to shoot unless they have reason to AT THE SCENE. There is no way in hell anyone could send orders to SWAT to say "kill person XYZ". SWAT doesn't do assassinations, they are called in to prevent deaths if possible."

Trouble is...at my house, if I wake up to hearing someone breaking into my house, my first reaction is to grab my gun and shoot...and not stop unless changing clips.

In this case, with it being cops...they'd likely take me out after my first few rounds....

I'm sure this could be the case in MANY instances, and someone could count a pretty high percentage that this 'assasination' by cop might indeed happen....

Re:Good grief

[Myopic]

That would be a trajedy, and a very difficult situation; but it wouldn't be resisting arrest, it would be assault with a deadly weapon or something, which is not a strict liability crime (meaning, if you have a good enough excuse, you might get away with it). Resisting arrest is when an officer grabs your wrists and says you are under arrest, and you squirm or fight. Cf. the Don't Taze Me Bro guy. That was resisting arrest.

Re:Good grief

[niteice]

You're right, the anti-authoritarian, anarchist, pro-conspiracy-theory tone is quite sickening indeed.

Re:Good grief

[Boomer_Zz]

I would say that even in your extreme circumstances, a death or even a shooting would be unlikely.

This is because a SWAT team member

A) Isn't any old Joe
B) Has been on the police force for probably 5+ years
C) Has been on the SWAT team for more than 2 if he's in front where a split decision will most likely be made

Numbers 3 and 4 don't even matter, they treat every person on a call like they have done that, as well they should.

"Even better, because the cops never, ever admit they're wrong, ever, the person then ends up framed for some bogus crime so the shooting seems justified."

That seems laughable, what cops are you talking about? Certainly not SWAT team members. This isn't the movies.

If the guy were to come outside with a gun, which would be the worst case scenario, he would quickly put it down when the police yelled POLICE repeatedly, as they are trained to do.

Re:Good grief

[SengirV]

I don't like the warrantless sytem that is in place now. Fix that part, and I'm a bit more amenable towards being proactive with national security.

Sorry, but you won't find an ally in me when criminals have more rights than law-abiding citizens.

Re:Good grief

[Carnildo]

I would have sent them someplace absurd -- Bill Gates' house, or the boat launch at the local park; someplace where the incident in question could not possibly have taken place. The idea is to make the police look absurd in such a public way that they can't deny that someone fooled them.

Re:Good grief

[Boomer_Zz]

If the bogus orders were "the people inside the house just shot a cop!" then unquestionably the trigger fingers would have been quite a bit happier.

Or, they might simply go "who did they shoot dispatch?" and find out all of the officers are fine and realize it is some sort of prank.

I would keep that one out of the master plan.

Re:Good grief

[Boomer_Zz]

Agreed, why does it need to be so biased if it was so wrong?

The lack of reporting made me sick.

Re:Good grief

[Boomer_Zz]

scenario: Instead of a knife the homeowner gets out a gun (who cares what kind, pistol, shotgun, rifle). He goes outside and ...

I stopped it right there, because at that point, the officer would have already seen the homeowner the second he opened the door and yelled POLICE repeatedly, more than one officer would have joined in, and if they had seen a gun or a weapon they would be telling him to drop it.

The decision is his, he knows the people outside are police, he is holding a gun without it being pointed at anyone.

Re:Good grief

[Omnifarious]

I've read numerous stories of 'accidental' shootings that hardly seemed justified. Almost always there is a coverup of some kind.

Re:Good grief

[nsayer]

Or, IF certain elements of a certain government were to perpetuate a certain climate of fear and uncertainty, in order to erode civil liberties thus causing profoundly detrimental social and political change... That would be terrorism, no? No, it wouldn't. At the very least, terrorism is, by definition, an illegal act. The actions you describe are not, per se, illegal.

I'm certainly not going to defend those actions, but I'm not going to mislabel them, either.

Re:Good grief

[200_success]

Bush didn't have such terrible difficulties with language when he was governor of Texas. His speaking skills have declined since then -- a pattern not indicative of dyslexia. It is speculated that it's pre-senile dementia.

Re:Good grief

[Boomer_Zz]

I too have seen them, but I try to consider the source. The media wants me to think they are unjustified, especially when they show me 5 seconds of the 5 minute video.

Luckily the courts seem to handle these fine... so when the juries are given all the evidence, they make a better decision.

Re:Good grief

[Chris Burke]

Agree, 100%. It still doesn't change my position that being anywhere near a SWAT raid is dangerous, because SWAT is dangerous. Justifiably dangerous - used right, trained right, equiped right. It's just that you use them when you expect people to be killed or seriously injured - using SWAT increases the likelyhood of it being the bad guys.

Yeah, and I highly agree with what you said elsewhere that using SWAT to serve routine warrants just to justify the cost of the program is a bad idea exactly because SWAT is what it is. SWAT can make a dangerous situation safer for innocents, but they can certainly make a relatively safe situation more dangerous than it need be.

Re:Good grief

[againjj]

SWAT isn't going to shoot unless they have reason to AT THE SCENE.

My family knows a boy that lives in the poorer part of town. The SWAT team broke down his front door as he and his family were eating dinner. His parents do not speak English well, and the father got shot and killed. It turned out that they had the wrong address.

For some reason, the boy has an extreme fear of the police now.

Re:Good grief

[BlueStrat]

It gets more interesting if the occupants have rifles - then only trauma plates will save them, if they're lucky

Quite correct. Most tactical body armor will *not* protect against common civilian-owned weapons such as the M1 Garand or Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) and their civilian variants which are commonly chambered for the Springfield 30-06 round.

Even with trauma-plates, a direct center-torso hit with a weapon like the M1 Garand or BAR at ranges under 100 feet will almost certainly take the target out of the fight, and likely cause serious internal injuries. Two to four rounds fired in slow or fast fully-automatic (a single burst) or semi-automatic firing modes from a BAR or two or three rounds from an M1 at close or point-blank range could easily be fatal even with trauma plates.

Even with standard-issue jacketed rounds, they will easily penetrate standard tactical body armor at close range, and with armor-piercing rounds, can take out a target with standard tactical body armor at up to 880 yards.

My father carried a BAR in WW2 and had a Sharpshooter certification. He said that he loved the weapon despite the weight, because there was very little he *couldn't* kill with it, including most light- and medium-armored vehicles up to a half-track. About the power and range of the weapon, he said that "If it was close enough see it, I could kill it, many times even without line-of-sight, through cover like the average wall or medium-size tree."

Nothing makes a tactical team member sweat more than learning that the target(s) is/are armed with these type weapons, especially if it's also learned he/they have military (especially Marine Corp.) training.

Cheers!

Strat

Re:Good grief

[totally bogus dude]

I objected to the idea that shooting someone on their own property could be justified solely on the basis of an unverified anonymous tip, when they could quite reasonably be acting in self-defense. The situation would've been different if they'd verified that someone was actually in danger.

I think the problem is that they don't have any way to verify someone is actually in danger. They can't just call them up and ask if there really is a problem, because a) that would tell the bad guys that someone there called for help, and b) the bad guys themselves might answer and say everything's fine (or coerce the resident to answer and say everything's fine). Likewise, knocking on the door and politely waiting for an answer is just going to give the bad guys time to barricade themselves in.

The main reason for the "hard and fast" response, after all, is to avoid giving the perpetrators time to plan a response. You want to plunge their world into chaos, and a heavily armed assault team is a good way to do that, as it tends to unnerve people, and they decide that doing what the scary man is screaming at him to do is a damned good idea. Calling ahead or announcing your arrival gives the suspects time to prepare for that, which greatly increases the danger for the entry team as well for any hostages.

Moreover, if the SWAT team hasn't yet verified the caller's claims first-hand, then they have to assume that the owner is merely acting in self-defense.

I don't think that's really the team's responsibility, any more than it's a police officer's responsibility to personally verify that the guy they've been told to arrest actually committed the crime. That's sorted out by someone else, and someone with the authority to do so tells them to arrest them. Same deal with SWAT teams. They've been told, by someone who they implicitly trust to provide reasonably accurate information, that there's a deranged guy with a gun who's already shot someone and intends to shoot at least one more person. How do they verify this without putting themselves and their mission in jeopardy?

Any threat to the SWAT team itself is due to their own uninvited and highly suspicious presence

That's only if you assume it's a hoax call. If it's a real call (like the vast majority are), then the threat to the SWAT team is exactly what they've been told to expect: deranged guy with a gun who seems quite willing to use it, and potentially additional armed people the caller wasn't aware of. Yes, the team wouldn't be in danger if they didn't show up uninvited -- but that's their damned job!

Ultimately, they're using the caller ID system as verification, on the assumption that people won't call with a story that would result in an armed response to their own home if they didn't need one. That's a reasonable assumption IMHO. The only solution is to fix the system so it can't be tricked. If that can't be done, then yes -- they need to alter procedures to treat all calls as suspect, with the resulting increase in risk to all involved.

Re:Good grief

[stonecypher]

Since when has Canada been attached to real life? They have actual money now, they got electricity six months ago, and now this?

I'm out of the loop.

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

Quite correct. Most tactical body armor will *not* protect against common civilian-owned weapons such as the M1 Garand or Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) and their civilian variants which are commonly chambered for the Springfield 30-06 round.

I'm afraid that I'd have to disagree with some of this - while I own a M1 Garand, it IS a battle rifle, and civilian 30-06 rifles far outnumber it. Many of them are bolt action. The BAR, while fairly common with the machine gun crowd, is still a machine gun - placing it in the realm of only people capable of spending more than $10k on a single weapon.

I usually use a different caliber in my examples - the humble 30-30, the most common deer hunting cartridge for at least a century. It's most commonly chambered in lever action rifles. And even with soft lead round noses it will cut through any soft body armor like a hot knife through butter.

Other common calibers - .308, 7mm, 8mm, various magnum rounds will all, even with non-'AP', non FMJ hunting ammunition will ruin the day of any but the most heavily armored man in a rather serious way even if it hits and is stopped by the trauma plate.

Bring out some of the hotter hunting ammunition - such as the .45-70* or my .300 weatherby magnum would do even worse - the .45-70 fires a round better than 10 times the weight of many common 'assault rifle' cartridges, while my weatherby fires a round ~50% faster than common military cartridges. That's a lot of energy(it's brutal on my shoulder).

Nothing makes a tactical team member sweat more than learning that the target(s) is/are armed with these type weapons, especially if it's also learned he/they have military (especially Marine Corp.) training.

The old hunter hiding out in the woods does it as well. Frequently situations like this result in the cops entering 'siege' mode where they wait and try to talk the guy out. They can't just sniper him(he knows about cover and concealment), odds are decent he has a gas mask, especially it he was intending trouble, so their gas grenades are no good, and he's armed with weapons that are substantially more powerful and lethal.

Sure, they can take him out - but he's almost sure to take at least one of them with him, more likely two or three. Their goal is to go home alive - all of them. It's not worth the risk if he's forted up - he's not going anywhere. Especially if he doesn't have any hostages, it's just not worth it.

*Old buffalo hunting caliber.

Re:Good grief

[terrymr]

Some more background :

One of these homicides happened to a man who was doing no more that holding a 2 liter bottle of pop while in a convenience store.

Another was a man who the officers involved said "appeared to be having a seizure" when they entered his residence.

Clearly a finding of homicide in these circumstances suggests there's a problem.

Re:Good grief

[nsayer]

Clearly a finding of homicide in these circumstances suggests there's a problem. No, it bloody doesn't. A finding of homicide simply means that one person killed another. What part of that are you not understanding?

There are clearly issues with those cases you describe but they are no more or less homicides than when a cop shoots a bank robber menacing a teller or when OJ knifed Nicole.

Re:Good grief

[terrymr]

Yes I do understand the meaning of the finding.

My point was that neither situation as described seemed to merit the killing of one person by another.

Re:Good grief

[agent_no.82]

That's the thing though, there are sane limits that can and should be imposed on firearms ownership. We don't have to accept an all-or-nothing approach.
If I remember correctly, there are things like waiting periods that have been proved to reduce crimes of passion with guns. We also ought to psyche-test people for firearms ownership, get them all certified in gun etiquette, et cetera. You should be sane & clean; know how to operate, maintain and use a gun properly; and know all the relevant regulations before you can own a gun. Tracking weapons after they leave factories might be interesting (a certain variety of gun has become very popular with thugs in Cleveland, but many collectors don't like it,) though likely wouldn't prove that effective.
Ultimately, more effective measures of reducing crime tend to be social or political (lowering the desperation of criminals or teaching the correct values to begin with,) rather than with gun control. Most people I know who disfavor gun control however, are against such alternative measures.

Re:Good grief

[darkpixel2k]

If the guy were to come outside with a gun, which would be the worst case scenario, he would quickly put it down when the police yelled POLICE repeatedly, as they are trained to do.


Hmm...I wonder if...

Naah. Never happen.

...but what if maybe...just maybe...a criminal shouted 'POLICE'.

If someone breaks into my house shouting 'POLICE', I'm not putting down my gun until I can visually verify they are in fact police officers. And the more they merrier. Criminals usually don't come in packs of 10.

Re:Good grief

[theshowmecanuck]

There is high school civics and then there is the real world.

Re:Good grief

[theshowmecanuck]

you should have stopped at least at

There are many permutations of this scenario.

Re:Good grief

[mrchaotica]

As far as I'm concerned they did everything right.

Except failing to verify that the action was warranted (literally!) in the first place, of course -- a minor detail.

Re:Good grief

[mrchaotica]

SWAT shouldn't be able to be summoned without a warrant. A real warrant, issued by a real judge, based on real evidence. And if it takes an extra half hour to wake up a judge to issue it? Then so-fucking-be it, because it's more important to preserve innocent lives than it is to catch the criminals, regardless of how bad the crime!

Even if the 911 call claims that the entire Red Army, Hitler, and Satan himself are there, the initial response should still be to send a regular officer, not SWAT. Why? Because -- as this incident makes abundantly clear -- they have to verify the fucking thing's actually true!

Re:Good grief

[mrchaotica]

And it is his positions that I am commenting on when I say that his level of sophistication is at what I would consider a five-year-old level. For instance, advocating a return to the gold standard is a juvenille position based on the need to have a shiny object to represent an abstract concept. Gold is just as arbitrary as silver or platinum.

I think you need to reconsider just which of you is reasoning on a five-year-old level. Gold, as an arbitrary substance, is most emphatically not the point! (And I'm absolutely sure any gold-standard advocate competent enough to be running for President understands this.) The point of going back on the "gold" standard is to return to a fixed, asset-based currency, as opposed to the exponentially-increasing, debt-based one we have now. Watch this video to understand what I'm talking about.

Re:Good grief

[mrchaotica]

you're facing 20 people whose vests are printed "POLICE" in extremely visible yellow

If you happened to have been visibly armed at the time, then by the time you read that somebody's already dead.

Re:Good grief

[nor_fariza]

Now this is funny. Imagine what'll be like to send SWAT Team to a female frat house while perky teens are having a slumber party.

Re:Good grief

[Chris Burke]

What are you saying? That if I call 911 saying there's somebody in my house who's already killed somebody and is about to kill me, that they should first go to the court and ask for a warrant before coming over to my house to try to, you know, stop me from being killed? How exactly is that supposed to go down at the courthouse, anyway?

SWAT: "Hey, Your Honor. We just got a 911 call down at dispatch and some guy says some crazy guy is in his house and about to kill him."

Judge: "My goodness! I assume your team is en route, and you're in communication with them so if they arrive and feel they have to break into the house to make sure the occupant is safe that you will have my approval? I appreciate your diligence. Send me the phone record with the address and I'll have a search warrant for you in no time."

SWAT: "Actually, we haven't sent a team yet. We were waiting for the warrant first, before taking any action. I mean, what if the call was just a sick prank?"

Judge: "What? Why? It's not like I can tell if it's a prank or not. How will we know until you send a team over to investigate? And you'd better hurry, because if it's not a prank, someone's life will be in danger. Tell your team not to wait on the paper work, you have clearly established probable cause and can act as you feel is necessary on the scene."

SWAT: "I don't know. A buddy of mine who posts on slashdot said something like I should always verify before responding... though now that you mention it... not sure how that works. I mean, I guess we could have just gone there and approached as though it were a live fire situation, but cautious and alert, like we were trained, and if it's a mistake and we just find some guy walking around his back yard we'll try not to scare him too bad."

Judge: "If it's just some guy, he'll probably be pretty scared. But better safe than sorry."

SWAT: "Oh, I just got a call. Turns out it was real. Shooter killed the caller, then himself. Oopsie!"

I mean seriously. The SWAT team can't verify that the phone company caller ID system is accurate and free of bugs in the time between a call and them hauling ass to the possible victim's house. They need to respond in a timely fashion to such things, and the law and court rulings are on their side here that in these circumstances they can proceed without a warrant. There's really nothing they could have done better -- they arrived at the scene, the only place any "verification" is possible, and when the situation was different they drew down.

The part that matters -- now that they know the system is hackable, what do they do to fix it? This part really has little to do with SWAT, it's more to do with the department and how they can press the telcos.

Re:Good grief

[DerekLyons]

Ah, yes - in your world innocent people will die (along with more than a few law enforcement officers) when SWAT teams don't arrive in a timely fashion, because SWAT should be intentionally delayed to protect the lives of innocent people. How logical.

Re:Good grief

[mrchaotica]

That if I call 911 saying there's somebody in my house who's already killed somebody and is about to kill me, that they should first go to the court and ask for a warrant before coming over to my house to try to, you know, stop me from being killed? How exactly is that supposed to go down at the courthouse, anyway?

No, that they should send regular cops instead of a SWAT team! If it turns out that the SWAT team was indeed necessary, then the regular cops could call for backup.

Re:Good grief

[rtb61]

The innocent victim deserve the benefit of the doubt, not the killer.

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

If I remember correctly, there are things like waiting periods that have been proved to reduce crimes of passion with guns.

That's the thing though. Waiting periods had no statistical benefits - they didn't prevent any crimes. Or they may have only delayed them a bit.

Actually, there's some anecdotal evidence that it cost lives - Women who were in the waiting period, with a restraining order out against a known threat, the police not guarding them because it hadn't been determined that the threat was high enough. Murdered by their violent husband, boyfriend, whatever.

blatantly biased reference
Waiting periods extend a potential victim's "period of vulnerability," sometimes with tragic consequences. For example, in 1991 Wisconsin resident Bonnie Elmasri, seeking to purchase a firearm for protection from a husband who had repeatedly threatened to kill her, was told she would have to wait 48 hours to obtain the weapon. Unfortunately, 48 hours was too long to wait; the abusive husband killed Bonnie and her two children the next day.[iii]

We also ought to psyche-test people for firearms ownership, get them all certified in gun etiquette, et cetera. You should be sane & clean; know how to operate, maintain and use a gun properly; and know all the relevant regulations before you can own a gun.

Hearkens back to the old literacy tests to vote; You know, the ones nobody could pass? Psyche tests can disqualify anybody - it'd be absurdly easy to turn it into a catch-22 situation.* Besides - it's already illegal for people who have been committed to own or possess firearms. That's at least a high enough standard that the average joe can't be disqualified.

As for the safety part - I'd have gun safety taught in schools again. Start with the eddie eagle type 'don't touch, tell an adult' stuff in elementary, graduate to shooting BB guns in jr high, and rimfires (maybe centerfires) in HS.

Tracking weapons after they leave factories might be interesting (a certain variety of gun has become very popular with thugs in Cleveland, but many collectors don't like it,) though likely wouldn't prove that effective.

Bingo.

*You want a gun? Wanting a gun is a syndrome, so you're crazy, so no gun

Re:Good grief

[Firethorn]

And this is the heart of the problem. The NYPD has, basically, the same rules of engagement that the military is using in Baghdad, as if NYC was a war zone.

You have a better chance of being murdered as a citizen of Washington DC than a soldier has of being killed in combat in Iraq.

Crime rates were higher back then as well. Also as a result of this case, NYC changed it's operating procedures.

You think that is justified. I don't.

I don't think that it's justified, just understandable. Police go above and beyond every single day. Sometimes some of them stumble. That doesn't mean that there shouldn't be consequences when they mess up, but we do need to look at the situation and what the officers could reasonably know at the time - remember, they have less than a second to react, while the investigators can take weeks, months or even years to second guess them.

Most well trained police wouldn't have shot just because the suspect has a gun(or at least what the police think are a gun), they'll wait until the suspect presents them with the suspicion that he's going to use it, or will have it in the position to use it to cause harm. IE going to point it at somebody. Meanwhile they'll be yelling 'drop the gun'.

Sure - aquit the police officers who did the shooting. Fine them, demote them, fire them, send them back to the academy for supplimental training, transfer to permanent desk job. Something. Meanwhile send the whole department back to usage of force training.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, because everything revolves around you, and it's never your fault. Go away, you pretentious pseudo-intellectual. If you were really as smart as you claim you'd have never become homeless in the first place.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but you won't find an ally in me when criminals have more rights than law-abiding citizens.

That's okay, when you get detained incommunicado, you'll be just another criminal and will get their benefits then.

Take it from somebody who is on the watch list, AND has a current security clearance.

Re:Good grief

[WNight]

God, it must take a team of coaches to help one person be so stupid.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476

Re:Good grief

[sholden]

For the entire map, there are 144 "raid on an innocent" cases, and 41 "death of an innocent" cases. Discounting New York where everyone knows that police will kick down your door for no reason and hence makes allowances it becomes 118 and 38, or 24% of those innocent raids result in deaths. Of course some "raid on an innocent" situations are in other categories so that over counts - if a police officer was wounded or killed by the innocent person defending themselves, for example.

A great example of New York's finest:

"""
On June 5, 1997, police carry out a no-knock raid based on information from an anonymous informant in the East New York area of Brooklyn. The warrant instructs them to raid a gray door marked "2M." Finding no such door, they instead break down a red door marked "2L," terrorizing Sandra Soto and her two children. They find no drugs.
"""

Re:Good grief

[rk075456]

sure, criminals nowadays becomes more and more intelligent and loves prank

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

You can only become derailed if you allow yourself to. You on the otherhand, have never been on any resemblance of a track in the first place.

Re:Good grief

[stonecypher]

Wow, a link to a self published book, with no actual commentary. And I'm the stupid one, for citing the things I lived through. You, sir, are a debate champion.

Re:Good grief

[rtechie]

Bullshit! Prove that statement. I can't. Though you can't disprove it. I did some digging and I found that apparently these statistics aren't really tracked. Police departments aren't required to keep track of the number of people they shoot, so many do not. They certainly don't separate out the SWAT shootings. For legal reasons the police departments insist that EVERY shooting in EVERY circumstance is justified.

Anecdotally, it SEEMS that a lot more innocent people get shot than "guilty" people. I also think it's difficult to deny that, per capita, the US police shoot far more people than the police in other Western industrialized nations like the UK or Canada.

If I'm ever in a hostage situation, I want SWAT there because I have full confidence in them saving me. Most SWAT officers are never in a hostage situation either. The most SWAT raids are attempts to serve warrants for drug offenses. Most of the time nobody is shot because the intel is halfway decent. It's when they have bad intel that the problems arise (the target isn't there or they're at the wrong location). It's how the SWAT members deal with less than perfect information that's at issue (see the original post). And, anecdotally, the answer to that seems to be: not well. They tend to shoot first and ask questions later.

Re:Good grief

[pclminion]

You said he wasn't responsible. You implied that you believed his motivations were honorable. THAT is being fucking stupid.

There are degrees of responsibility. In this case it is split between him and the implementors of the system. I did not IMPLY anything -- you INFERRED.

Is the guy a douche? Unquestionably. But it shouldn't be the focus of your ire.

Re:Good grief

[Alinabi]

You have a better chance of being murdered as a citizen of Washington DC than a soldier has of being killed in combat in Iraq.

Can you back that up with numbers? 'cuz I think you just pulled that "fact" out of your ass. Here are my numbers:

DC (2006): population 581,530; 169 murders => probability of death: 0.0003.

Iraq (2006): troops 168,530; 791 deaths => probability of death 0.0047.

In other words you would be 16 times more likely to be killed in Iraq than in DC. The data I used came from here, here and here.

Sure - aquit the police officers who did the shooting. Fine them, demote them, fire them, send them back to the academy for supplimental training, transfer to permanent desk job. Something. Meanwhile send the whole department back to usage of force training.

Why? Either they acted correctly, in which case nothing should happen to them, not even a fine, or they used excessive force in which case negligent manslaughter charges and jail time would be in order.

Re:Good grief

[pclminion]

I'm sorry, but anyone one Slashdot blaming SWAT, the Police, 911 Dispatch, or anyone other then the hacker is a fucking moron.

I don't blame them for acting on the information they were given. They did exactly what they were supposed to do. I DO blame the decision to rely on software which can so easily be compromised. That decision was out of the hands of SWAT, 911 dispatch, perhaps the entire police department. But SOMEBODY chose to use a system that was flawed, and whoever that person/organization is, they bear blame.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear you bro. I was just offered a job at Abbot as a research scientest. Like you, my background is biotech, and I like to smoke dope. I emailed them my resume and cover letter. I had even mis-spelled the name of the company in my cover letter ! Starting salary was to be six figures. They flew me in to for the interview. During the interview, the department director made some comments that gave me some insights about their internal politics and the way they railroad people. His comments were quite unsettling as far as my prinipals and philosophy of life go. Anyway I had to reject their offer on account of my principals. I'd rather be homeless too.

Re:Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

I should mention that my flight in was upsetting as well. I was seated next to a psychiatrist who pratices there. I thought I might get an idea of the demographics by speaking with someone who lives and works there and deals with the population daily. Since I'm single, I was interested in the dating scene. Very upsetting. Too many of the women are gold diggers with tit-and-nose jobs. Since I don't drive a car on account of my politics, I would n't be "cool" amongst them. Also, that area is mostly conservative christian.

Re:Good grief

[Geminii]

Hmm, you wouldn't have the home addresses of some of these politicians, would you? I just need to make a... phone call.

Re:Good grief

[agent_no.82]

Make the psyche testing guidelines open enough and transparent, and the courts will take care of it.

Teaching gun care and usage in schools is, of course, politically infeasible.

Re:Good grief

[hexmem]

No, the cop deserves the benefit of the doubt, because he is trained to protect the innocent from the guilty!

Re:Good grief

[hexmem]

Blame the politicians. They are the ones who choose the system. (I'm not being flippant. That's who chooses it. There are two companies in Utah fighting it out to provide Dispatch software. The dominant company sucks!)

Re:Good grief

[WNight]

Yes. I am. You stated something totally retarded, I responded and demolished your entire argument with a single link. That may be a self published book, but does that mean that none of the articles it referenced exist? That none of the events mentioned actually happened?

Ahh yes, but you've never been killed by a SWAT team so it must not happen.

Re:Good grief

[rtb61]

So who bloody protects the innocent from the cop. If they person who upholds the law fails to be judged by the law, the you have no justice.

Re:Good grief

[Anti_Climax]

Indeed. I couldn't find that specific example when writing my comment but knew that it was out there somewhere. That's why I used 'may' in my comment since, being the product of fallible people, our justice system doesn't always do what is right.

I'm really glad I don't believe in hell...

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Because I would so be going there for finding this hilariously funny.

Re:I'm really glad I don't believe in hell...

[cromar]

truly epic rorz.

Re:I'm really glad I don't believe in hell...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, heavily armed SWAT teams plowing into your home and running down your small children - fucking hilarious. There will be deaths at some point - even more hilarity.

Great Geek culture - self-righteous "morality" on copyright law and capitalism, stuff "that matters", and hacker tricks that terrorize (and potentially murder) small children...

Re:I'm really glad I don't believe in hell...

[FlyingSquidStudios]

I didn't say it was a good thing. I said it was funny.

Re:I'm really glad I don't believe in hell...

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats for the self-righteous elevation of the stupid comment of one person into an indictment of a whole group of people. I'm sorry someone here made fun of you once, but you need to get over it.

Re:I'm really glad I don't believe in hell...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, heavily armed SWAT teams plowing into your home and running down your small children - fucking hilarious. There will be deaths at some point - even more hilarity.

Great Geek culture - self-righteous "morality" on copyright law and capitalism, stuff "that matters", and hacker tricks that terrorize (and potentially murder) small children... Now, imagine it happening to your neighbor...

Re:I'm really glad I don't believe in hell...

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Great Geek culture - self-righteous "morality" on copyright law and capitalism, stuff "that matters", and hacker tricks that terrorize (and potentially murder) small children...

Maybe you should switch back from Vista to XP. That may help with your anger.

Stupid & dangerous

[Arthur B.]

If the guy that was targeted thought someone was breaking in and tried to defend himself, he would probably have been killed... nice prank :(

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see it now, some geek hacks the new pentagon war room and hey presto some idiot goes and invades iran

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[SatanicPuppy]

I can't believe that they'd send out a swat team based purely on computer entered info. Does no one have to authorize that use of force? Seems like it would be as vulnerable to a typo as to malicious alteration.

I'd think that sort of thing would work with a pizza delivery system. I wouldn't think it would work for a van fully of heavily armed cops.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as the blame were laid squarely where it belongs: on the heads of the politicians who dictate budgets which are usually woefully short of IT funds. An extra $10,000 on security a decade ago could have prevented the entire fiasco, including overtime, supplies, and the soon-to-ensue court, jail, etc costs.

Prevention is almost always cheaper.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[msimm]

Good thing they typically yell police. But it's still a stupid prank.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[BlowHole666]

Do you never watch Dallas Swat or something like that? They get a page that says where to go and what to do etc. So they probably sent a page out to all the guys in the swat team with something made up. The swat guys did what they were trained to do. So they responded. Also this could have been to the computer system inside the cars. It could have been to a dispatch agent who called it out over the radio.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. No one else can yell "police".

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[elrous0]

Burglars, murderers, and rapists can yell "Police!" too.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[theguru]

But.. but.. that would be illegal.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[maxume]

So if I decide to break into someones house to kill them, I should yell "Police" first, so they don't react?

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[MightyYar]

I'm on the opposite side of this one. In my experience, written information is much more reliable than the spoken word. A dispatcher is just as likely to mis-speak as to mis-type. And a written order gives you a paper trail in case a mistake is made, whereas relying on vocal communication can lead to "he said, she said" situations.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[doombringerltx]

FTFA:

Thinking that a prowler was roaming his back yard, a resident of the home, identified only as Doug B. in the district attorney's complaint filed in court, walked outside with a kitchen knife as SWAT officers from the Orange County Sheriff's Department waited with assault rifles.
He thought they were prowlers at first and tried to defend them himself and then droped the knife when he figured out who it was. I imagine this is pretty standard among people who have their houses raided by the police. And no I don't want to find out, so no "hacking". ;)

As another poster has pointed out, the article makes it sound like this "hack" was just caller ID spoofing which is pretty disapointing.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[SatanicPuppy]

If 10 rapists in riot gear with automatic weapons are running at me yelling, "Police!" I'm fucked whether I drop the gun or not.

It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion. The cops will not even attempt to be subtle once they start moving in.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[evilviper]

If the guy [...] thought someone was breaking in and tried to defend himself

...he would have to be a complete idiot.

You really think this issue has never come up before? It happens all the time, so there are strict rules in place to prevent such accidents, and ensure blame is properly assigned when it does happen.

Police in most states are required to knock on the door, and usually state that they have a warrant before entering. Besides that, it's beaten into every officer's head that the word "Police" starts every sentence... Every time an officer sees someone, 'Police' will be the first word out of his mouth. That single word is the difference between self defense and a murder conviction, so they make damn sure they say it.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[gstoddart]

Good thing they typically yell police. But it's still a stupid prank.

Well, scary enough is the resident of the home heard the commotion, thought it was an intruder, and went into his backyard with a kitchen knife in hand to defend his family.

That could have escalated into a hard take down very quickly. There was huge potential for loss of life here. From what I've seen on TV, SWAT yells 'police' as they're breeching.

I agree with a previous poster -- this is the kind of stuff I'd expect to affect a pizza delivery system not 911. The fact that they think this is the 3rd time this kid has done this means they really need to throw as many charges at him as possible and put him away.

Cheers

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[megaditto]

It was a typo. I mean, Q and N are right next to each-other.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[nocomment]

He did. The guy in the house heard rustling and went into the backyard with a knife. He could have easily been picked off right there.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

Please edumucate yourself before posting. Have you heard of "no knock" warrants? In those, the police don't knock, they just bust in. Besides, a warrant isn't needed when there's probable cause, and a call for assistance probably constitutes probable cause.

As far as defending oneself against police, it's happened, and people have even killed police when a bad no-knock warrant is executed. Those people get of scott free, as the warrant is bad (it's the cop's fault if they don't take the time to check out the building and make sure it's the right place, at least, according to the court system).

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

If 10 rapists in riot gear with automatic weapons are running at me yelling, "Police!" I'm fucked whether I drop the gun or not.

Quite literally.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Xonstantine]

Well, scary enough is the resident of the home heard the commotion, thought it was an intruder, and went into his backyard with a kitchen knife in hand to defend his family.

That could have escalated into a hard take down very quickly. And by a hard take down, we're talking a burst from the MP5 in the guy's chest. Have to commend the SWAT team on this one for not immediately escalating to deadly force.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

Police in most states are required to knock on the door, and usually state that they have a warrant before entering

Where have you been these last couple of years? 'States' don't require the police to knock on the door, the US Constitution requires it. Additionally, this provision has been weakened greatly in the last few years:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/15/AR2006061500730.html

Police *may* shout out 'Police' before barging in, but they won't necessarily announce their position it as they sneak up to your house.

This man heard a noise outside *before* the police knocked on the door, and went outside to confront the 'intruder'. He probably caught them by surprise, and I'm sure the officers are glad they had time to react.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[SatanicPuppy]

Contrary to what people seem to believe, it's unlikely that swat would ever shoot on sight someone who is holding no more than a knife. They have a wide array of "less-lethal" options for those sort of situations, and a guy with a knife is a minimal threat.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it was in California. Self-defense is just as illegal as the Bill of Rights out there, so the cops would be within the scope of their duties to kill them all.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[grouchyman]

Yeah, ask O.J. how that turned out.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[xrayspx]

Hey, if the pizza delivery gets fucked up, Uncle Enzo will disappear you, don't forget it. I bet their customer database is tighter than e911.

Speaking of which, where was Enzo's on the Fictional Company poll?

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[ParrotDroppings]

Huh?! You mean they didn't?
Oh wel...

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Firethorn]

It's happened.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Opportunist]

No, why? Stupid, yes, but not illegal. It's been proven time and again that stupidity is not illegal. More often than not, it's quite helpful in a legal case.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[pla]

It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion.

Sitting down to eat dinner when a swat team breaks down the door, yes. The police, however, favor pre-dawn raids. You presume that someone would have the same capacity to tell the difference in the 1.7 seconds between "sound asleep", "guys with guns yelling at me", and "fire off as many rounds at my attackers as possible".

You also presume someone would care about the difference, rather than considering the police just as dangerous (if not more) than most actual criminals.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Reece400]

I suspect that would fall under impersonating a police officer? Not sure what the concequences are, but I'm certain it's illegal.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Minwee]

It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion.

Right. In a home invasion, the attackers aren't wearing uniforms, don't identify themselves as police, smash up nearby parked cars just because they're there, set fire to your house, kill your dog and then joke about it.

No, wait. That's the police. My bad.

I guess if you're lucky it will just be a home invasion.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[jimicus]

I suspect that would fall under impersonating a police officer? Not sure what the concequences are, but I'm certain it's illegal.

I wouldn't imagine the consequences are any worse than the consequences for kicking someones door down in the middle of the night, barging in with 3 or 4 heavily armed men and stealing all the family's valuables WITHOUT shouting "Police"

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[legirons]

"If the guy that was targeted thought someone was breaking in and tried to defend himself, he would probably have been killed"

So he needs better weapons...

If you can't kill all members of a SWAT team invading your property, then you need to rethink your strategy for defending yourself

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

Except when you commit several crimes, you are not simply tried for a single crime, but for all the crimes. Yelling "police" may extend your sentence, weaken your plea-bargaining position, and could possibly be the only thing that sticks, depending on the circumstances.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Have Brain Will Rent]

it's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion.

Really? Just how many police raid/ home invasions have you been the victim of? Or are you just another armchair quarterback making guesses? There's a little thing called "panic response" which might cause the victim to misinterpret things.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[fm6]

I thoroughly agree. What I don't get is why everyone groks that it's wrong to play pranks on heavily armed cops, but thinks that the cops overreacted when ATHF planted mysterious electronic gizmos all over Boston. Both had equal potential for incidental mayhem.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

You should defend yourself from home invasion as follows:

Plan. Have a safe room that you can retreat to. Make sure you keep a cell phone charged. It can be an unserviced cell phone, you can still use it to dial 911. While the home invasion takes place, you can chat with the 911 operator from your jacuzzi tub, your shotgun at hand, in case the invader makes it through the steel core door.

Responding to a home invasion by going out in the yard with a knife sounds like a good way to get yourself and everybody else in your family killed, or raped and then killed.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Scudsucker]

What I don't get is why everyone groks that it's wrong to play pranks on heavily armed cops, but thinks that the cops overreacted when ATHF planted mysterious electronic gizmos all over Boston.

Because those people aren't stupid, thats why. The Boston PD did their job in inspecting a suspicious device. They did not do their jobs by freaking the fuck out over each and every one and shutting the down the whole damn town. Even if the signs, typically attached to structures like bridges, were bombs, they weren't large enough to damage the infrastructure or placed close enough to human traffic to be anti-personnel mines. These signs were placed in many cities across the U.S. but only Boston saw the sky falling on their heads.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Scudsucker]

Given the fact that people have been shot by cops for a lot less than that, in situations were they weren't called in, yes he was lucky.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[karnal]

smash up nearby parked cars just because they're there, Come on. The article even states:

The armored personnel carrier careened down the street and smashed into a parked car after its brakes failed.

BIIIG difference between just randomly smashing into a car just because they're there and having brakes fail...

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[karnal]

Alright, I'm an idiot. Further down in the article:

But a deputy apparently failed to set the brakes on the heavy vehicle and it began rolling down a hill and smashed into a parked car.

Good good journalism. Brake failure != failing to set brakes, in my backyard mechanic opinion. Wow.

My apologies.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[hawk]

>Every time an officer sees someone, 'Police' will be the first word out of his mouth.

This may have something to do with the divorce rate for cops:

[sultry] "Hey, honey, look what I put on for you."

"Police, wow."

[confused] "Huh?"

"Police, I like it."

[hurt] "Knock that off!" {*sniff*}

"Police, I can't."

[angry] "Goodbye." :)

hawk

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[fm6]

Even if the signs, typically attached to structures like bridges, were bombs, they weren't large enough to damage the infrastructure or placed close enough to human traffic to be anti-personnel mines.

That's one of those glib factoids that people come up with after the fact. Be honest: do you have the background to look at a box that might contain explosives and estimate how much damage it would actually do? I'm guessing not. In any case, it makes more sense for the cops to assume the worst case scenario.

This isn't even a 9-11 thing. Police and security people have been trained to react this way for a long time. Sometimes the results are comic, as when somebody absent-mindedly leaves their lunch in a bank, and comes back to find the bomb squad working on it. But sometimes the results are quite serious. At the 1996 Atlantic Olympics, security people got suspicious about an abandoned backpack and started clearing people away from it. Now, a forgotten backpack is not exactly a rare thing at public event. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, the owner shows up looking for it. But this was the thousandth time, and the backpack blew up, spraying shrapnel all over the place. Two people died, and over a hundred were injured. If the security folks had been less paranoid, it would have been a lot worse.

Security and police are supposed to be paranoid. When they're not sufficiently paranoid and people get hurt, we're certainly quick to blame them for it. Their paranoia can be a threat to civil liberties, but we have other institutions to protect people from that. But inconvenience has a lower priority for some strange reason.

I don't know why cops in other cities didn't react as strongly. Maybe they're all ATHF fans. What I do know is that there can be nasty consequences to doing something that will freak out somebody wearing a uniform and carrying a gun. Anyone who doesn't take that into account is an asshole.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Minwee]

Either way, I don't think that anybody involved is going to get a winning score in Police Quest.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

They are, on my clearly superior and more efficient keyboard layout! LINUX RULES YOU GUYS

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

And if you make yelling "Police!" as you smash the door down illegal, only home-invading criminals will yell "Police!"

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Scudsucker]

That's one of those glib factoids that people come up with after the fact. Be honest: do you have the background to look at a box that might contain explosives and estimate how much damage it would actually do?

No, I personally do not. There are professionals, however, that do. Cities, especially large cities, hire several of them to lend their expertise in situations where there might be a bomb. I even hear they're organized into groups, called squads or something.

This isn't even a 9-11 thing. Police and security people have been trained to react this way for a long time.

Not having been through a police academy myself, I didn't know hysteria was taught over reasoned, logical responses to events.

Security and police are supposed to be paranoid.

Paranoid in preparation. Not paranoid in response.

At the 1996 Atlantic Olympics, security people got suspicious about an abandoned backpack and started clearing people away from it.

That wasn't paranoia, that due diligence. Just as the cops in Boston who checked out a suspicous device were doing their jobs. Not when they kept freaking out when each and every one turned out to be Lite-Brites hooked up to D-batteries.

I don't know why cops in other cities didn't react as strongly. Maybe they're all ATHF fans.

Or they weren't hysterical idiots. Remember that Boston city officials didn't just freak out over the Lite-Brights, they were talking about brining serious charges against the guys who put up the signs and suing the parent company for millions of dollars rather than admit they shit their pants over nothing.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Chris Burke]

The cops will not even attempt to be subtle once they start moving in.

Of course they will. The whole point of the 'no-knock warrant' is that when they suspect that there are armed suspects inside they don't want those suspects ready and waiting for when the police kick in the door. They don't start shouting "police!" until after they kick in the door, and I don't know about you, but between the adrenaline that'd shoot into my veins and the brick that'd shoot into my pants I'm not so sure I'd get what they were saying. It's nice to be all emotionally detached, but that's the opposite of how most people would be when they suddenly find their home invaded by semi-auto-wielding men in black screaming at them.

Fortunately the guy heard them, and they found him out in the open, and holding a knife not the described weapon. But "It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion" in general is just not true. Not in the split seconds in which most of the mistakes will occur.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[elrous0]

Don't write the Juice off yet! They said he was as good as convicted when he ran for the airport in that Bronco too.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[stonecypher]

If a person sees twenty people in riot gear that says police in huge yellow letters, with flash grenades and lexan shields coming in with assault rifles and screaming "clear!" at the top of their lungs, and thinks it's a robbery, then do you really want the genes that made their brain going back into the species?

The suspension of disbelief that it takes to equate SWAT with burglary borders on the absurd.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[stonecypher]

Burglars, murderers, and rapists can yell "Police!" too.

Usually, burglars, murderers and rapists don't show up in riot gear in squads of 20 with assault rifles and flash grenades. And frankly, if they did, I really doubt they'd bother to yell police.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[stonecypher]

You also presume someone would care about the difference, rather than considering the police just as dangerous (if not more) than most actual criminals.

People who shoot at cops because they find them dangerous deserve to be in jail. That's called being a paranoid sociopath. Believe it or not, you don't get to shoot people just because they make you nervous, even if you have flimsy logic to prop it up. And please, spare me the "but they're in my house;" that only holds water when there's the reasonable presumption of danger, and it turns out that saying "I think cops are dangerous" isn't actually reasonable presumption of danger under the law.

The myth that pervades America that you're allowed to shoot people you find in your house is distressing. If there's a mentally retarded man in your living room and you shoot him because you don't know him, you're not defending your home, you're a fucking murderer.

Grow up.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[StikyPad]

I favor post-dusk raids you insensitive clod!

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Clandestine_Blaze]

You also presume someone would care about the difference, rather than considering the police just as dangerous (if not more) than most actual criminals.

People who shoot at cops because they find them dangerous deserve to be in jail. That's called being a paranoid sociopath. Believe it or not, you don't get to shoot people just because they make you nervous, even if you have flimsy logic to prop it up. And please, spare me the "but they're in my house;" that only holds water when there's the reasonable presumption of danger, and it turns out that saying "I think cops are dangerous" isn't actually reasonable presumption of danger under the law. I don't think the poster was implying that someone should be allowed to shoot at the police just because they look dangerous. Is it legal to shoot at the police if they DO NOT properly identify themselves after breaking your door down with weapons drawn and you have no way of knowing who they are? In most states, it is perfectly legal to defend your home under such circumstances. The law in most cases does swing in favor of the homeowner but they better be damned sure that they thought it was a burglar. This is why the police are supposed to make every attempt to identify themselves.

So if they yell police, have identifiable uniforms on, and even give you a chance to drop your weapon and try to talk you, then no, you are guilty for murder if you pull that trigger anyway.

The myth that pervades America that you're allowed to shoot people you find in your house is distressing. If there's a mentally retarded man in your living room and you shoot him because you don't know him, you're not defending your home, you're a fucking murderer.

Grow up. You are right, you are not allowed to shoot at someone just because they're in your home. If that person is not threatening to harm you, and they are not wanted in your home, then you call the police.

However, there is a big difference between a mentally retarded man standing in my living room, being quite harmless to myself and everyone else in the room, versus 8-12 highly armed men in ski masks breaking in with their guns drawn during a pre-dawn raid while I'm presumably in bed. When a bunch of people with guns kick your door down, you have only a few seconds to grab your gun and defend yourself from what could potentially be a burglary. Even if the police scream "POLICE", that noise will probably just startle you out of sleep and you wouldn't even understand what they're saying in time.

This isn't a computer simulation - all it takes is for one nervous police officer or one extremely scared homeowner to pull the trigger and to make the situation really ugly. Unfortunately, very few people possess calm enough nerves to assess the situation, realize that it is the police that broke the door down, and to immediately put the gun down without making any threatening gestures.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[pla]

The myth that pervades America that you're allowed to shoot people you find in your house is distressing.

No, the fact remains that in most US states, you have the right to use deadly force to defend yourself.

In any case, this amounts to an irrelevant distinction, because you missed my entire point. In the situation I described, even if the homeowner did manage to take out a few of his attackers, he would most certainly still lose (and the press would call it "suicide by cop"). Seems a bit of a harsh outcome for doing nothing wrong, but I guess we pay that price for the 'safety" of having a class of armed citizens permitted to break down your door and drag you out of bed without announcing themselves (but hey, the USSC approved no-knock, so we'll call half a dozen corpses cool, right?).



If there's a mentally retarded man in your living room and you shoot him

Careful, don't get that strawman too close to any open flames...

I grew up in a place (in the US) where quite a few people distrusted the government (and the majority did not count as paranoid whackjobs, though I won't deny we had our share of those). The condition I described most certainly applied - And many private citizens had a better home armory than the police. I only meant to point out that, if the same thing happened to one of those people, they wouldn't care about the police/criminal distinction, they would simply think the government had finally gone all the way bad, and defend their home with deadly force.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

come on, have some sense of humor. the poster suggesting it was illegal was trying to be funny.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[evilviper]

the police don't knock, they just bust in.

Even if they don't knock, they do still identify themselves immediately afterwards.

people have even killed police when a bad no-knock warrant is executed. Those people get of scott free,

If any witnesses testify that the police officer identified himself before you shot and killed him, you will be going directly to death row.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[fm6]

Not having been through a police academy myself, I didn't know hysteria was taught over reasoned, logical responses to events.

Not having been through police training, you don't know what counts as hysteria and what doesn't.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

And the threat of punishment for that is about as much of a deterrent as gun control laws are to hardened criminals.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

He's white, so they'd tasered him instead of shot him.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[nsayer]

If the guy that was targeted thought someone was breaking in and tried to defend himself, he would probably have been killed

Go read TFA. He actually did think someone was breaking in, and he armed himself with a knife and went out into the back yard to investigate, whereupon he was tackled by the SWAT team. It was a much, much closer thing than I think you realize.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[NeutronCowboy]

Heh. You're still cracking me up. Here's the first link from a quick google search: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0224/p02s01-usju.html. There's plenty more with actual self-defense laws.

Finally, as plenty of others already pointed out, when you just woke up because of some commotion in your house, where things are dark, you're bleary eyed and can't immediately figure out who is exactly sneaking around your house.... things will get ugly without anyone being a paranoid sociopath. You're making the mistake of assuming that all cops have a little "cop" icon floating over their head, and all robbers and murderers have a "bad guy" icon over their head.

You're as ill-informed and moronic as ever.

And in case you're wondering - all freaks get a +1 from me. I have a morbid curiosity for people who put me on their foe list.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[RichZellich]

> It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference
> between a police raid and a home invasion. The cops will not
> even attempt to be subtle once they start moving in.

I guess you missed the past news reports from multiple cities where the bad guys took to dressing up more-or-less like SWAT cops, yelling "police!" as they broke down doors, handcuffing the residents, and then looting the residence. Sometimes it was drug houses, and they were after the drugs, weapons, and cash and sometimes it was non-crime residences where they were just after an easy score (since the drug dealers were somewhat likely to shoot when were raided by the "cops").

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Scudsucker]

Not having been through police training, you don't know what counts as hysteria and what doesn't.

There's this thing called common sense, maybe they offer classes on it in your area. I no more need to go through police academy training to see that Boston's response was way over the top than I need to go to film school to say Biodome was a horrible movie.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Scudsucker]

I know many PD's like to hand out DWB tickets, but some cops are indiscriminate and get their jollies tasering handcuffed white women.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[fm6]

Common sense? You've got to be kidding me. It's "common sense" to find a strange gadget with a bunch of wires hanging out, and just assume it's not dangerous?

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[stonecypher]

No, the fact remains that in most US states, you have the right to use deadly force to defend yourself.

And, time and time again, in court, it has been shown that just having someone in your house doesn't mean that when you open fire you're defending yourself. You can use all the bold and the suggestive phrasing you want, but no amount of you pretending to know what you're talking about changes the body of precedent that is already in place under the law.

Careful, don't get that strawman too close to any open flames...

A straw man is a disconnected argument. If I said that Toyota Corporation was behind it, that would be a straw man. Try not to trip on all those big words; it's a counterexample, plain and simple.

I grew up

Sure doesn't look that way from here.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[Scudsucker]

Just how thick are you? Where you asleep the first 5 times I said the cops did their jobs by checking them out? Are you also aware of the fact that it is possible to check out something suspicious without shutting down a major metropolitan area and threateningly draconian legal charges? NO OTHER CITY HAD A PROBLEM WITH THESE THINGS.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[mrchaotica]

Even if they don't knock, they do still identify themselves immediately afterwards.

"Immediately" is not quick enough if the homeowner already had his gun pointed at the door.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[mrchaotica]

Personally, my inclination would be to fortify the residence enough that the intruders wouldn't be able to get in before losing the element of surprise. At least then I'd be able to realize they were cops and get my ass on the ground before they thought I was about to shoor them.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[pla]

just having someone in your house doesn't mean that when you open fire you're defending yourself. You can use all the bold and the suggestive phrasing you want

That "bold", "suggestive phrasing" contains the key word you keep ignoring - "Defending"!

You, not I, drifted from the idea of using deadly force against someone who wakes me up with a gun in my face, to killing a retard in my living room "just because". And that makes it...

A straw man is a disconnected argument. If I said that Toyota Corporation was behind it, that would be a straw man. Try not to trip on all those big words; it's a counterexample, plain and simple.

You might want to look that one up again: " The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position"... For example, if I said something about defending myself against an armed attacker and you turned it into some garbage about killing retards, that would count as a strawman.

Oh, wait, you did exactly that. "Try not to trip on all those big words".

I grew up

Sure doesn't look that way from here.

Wow, scraping the barrel, here - You could probably have strung a few more of my words together out of context to make a real point. But no, you chose to snip-and-snipe. Class, man. Real class.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[stonecypher]

doesn't mean ... you're defending yourself.

the key word you keep ignoring - "Defending"!

You're obviously not reading, so I'm not wasting any more time on you.

For you to suggest that someone else is distortionary after this kind of nonsense? Hard to fathom, really. I bet you even believe it. I sat there arguing the definintion of "defense," and you said I was ignoring it. Come up for air, kid.

Re:Stupid & dangerous

[sjames]

The problem is one of expectations. If a homeowner is in the bedroom and hears his front door kicked in, he resonably expects it to be the badguys (since the police have no reason to kick his door in).

At the same time, the police kicking the door expect to find badguys inside (or they wouldn't kick the door in).

Given the police habit of wearing all black with the word police on the BACK of their uniforms, all the homeowner will see is people in black with guns. When he yells freeze, they will aim at him. Naturally, he may now feel obligated to open fire.

That is a very good reason why no-knock warrants should NEVER be issued unless there is clear evidence that a life is at stake. Avoiding destruction of evidence is simply not a good enough reason when it puts innocent lives at risk. It wasn't that long ago the police in Atlanta killed an innocent 79 year old woman that way.

So what state is the crime?

[_PimpDaddy7_]

Is the crime he committed in Washington or Orange County, CA? Because it "crossed" state lines, does it become a Federal offense? Interesting...

So the SWAT team got hacked LOL

Re:So what state is the crime?

[east coast]

So the SWAT team got hacked LOL

You'll think that until you end up being on the short end of the stick. It's nice to have the police show up and you getting a few round from a MP5 popped into your chest for trying to make heads or tails of the commotion. Don't think it won't happen sooner or later. I know if someone was beating in my door at 3 a.m. the first things I'm reaching for is a flashlight and my H&K 45.

Defacing a webpage is funny. Risking some unknown family's lives over a prank is just idiotic.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[spotdog14]

Yes, it crossed the state lines. That is a felony. Sucks to be that kid! But what a dumbass thing to do in the first place. At least send the Swat Team to McDonalds or something.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[JonJ]

I say, might it be possible to equip all americans with firearms, and let you guys sort your own mess out over there? We could use some space. A nation with armed dumbasses.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[DragonWriter]

Yes, it crossed the state lines. That is a felony.

Its almost certainly a felony in any case. Crossing state lines makes it more likely to also be a federal crime; but the two categories are orthogonal.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[dgatwood]

Would you like McFries with that McSWAT Team?

Re:So what state is the crime?

[Culture20]

Actually, quite a few USians have firearms, or some form of deadly weapon. It's a reason why semi-crazies (criminals) are targeting "soft" targets now; if they know people aren't allowed weapons at event X or location Y, they go there because it's safe for them. The real crazies (insane) don't care; they just get taken down where they are because they don't care that everyone else might be armed. Criminals enjoy a disarmed populace. Corrupt governments demand a disarmed populace.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[east coast]

A nation with armed dumbasses.

Nice troll, but I'd rather be armed than take my chances.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[AHumbleOpinion]

I say, might it be possible to equip all americans with firearms, and let you guys sort your own mess out over there? We could use some space. A nation with armed dumbasses.

I'd show the armed dumbasses a little more respect. Given your phraseology you are probably from a country that was either (a) liberated by the armed dumbasses or (b) saved from blockade, starvation, and invasion by the armed dumbasses. Also, parts of the US were there is a greater percentage of firearm ownership tends to be safer. So you are correct that things can sort themselves out, but you are incorrect in the manner in which that is achieved. You wouldn't be getting any space.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[Anonymous Coward]

/me sends swat team to 'east coast's house. makes popcorn.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[pclminion]

Defacing a webpage is funny. Risking some unknown family's lives over a prank is just idiotic.

No. Using a 911 dispatch system that can so easily be manipulated by outsiders is what is idiotic.

If there was a web site somewhere that allowed you to launch nuclear missiles from the Unites States arsenal, and somebody did it, who would you blame?

Re:So what state is the crime?

[east coast]

Using a 911 dispatch system that can so easily be manipulated by outsiders is what is idiotic.

Actually, the article says that he made a call, but from some of the other wording of the article it's hard to tell. In all, this was probably a phone hack.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[JCSoRocks]

There are many other examples, but Washington D.C. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Washington,_D.C. is a good example of this. No guns among the citizens = more crime. Why? Why not? If you can rob someone with a knife / gun knowing that they have no means of defending themselves why not do it? Think about it. (This is obviously from a criminal standpoint, I'm not saying that guns are the only thing that prevent me from robbing people)

Re:So what state is the crime?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly this is why I live in a small town.
We don't have a police department and the Sherrif knows me.
If they want to talk to me they will CALL first.
Anyone kicking in my door is going to get shot.
You see I surived a home invasion I will not go through another.
If that was my house the first round would have been off with in a moment of the door splintering.
Because that would mean whoever kicked the door killed the dogs to get that far.
Yell all you want I am not going to hear you. Gunshots in a confined space do that. After the first round it is a fight to the death, the team is going to respond to a gunshot or shots as they have to and so would I.
At the very least I would be dead. Now in this instance the homeowner met them in the back yard. That would be best result for something like this. Going out in a urban area with a knife is not very wise. Police are supposed to react to it same as a firearm with in a certin radius. And though it is better then beeing umarmed it is not much better then being unarmed. Best to have somone call 911 as someone is going outside. The dispatcher will see what is comming a mile off and will help make sure that this does not happen. The phone is your best weapon as long as you have time to use it.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[Clover_Kicker]

Defacing a webpage is funny. Risking some unknown family's lives over a prank is just idiotic.

No. Using a 911 dispatch system that can so easily be manipulated by outsiders is what is idiotic.

I'm pretty sure they're both idiotic.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[bzipitidoo]

One group that probably finds this pretty funny is Al-Qaeda. One of their goals is to scare us into ruinous spending on security and unreasoning paranoid measures that hurts and angers our allies and hurts our reputation around the world. Sadly, we haven't been smart and courageous enough to totally avoid a little self-inflicted damage along those lines.

Those who think we're stupid for being so well armed minimize an important point. Arms are a final line of defense against even the hint of oppression, be that direct from the government or more indirectly from organizations that have no legal standing to execute searches and seizures but which have conned the government into looking the other way or even into doing their dirty work for them. I'm talking about things like raids by the Business Software Alliance. So far, though such raids have occurred, they've been examined in court and found illegal and unwarranted, or generated so much negative press that the organization had to back down, or both. Arms are perhaps one of the least effective ways of stopping such things, as society would have to be in very bad shape before that way could possibly be worth trying. Hasn't been necessary yet to use firearms to defend a citizen's P2P file server, and hopefully it never will be necessary, but the option remains available.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, because the united states is the only place that has this problem.
 
ownership of firearms makes an obvious difference.

Re:So what state is the crime?

[sribe]

Defacing a webpage is funny. Risking some unknown family's lives over a prank is just idiotic.

Actually no, it is not idiotic. It is sociopathic. Big difference.

Man, what a shitbag

[Reality Master 201]

Here's hoping the kid winds up having to pay for everything, getting sued for millions, and having to spend several years in prison.

Re:Man, what a shitbag

[Major Blud]

Several years in a Federal Pound-me-in-the-A** Prison....

Re:Man, what a shitbag

[nocomment]

I so wish I hadn't already posted in this story. laffs!

...with two sleeping toddlers

[siyavash]

Don't these hackers THINK OF THE CHILDREN? ^^ ...I know, I know. :p

Forged CID

[jfroot]

"The purpose is to create a false 911 call that appears to be coming from the residence in question and prompt a SWAT response from local law enforcement agencies, Barnes said."

It sounds to me that this was not really a systems penetration type of 'hack', rather the kid forged his Caller ID.

Re:Forged CID

[222]

Hrmm. 911 uses ANI, not your garden variety CID. I'm not saying it's impossible to spoof, but WAAAAAY harder and typically involves something being mis configured at your telco. ANI is also used to handle billing for 1-800 numbers, etc.

Re:Forged CID

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my!!

all this talk about penetration and ANIs and 19 year old boys and handcuffs and SWATing. I've got a raging erection folks!

- Rob Malda

Re:Forged CID

[Experiment 626]

While his hack could turn out to be something that simple, my understanding is that emergency response systems use the ANI identification information (Automatic Number Identification, the actual identification information that phone companies use for billing) rather than the Caller ID (easy to spoof, block, etc. and in general much less accurate than people give it credit for).

Re:Forged CID

[parcel]

It sounds to me that this was not really a systems penetration type of 'hack', rather the kid forged his Caller ID. But it also says "False 911 calls are placed all the time, McHenry said, but he said this is the first time someone has hacked into Orange County's system and created a false call in this way." It sounds to me like normally it's CID spoofing, but in this case it seems they're implying that the OC 911 system was hacked. But it's pretty vague.

Re:Forged CID

[blhack]

Sir, please take your rational, knowledgable, and insightful comments elsewhere.
THIS IS SLASHDOT FOR FORD'S SAKE!

Re:Forged CID

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a telco. It's not hard.

I send agents in the support department false ANIs all the time to test them.

Re:Forged CID

[Anonymous Coward]

ANI is also used to handle billing for 1-800 numbers, etc

Good thing he only called 911, instead of having a 3 hour call to the Hott Chixx hotline.

Scenario 1:
Dude: "I did not call 911 and tell them to barge in here with guns."
Wife: "I believe you."
Cop: "Ok, we won't shoot you."

Scenario 2:
Dude: "I did not call the Hott Chixx hotline."
Wife: "I want a divorce."
Qwest: "Pay your phone bill!"

Re:Forged CID

[nobodyman]

911 uses ANI, not your garden variety CID. I'm not saying it's impossible to spoof, but WAAAAAY harder

Yes, the amount of research you have to do to learn how to spoof ANI is daunting. Oh wait, no it's not

Yes it's harder to forge than CID, but it's definitely possible. I'm not sure what the point of your post was. Are you disputing the facts? Obviously the police raided the house, that's not in dispute. So are you saying the hack didn't happen, or what?

Re:Forged CID

[Myrkridian42]

It sounds to me that this was not really a systems penetration type of 'hack', rather the kid forged his Caller ID. So technically that should be a "phreak", not a "hack".

Re:Forged CID

[hawk]

I assume that this is no longer the case here . . .

In 1990, I called 911 due to a fire in the bins behind my office. She responded by asking for my address . . .

hawk

Re:Forged CID

[blhack]

whoever modded me troll on this one. Maybe you didn't read the rest of the thread....above it were like 6 comments talking about how the kid did it by spoofing his caller ID, all of which were modded like +5 informative. When i responded....the comment i was responding to wasn't moderated at all.

Re:Forged CID

[Khyber]

You must be new here. :)

Re:Forged CID

[Anonymous Coward]

>whoever modded me troll on this one

You shouldn't piss off the Slashdot kiddiez... they want to feel 'l33t, and don't take kindly to any criticism, most especially when it's valid.

scary

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if a group of folks got together and pulled this off in an organized way. Just how many emergency services could they pull from something *REAL* that was happening?

Proxy

[kilo_foxtrot84]

assault with an assault weapon by proxy I find this charge to be very interesting. Are there any sort of precedents for it?

Re:Proxy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's basically the same thing as if you tell someone to commit an assault. The assault weapons bit is just an enhancement for sentencing purposes.

It's probably most often used against gang leaders.

Re:Proxy

[wattrlz]

Yeah, but that's where, complicity, collusion, and conspiracy come into play. "Assault by proxy" sounds like a nice way of saying, "...he was just following orders."

Re:Proxy

[Ethanol-fueled]

Most dark deeds are done by proxy. The RIAA's thugs and Blackwater in Iraq are a couple wide-ranging examples.

Methinks the US congress should impliment a traceability act to render proxies obsolete.

Re:Proxy

[IndustrialComplex]

I can't cite any specific sources, but I doubt it would be hard to find a precedent or justification.

It is a very clear statement. Assault by proxy.

All that they would need to prove is that he knew that by his actions, the police would raid the home. Since they have the false 'report' he created, it is probably written in a manner that suggest that a raid was absolutely necessary.

The police in this case were the proxy.

However, it could be argued that he only expected them to use standard issue sidearms. If that is the case, then Assault with an assault weapon (friggen redundant) by proxy may not stick because his intent was assault with a deadly weapon or simply assault.

But it appears that they are throwing the book at him. The loaded term, Assault weapon, was probably thrown in because it carries the potential for the highest penalites of the Assault by Proxy category.

Re:Proxy

[Rob the Bold]

assault with an assault weapon by proxy

I find this charge to be very interesting. Are there any sort of precedents for it?

So if he got someone else to make the phony call to send SWAT to the wrong house, it would be "assault with an assault weapon by proxy by proxy"?

Re:Proxy

[martinX]

And furthermore, if he was Irish and he got two people to make the phony call to send SWAT to the wrong house, it would be "assault with an assault weapon by proxy by proxy, to be sure to be sure."

Re:Proxy

[Firethorn]

Sure, this is the sort of thing they use to get drug lords all the time.

After all, once they're that high they tend to stop commiting obvious crimes themselves, as they're too big of a target. While they're out at the golf range some hired thugs are beating/killing some dealers who were caught skimming.

Re:Proxy

[Anonymous Coward]

It just means you got someone else to do your dirty work.

...

Wait, you didn't think it had to do with servers, did you?

Re:Proxy

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any sort of precedents for it?

If there are, I can't find them in my code of ethics.

(Disclaimer: I'm a peaceful man.)

Re:Proxy

[j-pimp]

Most dark deeds are done by proxy. The RIAA's thugs and Blackwater in Iraq are a couple wide-ranging examples.

Methinks the US congress should impliment a traceability act to render proxies obsolete.

Yeah more government, that will fix our bad government!!

Re:Proxy

[Blakey Rat]

Similar situation in Futurama!

Fry: Leela, is the person that parrot is mimicking telling the truth by proxy?

Re:Proxy

[dbIII]

assault with an assault weapon by proxy

I find this charge to be very interesting. Are there any sort of precedents for it?

About 3128 of them I thought - but when I checked again 404 of them were not found.

Scary that a computer report alone...

[elrous0]

Scary to think that a team of grown, (presumably) reasonable adults can be convinced to kick down your door and point a gun in your face just because a random report on a computer screen says so--with absolutely no confirmation at all from an superior or actual living person involved in the case.

There are WAY too many stupid, unthinking individuals in law enforcement to allow them to act with this kind of force without some direct authorization from someone with at least a LITTLE sense.

We live in a time where fear is threatening *WAY* more people than terrorism ever could.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[PhxBlue]

Alternately, you could say we live in a time where the government is the most effective terrorist.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[Anonymous Coward]

We live in a time where fear is threatening *WAY* more people than terrorism ever could.

So you are saying that dispite Iraq and Afganistan, Bin Laden is winning?

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[LWATCDR]

"There are WAY too many stupid, unthinking individuals in law enforcement to allow them to act with this kind of force without some direct authorization from someone with at least a LITTLE sense."
I guess you didn't read the story.
It was a PHONE CALL. He somehow forged the CID and it looked like the call came from that address.
So what you would like is this," Someone with an assault rife is trying to break into my home". We will send you some help as soon as we get permission?

"We live in a time where fear is threatening *WAY* more people than terrorism ever could." Yep in in this case it is your fear of the goverment that is outside of reason. The police seemed to have acted properly in this case and showed good restraint. The man "heard" a noise in his backyard and went out with a "KITCHEN KNIFE" to see what it was. Brilliant... So the SWAT team after being told that there was someone with a weapon at that location runs into a guy in his PJs with a knife! And they didn't shoot him.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[elrous0]

I'm reminded of a line from Terry Gilliam many years back, talking about the movie "Brazil." He says that it takes place in a time where the government has launched so many different and conflicting counter-terrorism operations and staged bombings that they're not sure if there even are any ACTUAL terrorists still left. They are completely ruled by fear of an enemy who may well not even exist anymore (if ever), or pose any real threat at all. The government has become the worst enemy of the people, under the ironic guise of protecting them.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[BobMcD]

"...let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror ..." Franklin D. Roosevelt (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5057/)

The only difference today is that we've put a name on our terror, uncreative though it may be. There still is no reason applied to it, nor any sane justification for it.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[Korveck]

Which part of the news states that the action was not authorized by a superior? How can you get an actual living person to confirm this if the case was real? They get a report, and they act accordingly. If they take the time to verify whether the report is correct, they risk losing valuable time to arrive at the crime scene. The only thing you should blame in this case is the security flaw. There is nothing wrong with the way SWAT reacted to the report.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[mi]

Alternately, you could say we live in a time where the government is the most effective terrorist.

No, you can't. The definition of "terrorist" does not apply:

The noun terrorism has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
1. terrorism, act of terrorism, terrorist act -- (the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear)

Note, that the results of an act don't matter to the determination of whether it was terrorism or not, the goals do. And the goals of the SWAT teams are apprehending suspects in a (serious) crime — not political, religious, or ideological.

(Take your "US is the number one terrorist" agenda and shove it.)

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[Cedric Tsui]

This goes to elrous0 and to the 4 moderators.

READ THE F*CKING ARTICLE!!!

There was no electronic report. No computer screen told the swat team to go to the house. All the levels of direct authorization were present. The swat team was dispatched by radio with direct orders from their superiors.

The hacker phoned 911 and told them that he had overdosed on cocaine, had been shot and that someone was trying to kill his sister. The only hacked computer involved was the caller ID which was rigged to make it seem the call was coming from the house in question.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[Bent Mind]

Scary to think that a team of grown, (presumably) reasonable adults can be convinced to kick down your door and point a gun in your face just because a random report on a computer screen says so--with absolutely no confirmation at all... Kind of reminds me of the stories I keep hearing about people driving into rivers, off cliffs, etc., on the advice of their GPS navigation units.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[elrous0]

I think he means that in a much broader sense, way beyond this this case. There is more than ample evidence that Bush administration is using the threat of violence against U.S. civilians to instill fear in the public, as a means to accomplish political goals that go back LONG before 9-11 (Cheney's rejection of the restrictions put on Presidential power after Nixon, the "Neo-cons" desire to overthrow Hussein, the desires of the U.S. oil industry to garner lucrative development contracts forbidden to them under the Hussein regime, etc.).

By your own definition that would make them terrorists, no?

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[PhxBlue]

Note, that the results of an act don't matter to the determination of whether it was terrorism or not, the goals do. And the goals of the SWAT teams are apprehending suspects in a (serious) crime -- not political, religious, or ideological.

The SWAT team is a tool of a government which has been shown on more occasions than I care to count that it is a terrorist. Look at the brouhaha in California currently over medicinal marijuana -- the voters of that state want it legal, but federal authorities have raided companies doing medicinal marijuana business within state borders. That, to me, seems to fall straight in line with your definition -- calculated use of violence against civilians to attain a political goal.

And if you don't believe the PATRIOT Act and other post-2001 legislation are being used to political ends, I have a bridge in London to sell you. Even before 2001, the documented cases of FBI surveillance on non-violent protest groups are many and easy to find. When today's records are opened up 60 years from now, our grandchildren are going to wonder just what the hell happened that we gave up so many of our rights so easily.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[PhxBlue]

As a further thought ... what do you call Abu Ghraib? What do you call the CIA prisons in third-world countries? Our government is involved in a lot of shady shit overseas, and there's not much at the moment to prevent them from trying the same thing here. Think of Jose Padilla as the test case.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[Lord Apathy]

reasonable adults can be convinced to kick down your door and point a gun in your face just because a random report on a computer screen says so--with absolutely no confirmation at all from an superior or actual living person involved in the case.

It's just an example of what I've come to suspect a long time ago. People put to much faith in computers. Most of us know that computers are programmed, the data is entered, designed, and built by human beings. We know that computers are just fallible as the people that use them because the people are fallible.

Most people over 30 that do not work in the IT industry think that what comes out of a computer is gospel. I think we've all seen it at one point or another.

Oh and for the record. The fucker that did this needs to be taken out back and have the shit beaten out of him. What ever happened to the hacker motto of "do no harm?

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[sg3000]

> Scary to think that a team of grown, (presumably) reasonable adults can be convinced to kick down your door
> and point a gun in your face just because a random report on a computer screen says so--with absolutely no
> confirmation at all from an superior or actual living person involved in the case.

The alternative could be worse. If I had made the call and someone for real had been shot, I wouldn't want the police calling me back, and asking, "hey, are you *sure*?" The police have to err on the side of doing their jobs or it doesn't help to have a 911 system at all.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[Ogive17]

Are you joking? What are they suppose to do, knock politely on the front door and ask "Excuse me, do you have drugs and guns and a gunshot victim inside? No? Sorry for waking you."

When drugs and guns are potentially involved, the police don't screw around.

And it's not like they just go knocking on random doors looking for trouble. They were dispatched to a certain location because of a call that seemed to originate from that address. That, my friend, is probable cause to enter the home.

I hope the kid that made the call spends some time in jail.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[Stripe7]

Think in terms of the police officer who is responding to the situation. He is going into a situation that he is told will be lethally dangerous (drugs and weapons mentioned). He is responding to a call for help, (gunshot victim) trying to get there fast enough to save a life even if it is that of a drug user. Emergency situation, no time to think or plan, he has to get there fast and rely on his training and his fellow police officers to insure that he gets to go home to his wife and kids later.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[QCompson]

Scary to think that a team of grown, (presumably) reasonable adults can be convinced to kick down your door and point a gun in your face just because a random report on a computer screen says so--with absolutely no confirmation at all from an superior or actual living person involved in the case.

And really, this was just minor, compared to what damage the kid could have done to this poor couple had he hacked into their home PC, deposited some kiddy pr0n, and then called the cops on them. Cops will go on kiddy pr0n raids, busting down doors, armed to the teeth, etc. based on a single tip or lead, with little or no corroboration.

For example, remember this shaqcapade? http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061024-8062.html

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[Anonymous Coward]

The man "heard" a noise in his backyard and went out with a "KITCHEN KNIFE" to see what it was.

Presumably he also put the knife down as soon as he realized it was the police. When it comes to the conduct of the US government, I'm much more concerned about innocent people being tortured to death (e.g. Dilawar) but the fact the man and his wife got handcuffed makes me think that the SWAT team's emphasis on force may make them a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to figuring out what's really going on.

From the article: Officers apprehended and cuffed the resident and his wife, identified as Stacy B. It was moments later they learned the call was false, said Lt. Mike McHenry of the South County Investigations Bureau.

I know there are hypothetical situations where unless they go in with guns blazing then things go really bad but there are also hypothetical situations where unless they go in calmly then things go really bad. What I'd like to see is a careful study of whether an aggressive approach is most effective rather than an unsubstantiated assumption that an aggressive approach is best because that's all they've been trained for.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[DavidTC]

Is not the purpose of prison at least partially deterrence? Aka, we're threatening criminals with harm in an attempt to change their behavior.

That is, of course, not terrorism. There is a difference between a threat of harm after a legal process and actually causing terror.

However, now take that and apply it to breaking down doors with assault teams. Is it possible that someone would actually be 'scared' of that happening to the point they would stay in line and attempt to keep from offending people?

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[mi]

ample evidence that Bush administration is using the threat of violence against U.S. civilians to instill fear in the public, as a means to accomplish political goals that go back LONG before 9-11 ... By your own definition that would make them terrorists, no?

Uhm, no, the violence (or threat thereof) in the definition has to be applied (or threatened) by the same people, who try to achieve their goals.

For example, a stock-trader profiting from a price-hike (or drop) of something due to somebody else's act of terror, is not a terrorist.

So, unless you are stating, that Bush administration has performed (or threatened to perfrom) such acts against U.S. civilians, the definition would not apply.

It is not "my own definition" either, BTW. It comes from the WordNet program... A great tool.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[mi]

Look at the brouhaha in California currently over medicinal marijuana -- the voters of that state want it legal, but federal authorities have raided companies doing medicinal marijuana business within state borders. That, to me, seems to fall straight in line with your definition -- calculated use of violence against civilians to attain a political goal.

No, not a political, but a law-enforcement one. Enforcing a law (including "bad" laws) is not a "political" goal, otherwise, every arrest would be an act of terror.

Even before 2001, the documented cases of FBI surveillance on non-violent protest groups are many and easy to find.

And? Surveillance is not violence. You can be there — I can film you. Just ask any paparazzi.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[mi]

As a further thought ... what do you call Abu Ghraib?

A prison in Iraq.

What do you call the CIA prisons in third-world countries?

I call them "CIA prisons in third-world countries".

Our government is involved in a lot of shady shit

That may well be true, but not in terrorism — not to my knowledge anyway. If you have evidence to the contrary — post it.

Think of Jose Padilla as the test case.

Don't change the subject — Jose Padilla's prosecution (justified or not) was not an act of terror either.

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[elrous0]

Isn't "the threat thereof" EXACTLY what the Bush administration is trading on?

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[mi]

Isn't "the threat thereof" EXACTLY what the Bush administration is trading on?

The violence, that Bush's administration may be accused of "trading on" is not threatened by the Bush administration.

"Do this or we blow you up" is different from "Do that or they blow you up."

Bush may be accused of "trading on" the latter, but he is innocent of the former. And only the former qualifies as terrorism. By definition...

Re:Scary that a computer report alone...

[hesaigo999ca]

I agree with you, also though, if the individual they caught was host to a worm that was trying this stuff out, by lets say an organized crime faction or terrorist cell, this would prove to be tests on their part...so that when the real thing happened, they could cut off the link to the event in question and stop any backup or help from arriving!!!

"I am not paranoid, just slightly cautious * 100"

dealing with innocents

[Speare]

I totally don't condone the "prankster" jerk's behavior in this incident, or anything similar.

However, I have to say that a silver lining in this sort of incident is that it might help the more zealous members of law enforcement (ever more beefy, ever more armored, ever more anonymous, ever more hair-triggered) remember that there are innocent people out there who don't deserve a knee in the back, a taser in the ass, or a broken door. A citizen who is drunk at a restaurant, or who is loud at a rally does not equate to being dangerous or resisting.

When you assume, it makes an ass of you and me. When a cop assumes, all too often he reaches for his sidearm.

Re:dealing with innocents

[Anonymous Coward]

a taser in the ass

Sounds Kinky, Can I borrow yours?

Re:dealing with innocents

[langelgjm]

It's too bad the kid didn't use the hack for something more worthwhile, e.g., if there had been cases of police brutality, he could have sent the SWAT team to an elected official's house, called the media, and caused a big stir. Not that that would justify what he did, but it certainly would've been better than sending them to a random house.

Re:dealing with innocents

[ArcadeX]

A citizen who is drunk at a restaurant That same citizen could also be the one that is drunk and decides to shoot a cop, or appears drunk but is cracked out and ready for a fight. I don't approve of some of the asshole cops out there, but they all have to take steps to make it through the night. Everyone's heard stories about the cops that didn't reach for thier gun first, and didn't make it home.

Re:dealing with innocents

[Jafafa Hots]

That's the risk they accept that comes with the job. We accept that cops take risks and can lose their lives protecting the innocent. It is NOT supposed to be the case that we have to accept the innocent being placed at risk and losing their lives to protect the cops.

Re:dealing with innocents

[sconeu]

This guy isn't a "prankster" and it isn't a "prank".

I've been on the receiving end of a midnight call from the police, and it's not pleasant. A neighbor thought he heard screams from our house, and called the cops. My wife and I were woken up from a sound sleep by the cops.

Luckily for me, nothing happened -- the police were satisfied it was a mistake, and left.

The victim here, however, got cuffed, etc.... I hope this asshat gets prison time, then he'll see how much fun such "pranks" are.

Re:dealing with innocents

[Grishnakh]

He could have sent the SWAT team to a police commander's house. That would justify what he did.

Re:dealing with innocents

[Anonymous Coward]

so, keep voting for the Republicans and welcome to USA police state... This is not a prank, unfortunately.

Re:dealing with innocents

[gone.fishing]

Sadly, I have to disagree with your silver lining conclusion. A situation like this will not give them pause and cause them to rethink their method of handling events like this. From their perspective (and if I were one of them I would probably agree) they have to assume the worst and act accordingly. They believe (with some justification) that this is the best way to proceed to protect lives (primarily their own).

Cops by virtue of their training and experience have to work from the position of guilty until proven innocent, exactly opposite of what the rest of the justice system demands. The people that police come in contact with are frequently hiding something and even people who are just witnesses often have their own agendas or have seen the incident through "tunnel vision" having only seen a bit or piece of the event that transpired.

With the advent of video cameras in squad cars (and similar technologies) police have become a little better in run of the mill events, they have become less sarcastic when dealing with people they pull over for traffic infractions for instance but when it comes to SWAT like tactics when they get a chance to break out the cool toys, the old mentalities are still there. They will go in like gang-busters.

In the long-run, I do think that their tactics probably save lives. Still there is a fine line between terrorisim and legally justified police actions. Like anyone else, police need to be held accountable for their mistakes and need to be able to show that every bit of their actions and behaviors are logical, reasonable, and done in the public interest.

Re:dealing with innocents

[StikyPad]

When I assume, I get Iodine-Arsenic-Sulfur-Uranium-Methyl. Or something. Chemistry I fail it.

Re:dealing with innocents

[Anonymous Coward]

I would generally agree that restraint is needed ... but would not go so far as to 'assume' that ..

A citizen who is drunk at a restaurant, or who is loud at a rally does not equate to being dangerous or resisting.

;-)

Re:dealing with innocents

[_14k4]

If SWAT has to be sent, assumptions are made about the chain-of-command (that it is a legit request) - and the S in SWAT kind of states that they will bust in, take everyone out by the wrists, and ask names later.

Otherwise, two officers get a warrant, knock on your door, and ask you to come out nicely. ...hopefully. That isn't to deny the obvious fact that people get roughed up, both with normal arrests and SWAT arrests.

Re:dealing with innocents

[pk076201]

is it sure the kid hacked the system...or the 911 make it as a cover of they mistake

Re:dealing with innocents

[Eurika Girl9829]

haha!!! that's one of my favorite movie lines!!! Lol!!!!!

One really stupid hack

[Z00L00K]

If you are going to make a hack that calls in the SWAT team - assign them to some place of the Aryan Brotherhood, locally known drug outfit or something like that and leave ordinary people.

Or if you really want to embarrass them send them to the local church after midnight.

Re:One really stupid hack

[Maxo-Texas]

I think you should assign them to the home of a federal district judge or a state or federal representative.

Then something would be done about it.

I remember reading stories (here i think) that people have already died because of resisting mistaken police swat teams breaking into their house without warning in the middle of the night.

Re:One really stupid hack

[njfuzzy]

"Or if you really want to embarrass them send them to the local church after midnight."

Yeah. I get pretty embarrassed watching goth kids have sex too.

Re:One really stupid hack

[Stray7Xi]

This could further be abused by frightening the victim to defend themself. Murder by police proxy.

Imagine this being followed by a call to the target: Yo Johnny, I hear you been banging my boys hoe. We're coming to kick your ass.*click*

Or whatever gang speak sounds like now adays.

Re:One really stupid hack

[Headw1nd]

That this has been modded informative cracks me up.

"Ah... So that's where the do it!"

Re:One really stupid hack

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

Or if you really want to embarrass them send them to the local church after midnight.

Don't you mean Wrigley Field?

It's asshats like this one

[techpawn]

It's "hackers" like this who give "hackers" a bad name! Not saying that hacker is the most glorious title to have, but it's douche bags like this one who thinks it funny to hack for this reason that makes serious security people, white and black hat alike, pissed.

Re:It's asshats like this one

[MontyApollo]

>>it's douche bags like this one who thinks it funny to hack for this reason

At the moment "haha" is the fourth most popular tag for the story...

Re:It's asshats like this one

[foobsr]

Once upon a time, language was more precise. But the battle is indeed lost.

CC.

Re:It's asshats like this one

[Epi-man]

It's "hackers" like this who give "hackers" a bad name! Not saying that hacker is the most glorious title to have

This is why we must continue to fight the good fight to distinguish between a hacker and a cracker. I completely disagree, in the realms of computers, a hacker is just about the most glorious title to have. Cracker is certainly not a glorious title. Continue the fight, correct everyone you can, with our numbers, there is hope to change the tide back but we must all be diligent.

Re:It's asshats like this one

[sco08y]

It's "hackers" like this who give "hackers" a bad name! Not saying that hacker is the most glorious title to have, but it's douche bags like this one who thinks it funny to hack for this reason that makes serious security people, white and black hat alike, pissed.

Given the overwhelming trend of "hacker" being used in a pejorative sense in every part of media, including most technical publications, for the past 20 years, it's pretty clear that the word "hacker" is gone. Let it go.

Security is an illusion

[mdigiac1]

Would it be interesting if he sent false information to the police and it actually turned out to be right. Like the biggest drug ring foiled. Anyway it is stupid that of all people the police are hackable. How safe are we really?

Re:Security is an illusion

[moderatorrater]

That would be cool, but possibly illegal. They're going in without warrants because of a fake phone call. If they were able to get a free search of a house this time, it wouldn't be long before the cops started getting "faked" into any search they wanted.

I for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

would be right behind you!

WTF!?

[Anonymous Coward]

``assault with an assault weapon by proxy.''

How the hell do lawmakers dream this shit up?

How about ``assault because of stupid IT personal using insecure Windows Operating Systems to run Critical Emergency Services''

Re:WTF!?

[ceoyoyo]

So by that reasoning a 19 year old just HAD to do this because he COULD?

The system should have been secure yes. This idiot should have known that sending a SWAT team off on a wild goose chase to someone's house was a dumb idea.

The ability to commit a crime is not a justification for committing that crime.

Re:WTF!?

[MontyApollo]

They hacked the caller ID and called in saying there were a bunch of guys there on drugs shooting up the place. What does this have to do with Windows?

Re:WTF!?

[RightSaidFred99]

Hey, dipshit, he hacked caller ID not "Windoze" or "M% OS" or whatever you fucking dweebs call it these days. He should be sent to prison for at least 5 years and raped in the ass repeatedly.

Re:WTF!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Assault by proxy server.

Re:WTF!?

[Anonymous Coward]

That name was too long, they had lawyers shorten it.

How does this keep happening?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really naive about security, so I can't understand how these security breaches happen time and time again. If these systems were web based, or offering some kind of web or internet service which necessitated having open TCP ports I'd find this easier to understand. Why is it that ordinary office systems (and bespoke Command and Control Systems), and documents sitting on file servers behind corporate firewalls, with no direct connection to the outside world are always so vulnerable? Surely it's possible to run an internal network (ethernet or whatever) in such a way as to make it completely inaccessible from the outside world, while running an email and web gateway?

Re:How does this keep happening?

[adamstew]

I think the issue is that government contracts typically go to the lowest bidder and not necessarily the best person for the job. Not the best way to handle your security infrastructure.

Re:How does this keep happening?

[moderatorrater]

Surely it's possible to run an internal network (ethernet or whatever) in such a way as to make it completely inaccessible from the outside world, while running an email and web gateway? The problem is that you can get in through the web and email gateways. Any interface to the outside world has the potential to be hacked, especially when the interface is one that naturally lets things through (such as email or web sites). The hacker can now attack the server software directly or they can try and sneak something malicious through. If the email server lets a virus through, then there's plenty of ways that an attacker could control that computer and wreak havoc.

That's also not counting on social engineering or internal leaks. If your minimum wage secretary decides that this must be the new sysadmin who doesn't know where the server room is yet and they must not have their card follow me please I'll put in the security code for you and now leave you alone in the room, then we've got problems. Or claim they're servicing the copy machine, or repairing a workstation, or they know a guy. That's not even taking into account the authorized users who don't use it correctly (ie copy it to the laptop, leave it unencrypted, and then has their laptop stolen).

Any interface with the outside world is an attack vector, including humans.

Re:How does this keep happening?

[DerekLyons]

I'm really naive about security, so I can't understand how these security breaches happen time and time again. If these systems were web based, or offering some kind of web or internet service which necessitated having open TCP ports I'd find this easier to understand.

The 911 service uses the _phone lines_. You don't get any more exposed to the world without cutting a hole in your office wall and installing a door to the front sidewalk - then taking the door of it's hinges.

Re:How does this keep happening?

[Myopic]

Surely it's possible to run an internal network (ethernet or whatever) in such a way as to make it completely inaccessible from the outside world...

Sure. It's easy. Disconnect your secure network from the internet. Then zero attacks are possible coming from the internet. But if you want... ..an email and web gateway?

If you plug into the internet, your security is as tight as the software you run. That's obvious, but it's tightly bound to the fact that the world doesn't have any perfectly secure software. We have some rare software, though, which is pretty close.

Re:How does this keep happening?

[adolf]

It's just the way it is.

I often am tasked in working with some of the systems in (small) 911 dispatch centers, which often lets me see rather more than I'd like of what holds them together.

First off, the infrastructure is horrible, almost as a rule[1]. Take the messiest, most confusing, and disgusting wiring closet you've ever seen, and add another layer of funk and wayward cross-connects and a nameless PC under the floor, and you'll have yourself a fairly typical-looking E911 telephone system.

And, generally speaking, the network isn't in much better shape. The tools to secure and lock things down ceased being new long, long ago, but just aren't generally in use. And every system that the dispatchers see (including those that operate the fucking radios) runs Windows, and if it is anything based on HTML, it also has a dependency on Internet Explorer.

It goes downhill from here in all of the obvious directions.

[1]: Of notable contrast to this is the 911 center in the county where I live, where I had to request a hole in the firewall in order to make NTP work on some new equipment. Things there are generally pretty tidy and well-kept... However, nothing at all prevented me from plugging my laptop into an available Ethernet port on the wall, getting a DHCP address on the same subnet as the rest of the building, and then doing some random web browsing and DNS lookups. This was very convenient for me because it let me finish the job a little quicker, and I did have permission for it. However, it only takes one compromised or malicious PC, along with one motivated person, to bring down the whole house of cards with even this small amount of implicit trust. Just a cursory Google search shows that there are lots of ways for one to whatever one wishes with a network like this.

my feelings

[Lord Ender]

The responsible adult in my thinks this is a terrible, anti-social prank, but the 14-year-old kid in me thinks this is awesome.

Re:my feelings

[RightSaidFred99]

Well, if by awesome you mean "could have killed someone" then yeah. This little shitcake should be sent to prison for quite a while.

Re:my feelings

[why-is-it]

The responsible adult in my thinks this is a terrible, anti-social prank, but the 14-year-old kid in me thinks this is awesome.

I wonder if you might feel the same way if you (or someone you care about) was on the receiving end of such an 'awesome' prank?

What if someone had died? Would it still be awesome?

<sigh>

Re:my feelings

[Anonymous Coward]

What if someone had died? Would it still be awesome?

Just because someone dies doesn't mean something isn't awesome.
Plenty of awesome things result in death.

Also, it's not like there's a shortage of people on earth.

Re:my feelings

[Lord Ender]

Clearly, the kid in you is dead.

Kids play pranks on each other all the time. "SWATing" someone trumps the atomic-wedgie, the hand-in-warm-water-while-sleeping, the stick-in-the-spokes, and the frog-in-the-backpack pranks... combined. Kids are reckless, but they grow out of it.

If you think an extended stay in the drug, violence and rape-filled US prison system will make a better man of this smart-but-irresponsible kid, you must know something about prisons I am completely unaware of.

Re:my feelings

[Lord Ender]

I guess English is not your primary language? The expression "14-year-old-kid in me" was key, and you seemed to have misunderstood it... ya square.

Re:my feelings

[Anonymous Coward]

...Then the 14-year-old kid in you needs to be cracked across the face, hard, with a pair of nunchucks, and then kicked hard in the nutsack. (Which is exactly what Id like to do to the kid who pulled this prank.)

Theres nothing remotely awesome about this, dumbass.

Re:my feelings

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly the kid in you is an idiot. Even as a kid, I didn't want to see someone killed, especially as a result of my actions.

Re:my feelings

[PitaBred]

Which is why he said "responsible adult" when he stated what he thought when he thought all the way through it, but up until the consequences are realized it is pretty fucking awesome. Hence the 14 year old comment. But hey, who needs comprehension when we have a "Submit" button to mash indignantly?

Re:my feelings

[Lord Ender]

Who said he wanted to see someone killed?

Re:my feelings

[FurryFeet]

...Then the 14-year-old kid in you needs to be cracked across the face, hard, with a pair of nunchucks, and then kicked hard in the nutsack. (Which is exactly what Id like to do to the kid who pulled this prank.)

Now, THAT would be awesome.

Re:my feelings

[808140]

No one. It was a classic straw man. The logically-impaired love to use them. I'd say you shouldn't be surprised at that sort of thing from an Anonymous Coward, but sadly many users with accounts have the same problem.

Re:my feelings

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Yes, someone dying would be awesome. Trust the computer, the computer is your friend. WTF is it with people blindingly trusting systems they know nothing about?

Re:my feelings

[stonecypher]

but the 14-year-old kid in me thinks this is awesome.

Well, if by awesome you mean "could have killed someone" then yeah.

That's generally how 14 year olds think, yes.

Re:my feelings

[RightSaidFred99]

Ahh, good point. I find it especially amusing when some 16 year old punk drag races, crashes, and kills a family of 5. Haha, good times - good times. That sure beats an atomic wedgie! I don't want him to be a better man, I want him to suffer for being a jackass.

Re:my feelings

[RightSaidFred99]

I hit submit because it's fucking stupid. It's like saying it's "cool, but unfortunate" when some drag racing little douchebag kills a bunch of people in a crash. Or that it's cool but unfortunate when a bunch of kids tie up some gay or retarded kid to a fencepost somewhere and he accidentally dies.

More importantly, the guy who did this was 19. Unfortunately for him, that's adult age and he's going to pay.

Okay, having rtfa

[SatanicPuppy]

What he hacked up was their caller id system, so it looked like the call was coming from the house in question. He stated in the call that he'd overdosed on cocaine, was shot, and that someone was going to kill his sister. Sounds like they sent 20 guys, which would seem to be a rational response given drugs + guns + unknown number of assailants.

They handcuffed the homeowner because he went out in his skivvies with a kitchen knife because he thought he heard people on the lawn. I guess he saved his door getting kicked in, but I'm not sure he sees it as a good thing.

Re:Okay, having rtfa

[MightyMartian]

"This is the Moral Majority. Please come up with your hands in the air and your penis firmly inside your underwear."

Re:Okay, having rtfa

[Anonymous Coward]

What he hacked up was their caller id system

911 doesn't USE the caller ID system, there's a completely separate system for 911 that includes address, etc. This is why 911 from VoIP was such a big deal.

Re:Okay, having rtfa

[SatanicPuppy]

I didn't say "the" I said "their" as in "the system that they use to identify callers" not "the system commonly known as 'Caller Id'"

Re:Okay, having rtfa

[Organic User]

He stated in the call that he'd overdosed on cocaine, was shot, and that someone was going to kill his sister. How does he call if he has been shot?

Re:Okay, having rtfa

[mangastudent]

They handcuffed the homeowner because he went out in his skivvies with a kitchen knife because he thought he heard people on the lawn. I guess he saved his door getting kicked in, but I'm not sure he sees it as a good thing.

When I think about it, his action coupled with his "choice" of clothes and weapon may have saved him/his family.

The police in good faith rushed to his house expecting something entirely different. When he walked out like that, I can't see it fitting any profile they expected to see, and that probably started to tip them off that all was not as it seemed.

Re:Okay, having rtfa

[Mattwolf7]

shot != dead.

Re:Okay, having rtfa

[markana]

If you read the Seattle-area news, you get a bit more detail (but not much). He's got a juvenile record, and is suspected of doing this in other cities.

Looks like he picked the family at random (from his earlier entry into AOL's systems), then called them to verify their name and address. It seems to me that he tried to come up with a scenario that would generate the maximum possible response from the police, which is about what he got. If the homeowner was carrying a gun instead of a knife, he'd most likely be dead now. That was probably the high score that Ellis wanted to hit.

We'll see if anyone ever leaks how he did it. Could have been as simple as a compromised VOIP switch sending bogus ANI data down a trunk. Or maybe he entered a record directly into the dispatch system (which isn't supposed to be connected to the net).

At least he wasn't smart enough to fully cover his tracks.

Re:Okay, having rtfa

[jafiwam]

Those databases are not all that hard to get into.

If you are a CLEC (local telephone company) or are reselling phone service and using a phone switch, you get access to make the entries. This is quite common amongst big companies with big phone systems or small ISPs expanding dial up locations.

Then when you provision the lines, you put the entries in. It's just data in a switch, just like a router has routes and a firewall has rules. It is subject to the same "model X has this buffer over run" and "model Y has this default password" stuff that other devices have.

And when it's being set up, you dial through it, and politely ask 911 operators to verify the address that came up on their screen was the one you wanted and the number matches, etc.

It's not some big WOPR mainframe in a tunnel somewhere run by the best and brightest local authorities, it's a patchwork of stuff thrown together by phone techs who for the most part are careful, and for the most part are authorized to do what they are doing.

Yeah, not many high school "hackers" think of it as a target right off the bat when they feel destructive, but getting in or getting lucky trying random stuff with them is not hard at all. Half the battle is just knowing such things exist.

Obligatory and most likely ignored...

[Romancer]

Alright so here's the rant:

So do we all feel safer after the establishment of Homeland Security and the billions of dollars spent in upgrading the ease of violating our civil liberties here at home in the name of protecting those same distinctions that make America different? This is another nail in the coffin of fear that we're building for ourselves here in the name of safety. When our most basic methods of crying out for help to our protectors can so easily be broken and used by the tormentors I feel a tremendous sense of loss for what we could have done with the same motivation and money that has been spent on this fear mongering compaign with the almost transparent attempts to simply gain power using the real threats that we face as a shield. America is great because of the people who don't love it or leave it, but protect it and improve it. The swearing in of the presidency is the paramount symbol of this nation, to make an oath to protect America against threats forign and domestic and uphold the constitution. It's not a choice between the two. For without the constitution there would have been no America to protect. At least no America where you would have the rights that allow you to be protected in the first place.

It's sad that the most basic of methods to protect the people is so vulnerable.

Re:Obligatory and most likely ignored...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're supposed to end this kind of political rant with "Vote Ron Paul! REVOLUTION!"

Re:Obligatory and most likely ignored...

[Culture20]

I'm curious what SWAT teams have to do with "The War on Terror (TM)". We had them long before, and this sort of thing could have easily happened before. Now, in terms of money, and how it would have been spent w/o "The War on Terror (TM)": I can guarantee it would not have been spent auditing CID security. It would have been spent building that fence down south, maybe a fence up north, and auditing Shipping Dock security. This would have been the first year... a couple years after 2001, and it would have been spent taking down the fences, and drilling for oil up in Alaska. Then it would have been spent on vote-buying for 2004 and 2008. "The War on Terror (TM)" has, for all the distraction it has done on the local scale, has at least focused our eyes abroad.

Re:Obligatory and most likely ignored...

[MightyMait]

I heartily second your rant!! I too am saddened by the waste that I see.

Working for county government, I frequently interact with our law enforcement folks. Most of them are sincere, hard-working, good folks. Very few of them are what I'd call "technically-savvy" (even the ones with the reputations for being so).

As such, they can fairly easily be sold IT systems that look good but which have fundamental flaws by vendors who seem to value profit over quality.

Re:Obligatory and most likely ignored...

[Romancer]

My point is really solidified by your reply. Your most basic assumption is that the money would have gone somewhere else. That's my point. These things are infrastructure upgrades and are neglected. There "should" have been proper vetting of possible attacks to our basic protection systems on up. But you look at it as though these things are impossible. If the money didn't go to one thing, it would have gone to another, and not the necessary valid protections that are the underlying reasons for the money being spent in the first place.

Funds spent on the security of the people should require money be spent to actually make the people safer.

Re:Obligatory and most likely ignored...

[Anonymous Coward]

This crap has been going on way longer than homeland security has been around. I'm glad people are finally noticing because of homeland security. Maybe it WAS good for something afterall. I just wish y'all could have come around a lot sooner.

Drugs

[crabpeople]

"SWAT officers expected to find a victim shot to death, drugs and a belligerent armed suspect when they surrounded the home of an unsuspecting couple"

And if drugs were legal, they would have been dispensed by a licensed shop or market, not sold in a home. There would be no shootings over drugs, no belligerent armed suspects, and no home invaded under false pretenses. The problem here is the illegality and absurdity of the drug war.

Re:Drugs

[Grey_14]

The problem here is the illegality and absurdity of the drug war.

Yeah, That's the problem with people hacking the 911 system to dispatch SWAT teams, good call.

Re:Drugs

[Experiment 626]

Or maybe if drugs were legal, the guy would have just made up a different crime instead to get the SWAT team to go to the house.

Re:Drugs

[aramis34143]

First, let me state that I agree with the drug war being absurd.

However, I'm not buying you're other assertions.

Automobiles are legal. There are shootings over automobiles, there are armed and belligerent car thieves, and if you're vehicle were falsely reported stolen, you might well have your home invaded under false pretenses.

A car is a "big ticket" item and legal drugs wouldn't be nearly as valuable. However, violent crime is not confined to expensive toys.

Re:Drugs

[tnk1]

Heh. No. This call is perfectly reasonable even in a society with legal drugs. Otherwise, that's like saying that legalizing alcohol made DUIs and drunken brawls impossible.

People will still get baked on legal drugs, and if taken improperly, they will proceed to have the same violent altercations that they had before. They'll just do it with less involvement from organized crime.

And legalized drugs doesn't mean there still wouldn't be a black market. Guns are legal (in the US), but there is still a thriving black market on weaponry.

Drugs are a problem all by themselves. The problem with the War on Drugs isn't that drugs aren't a problem, its that their way of dealing with it is counterproductive. Even without the WoD, you still have to deal with the fact that many drugs can fuck people up in ways that don't require the involvement of the police or gangs.

Re:Drugs

[Romancer]

Honest question. Would you legalize cocain and sell it to kids?

Unless it's dirt cheap as well, kids that get some from their parents legal purchases and get hooked are going to have to either get their parents to get more for them or they would become the same gun carrying, drug dealing, robbing for the cash to get their next fix, problems that we have today. I already see kids running drugs and carrying guns to school as it is.

I honestly consider legalization an option, but only see it fixing the problem to a degree, and shifting the problem area more likely. Not solving the underlying problem that the drugs exist and can be used to feel good and are addictive. Unless those are addressed, I see no real solution.

Re:Drugs

[Lord_Slepnir]

Maybe the coder that wrote the 911 system was going through withdraw after the cops busted his dealer, and left the security hole in.

Re:Drugs

[crabpeople]

Veering dangerously offtopic

"Not solving the underlying problem that the drugs exist and can be used to feel good and are addictive."

Thats not a problem, our bodies have evolved to be addicted to things. Millions are already addicted to sugar, caffene, etc. Do kids deal alcohol at school with guns? No because alcohol is readily available everywhere. If your kid gets addicted to drugs, its really the same as if they get addicted to television or sugar or lack of physical activity. Thats bad parenting, but we shouldnt stop people from CHOOSING to be bad parents. If it gets really bad, they take your children away. I would imagine drug use would be treated similarly.

People do not currently knock over 7/11s for alcohol or cigarette money. In any case, the crime should be robbery, no matter the motivations behind it.

Re:Drugs

[Romancer]

People do not currently knock over 7/11s for alcohol or cigarette money.

Wanna look a little closer at that statement?

How do you know that?

How do you know what they will spend the money on once they rob a place and why do you assume that it's not for the highest item sales numbers of those stores baring gas? I have not really seen a 7-11 that doesn't sell cigs and beer.

Also the fact that so many people steal cigarettes and alcohol directly from 7-11s seems to go against your statements fundamental idea. Do a couple searches online and you'll see what I mean, those legal drugs are stolen more often than the actual cash at places like 7-11.

Re:Drugs

[Jherek Carnelian]

Or maybe if drugs were legal, the guy would have just made up a different crime instead to get the SWAT team to go to the house. If drugs were legal, then politicians would not have felt the need to grand-stand so much about "being tough on drugs" and thus would never have funded the SWAT team in the first place.

Re:Drugs

[dlZ]

Automobiles are legal. There are shootings over automobiles, there are armed and belligerent car thieves, and if you're vehicle were falsely reported stolen, you might well have your home invaded under false pretenses.

I had this happen, and ended up face first on the ground with a knee in my back because of it (it wasn't actually my car reported stolen, but they had put down the wrong license plate or something along those lines.) Yet, when my car was REALLY stolen, the cops kept insisting I had to have given my keys to someone, or maybe that I "forgot" I let someone borrow it. Oh, and they never found my car, but a friend driving home from work who cuts through a rough part of town did later the next day. It was on the side of the road, and looked like the passenger side of the car had been used as a battering ram. They didn't even take my stereo, just went on a joy ride and left it.

In this case, though, I think the SWAT team acted properly, and had great restraint if anything, as no one was hurt. This could have been so much worse.

Re:Drugs

[Mal-2]

Even if drugs themselves were legal, being an asshole under the influence could and should remain illegal. The flip side of legal drugs is accepting responsibility for one's behavior under the influence. Sadly, accepting responsibility is no longer the American Way.

Mal-2

Re:Drugs

[Anonymous Coward]

So the 911 system is still being screwed with 20 years later. I figured after the Atlanta 3, and some of the other 80's groups they would have better secured their systems.. guess not. 1 for creativity, 10 for bringing back 80's childhood memories.

Mass Crime

[benburned]

hmm- this would be a good way to do a huge crime without being caught- one would hack into the system repeatedly with fake crimes then when one went to rob a bank or whatever there would be no police forces available to apprehend the real thief I guess i think way too hard about some of these things. :(

Jerk....

[pablo_max]

I can not begin to tell you what a pain in the ass this was. You can not imagine how hard it is to tell your boss you are late for work because you are currently under siege from your the swat team. Totally messed up my morning.

sweet . . .

[spamking]

I've learned about a new concept . . . how a first post can be redundant.

Re:sweet . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

"some people have way too much time on their hands"

You were expecting Insightful?

Jail time need

[moracity]

If this kid doesn't get jail time, it's just time to do away with all of our laws. What's the point?

The victimized family should bring a a civil suit and make sure they get a monetary judgement that docks his wages for years to come. If he gets away with it, we'll be hearing about him again.

Re:Jail time need

[Epi-man]

The victimized family should bring a a civil suit and make sure they get a monetary judgement

This is the key. The blame here does not lie with the law enforcement (do note, I have not RTFA) but with the twit. As a citizen, I would like to have a very strong response should I call 911 and indicate my wife/son/daughter is about to be killed. I would want to see the "good guys" coming in with riot gear, MP-5s with laser sights, all that good stuff. Make sure the bad guys know it is suicide to kill hostages. Most importantly, get my family out of the mess as efficiently as possible. I live in a town home invasions are relatively common (one on the news ever few weeks it seems), so perhaps that has warped my perspective.

Re:Jail time need

[W33dz]

You should really tag drivel like this with a or people are going to think you really are serious. Oh wait. . .

Re:Jail time need

[W33dz]

You should really tag drivel like this with a disclaimer or people are going to think you really are serious. Oh wait. . .

Re:Jail time need

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell? What if it was someone in China or Africa? What if it was North Korea trying to cause confusion before some kind of attack?

This guy should be given an award for pointing out how fucktarded our police are and how much they need to fix their system. He should be rewarded with a large sum of cash and put in charge of those who ineptly implemented the system in the first place.

Hackers like this are saving us from mass attacks in the future. They should perhaps be monitored, but should be reward and nurtured--remove the desire to do damage and add incentive to report what they found and you have a fantastic resource.

Respond as you do and we are opening up our entire infrastructure to foreign attackers.

Think of these guys as inoculations against deadly viruses.

all I want to know is...

[spiffmastercow]

How did he find it? I mean, if I was designing an emergency response system, I would have it directly connected to the 911 call center and the dispatch center, with no internet connection..

Re:all I want to know is...

[east coast]

The article is pretty unclear as to the method. It nearly reads like this was a phone hack and at the same time they make it also seem like he was directly in control of the 911 system at the same time.

It's either poorly writen or the cops who reported the details somehow lost something in translation.

The police should be held accountable.

[kybur]

TJX Corp was held accountable when hackers stole credit card data. This is a much more serious case of negligence on the part of the police department. Perhaps they should be banned from using the Internet?

Re:The police should be held accountable.

[hexmem]

This is a much more serious case of negligence on the part of the police department. Perhaps they should be banned from using the Internet? Sorry Asshat, but there is ZERO negligence from the police department. They did everything 100% correctly. Legally, ethically, and morally.

Perhaps you should be banned from the Internet?

Re:The police should be held accountable.

[kybur]

Perhaps you should consider what happened to that family before you spew out these flip comments. This is the problem with law enforcement in this country. Like you, most are severely misguided. Typical. My condolences.

Re:The police should be held accountable.

[hexmem]

I do consider what happened to that family. Maybe you should too. The cops did nothing wrong. It was all the hackers fault. Period! Even the family agrees with that (from everything I've read in the news about this).

This is the problem with people like you. You lump 98% of the good cops with the 2% of the severely misguided ones. Typical. My condolences.

Re:The police should be held accountable.

[kybur]

There's no range there? Just good ones and severely misguided ones? What about just misguided, or slightly misguided, or even mostly good? You'd think if 98 percent were good, it would be easy for them to spot and get rid of the 2% of severely misguided police.

Read the story

[Sycraft-fu]

What the kid did was fake a call from the residence claiming that he had been shot and people were going to kill his sister. If I place a call like that, I WANT the SWAT team to kick in my door, I want 20 heavily armed people coming to save me. I don't want them to say "Well hang on a minute here, let's get the confirmation from the captain, a chief, a judge, and sit on it for day in case it's a hoax." I want them coming over and saving my life.

Yes, had they gone to some other random house, then I'd be with you on needing authorization, however this was, as far as they could tell, an emergency call from the resident in need of immediate help. Given that the emergency call involved drugs, a shooting and a potential hostage situation, this was an appropriate response. When you call for help, that's all the authorization they should need. The failure is in the identification system, not in the response. Had this been a real call, that's the kind of power you want to send, especially if there's a potential hostage situation.

Re:Read the story

[jimicus]

If I place a call like that, I WANT the SWAT team to kick in my door, I want 20 heavily armed people coming to save me.

Let me get this straight.

In a situation where a drugged up person with a gun (and probably a rather tenuous grip on reality) is pointing the gun straight at you and holding you hostage, you want a lot of noise and commotion?

I think there are possibly more subtle ways to defuse the situation which are much less likely to involve said madman pulling the trigger.

Re:Read the story

[vishbar]

Like what?

The druggy was (supposedly) already shooting people, heavily armed, and high. Ten times out of ten, rationality doesn't work. The first order of business is to save the lives of potential victims...many times, that means a swift disarmament.

Re:Read the story

[ravenshrike]

Had he had a gun, how much do you want to bet that he would be shot dead? A melee range weapon to a person covered in body armor with a gun is an almost negligible threat(Unless said person is right next to you and you're out of ammo.).

Re:Read the story

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, had they gone to some other random house, then I'd be with you on needing authorization, however this was, as far as they could tell, an emergency call from the resident in need of immediate help.

It does raise an interesting about a right to unreasonable searches. A while back I was trying to dial a complicated international number and I somehow managed to dial 911 and then hang up without realizing that I had just dialed 911. The police showed up and I had no idea what was going on but I wanted to try to stand up for my civil liberties so I tried to prevent them from searching my apartment.

The thing was, they took my refusal to allow a search as probable cause and searched it anyway. Naturally, they didn't find anything illegal and it wasn't really a big deal but it does illustrate the the prohibition against unreasonable searches can actually get rather complicated in real life situations.

Re:Read the story

[Jherek Carnelian]

What the kid did was fake a call from the residence claiming that he had been shot and people were going to kill his sister. If I place a call like that, I WANT the SWAT team to kick in my door, I want 20 heavily armed people coming to save me. You know what? I DON'T.

Forget all the cops and robbers shows on tv. The actual number of cases where that kind of response is desirable is very small. We don't need the service they are selling us, especially at the price of hundreds of millions spent on SWAT training nationwide and the occasional accidental death of an innocent.

Life has risks and always will no matter how hard we try to minimize them. The kind of risks that SWAT are supposed to be for are rare enough that we ought to be spending our resources on more effective avenues - more regular cops walking a beat, better drug abuse treatment, more community watch/involvement programs.

Re:Read the story

[Scudsucker]

The thing was, they took my refusal to allow a search as probable cause and searched it anyway.

I hope you sued the shit out of them then. Refusal to be searched cannot be probable cause or else the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures is meaningless. Refuse to be searched - probable cause, now they can search you. Consent to the search - well, you consented, so you can't complain later.

Re:Read the story

[Scudsucker]

Yup. Even if a heavy response is not necessary, I would also want the SWAT team there in case it turned out to be necessary.

Re:Read the story

[dlgeek]

I'm pretty sure 911 hang ups are defined to be probable cause already, they probably just asked out of politeness. If some one is in trouble and calls 911 (be it a kidnapping, domestic dispute or injured person), the cops need to determine this. If you call 911 accidentally (I've done it), just tell them it was an accident and they're fine with it. If it's a hang up, they have to assume it's an emergency situation and react appropriately.

Re:Read the story

[Scudsucker]

I'm pretty sure 911 hang ups are defined to be probable cause already

Probable suspicion, sure. Probable cause, probably not. Some quick Googling turned up a DOJ document that says a 911 hangup is probably not sufficient grounds for probable cause by itself, but my search didn't come up with any case law on the subject.

Stupid Kid. Lucky Kid.

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Man what a stupid prank to be pulling. As previous posters mentioned, he should have at least sent SWAT to a McDonalds or WalMart and not a private home. 10 years ago a SWAT team here in Boston made a felony entry into the wrong apartment and ended up roughing up an elderly priest named Accelynne Williams so badly that he ended up dying of a heart attack. If this SWAT team had injured or killed any of the people in the house they responded to, even if it was a similar case of just triggering a heart attack, this kid probably would have been charged with murder or manslaughter.

He did try to defend himself

[paladinwannabe2]

Apparently the owner heard a 'prowler' and went out armed with a kitchen knife. The kid's lucky no one was killed- he'd be looking at murder charges in addition to whatever fraud charges he's got now.

Re:He did try to defend himself

[Yvanhoe]

Agreed, the kid should be charged. But someone has to be charged for incompetence also.

Phillip Dick story?

[moankey]

Sounds like something out of a Phillip Dick story where nothing is seen as being wrong with the system even if the couple were killed. Acceptable losses or some other acronymed term, until one day one of the SWAT members realizes the prank is pulled on his own family only to realize its too late for him to warn them.
At which point the cog in the machine becomes the hero in various hollywood ways and somehow joins forces with the prankster that has some far reaching political message wrapped around his pranks.

Re:Phillip Dick story?

[Seakip18]

Isn't that also the plot to Fahrenheit 451?

Re:Phillip Dick story?

[pkphy39]

See: Brazil
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/.

Really risky hack

[Nonillion]

I can state with confidence, as another /. poster pointed out I wold have been shot if this prank had been played out on me. Someone using a ram to smash in my door would most certainly wake me up, and during the commotion, I would most certainly be killed as I pointed my weapon at the intruders. If you're going to channel your talents to do something like this, do it to someone who really deserves it. Of course, I would expect my family to sue for Billions for wrongful death.

Re:Really risky hack

[Cedric Tsui]

This is the reason why police have a procedure when entering private property.
They claim very loudly (over blowhorns if necessary) that they are police and that they are coming in. During a raid, the SWAT team is trained to shout continuously and in unison "Police! Get Down! Police! Get Down!" It's hard to mistaken them for robbers.

Re:Really risky hack

[Cedric Tsui]

Oh right! One more thing.

Suppose police raid your house, and you're deaf and disoriented and you end up swinging at them with a baseball bat. In today's day an age, you may be lucky enough to be tazed rather than shot.
If you were to start pointing a gun at the police... you may be sol.

Re:Really risky hack

[Isaac-Lew]

You do realize that it's possible to purchase a fake SWAT outfit (along with a fake badge), right? At 2 am in the morning, it's difficult to think straight after someone kicks in your door & points a gun at you.

Re:Really risky hack

[Nonillion]

Well, I don't know about you but I don't wake up instantly. There is a few moments that I'm still a little incoherent. Weather they are yelling POLICE GET DOWN! or not is going to sound like gibberish. What if this was done to a post war vet? All I know is if I was able to come to come coherence early enough to NOT point my weapon at the police, the best I could hope for is to get a little roughed up.

Re:Really risky hack

[gujo-odori]

No kidding. I bet "Police, police, get down!" Would be a pretty effective thing for home-invasion robbers to shout, too.

Re:Really risky hack

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trolling, this is an honest question.

If you acknowledge that pulling out the gun in response to someone kicking down the door gets you killed (at least in this particular situation), why pull out the gun?

I suppose that most of the time it's likely to be badguys breaking down the door and not a lost SWAT team, but doesn't it stand to reason that they'd start shooting as soon as they see a gun in your hands too?

I guess what I'm getting at is this: I've never really understood the idea of "having a gun for protection" in light of the way it seems to escalate situations, especially ones like this story. Obviously, while you acknowledge the increased risk, you still keep a gun for protection. Why?

Re:Really risky hack

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, I would expect my family to sue for Billions for wrongful death.

yeah, don't flatter yourself

Re:Really risky hack

[ErikZ]

Yeah. Because robbers would NEVER dress up like police, barge in and shout continuously "Police! Get Down! Police! Get Down!".

Only the magic of being a policeman lets them do that.

Re:Really risky hack

[stonecypher]

I can state with confidence, as another /. poster pointed out I wold have been shot if this prank had been played out on me.

What's amazing is that you still think the problem isn't you, even though almost everyone else survives such episodes. SWAT's false kill rate is less than a tenth of one percent. What does that tell you about the appropriacy of how you react to the world?

Re:Really risky hack

[stonecypher]

You cannot, however, buy nineteen other SWAT officers, or flash grenades. For that matter, if someone's got an assault rifle in your face, it pretty much doesn't matter who they are; if you react badly you're going to die, and that means only assholes react badly in those situations.

Believe it or not, lashing out is not in fact the best response to possible danger.

At 2 am in the morning, it's difficult to think straight after someone kicks in your door & points a gun at you.

I'm still alive because I managed. Has it happened to you? Because, frankly, I'm calling your bluff. It turns out that if there's a whole bunch of noise and suddenly a dozen dudes are pointing heavy weaponry at you, you suddenly begin to think very, very clearly.

Adrenaline doesn't care if you just woke up. When you've been there, let us know. For now, you're guessing, and you're not correct.

Oh spare me

[Anonymous Coward]

You are really blowing this out of proportion. I do this all the time, only occasionaly does someone get shot.

Get over yourself!

Brazil

[peripatetic_nyc]

Was his name Buttle?

Re:Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice, Maby Tuttle....

Re:Brazil

[rlgines]

Um, I think it should have been Tuttle ... but we'll need to fix the air-conditioning first.

Oh...so it was a "hacker" was it?

[Zapped.Info]

Well...Just chalk this up as another excuse for law enforcement to use, when they come barreling into your house at 4:14 in the morning, throwing you to the ground, putting handcuffs on you while pointing a loaded gun at your head (No psychological trauma there...nah...not at all.) Perhaps they did this because the 911 computer "dispatched" them, or perhaps another agenda is at hand? Since when do we start blindly following orders from a computer screen to the point of terrorizing and arresting citizens? (If you've got handcuffs on you're arrested) If this story is true, then we've got some dark days ahead...days when the police(state) can ignore even our most basic rights and not be held accountable: Instead saying..."Uh...Duh...the computer made me do it...Damn those hackers!" Scapegoat anyone? I hear they make tasty barbeque.

Re:Oh...so it was a "hacker" was it?

[Akaihiryuu]

Yes yes...but that's not what happened here. The kid somehow messed with the caller ID system (the one 911 uses, this is NOT the consumer "Caller ID" but a different system) and then called 911, making it appear that he was calling from the residence in question. He then started going on about how someone overdosed on cocaine, shot him, and was torturing his sister in the other room. The 911 dispatcher was talking to a real person on the phone, it wasn't just "the computer made me do it". Now as to why the system was vulnerable (it definitely shouldn't be, that's an issue in and of itself) or how the kid did it, TFA doesn't say. This isn't the slippery slope you're making it out to be (from your comments you make it seem like words appeared on the computer saying "send the SWAT team to this address).

Don't hack the police state

[athloi]

We need them to keep kicking down the doors of terrorists, drug dealers, and other bad people we fear so that we can stay in our apartments, and comfortable denial.

FBI?

[cpt.hugenstein]

Since this was cross state does this become an issue with the FBI and could he be dealt harser penalties?

All due respect to cops...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I totally respect what they do, and how many put their lives on the line to protect our way of life.

But a great many of the ones I have met (socially, I've never been nor do I plan in any way to in the future in trouble with the law in any serious way my most serious infraction to date or likely ever is a speeding ticket) are:
1. Ex Military that have never escaped their Gung-Ho kill the enemy balls to the wall attitude, and are mostly just trying to relive glory days in foreign lands.
2. Military wannabes who either couldn't get in, were to scared to go in, or washed out, and now take this paramilitary job as a way of living out the dreams of glory days in foreign lands they never had.

In either case give the guy a little bit of authority and they will abuse it all to hell, and exceed their mandate by a mile. Don't be a ball breaker Mr. Policeman and your definitely not my moral authority I don't need a lecture.

I've met plenty that don't fit into this picture as well, just regular guys trying to enforce the law of the land and protect the rest of us, I'm not trying to paint with a broad stroke, but the Military has beens and wannabes seem to out number the nice guy cops at least of late.

Would not have been murder

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Manslaughter maybe, but not murder.

Re:Would not have been murder

[SatanicPuppy]

They're charging him with assault by proxy. If there had been a death, it could very well be murder depending on the statutes.

Manslaughter is reserved for places where you didn't intend for there to be a death, and it would be hard to argue that you weren't intending someone to die when you send a van full of armed men to their house. The kid is lucky as hell; if someone had died, they'd have charged him with the absolute maximums.

Re:Would not have been murder

[cthulu_mt]

I know in New York that a felony (which I'm sure the hack is) that results in a death will get you a second degree Murder charge.

Re:Would not have been murder

[Rakarra]

I think it could very well be considered murder from the legal standpoint. If you can go out to an empty field, start a fire, some homes get burned, and a fireman is killed while fighting a fire at one of those houses, the arsonist can be charged with murder, not just manslaughter. It's happened in my home state at least once this year. Redirecting a swat team to someone else's house would be an even stronger case.

Re:Would not have been murder

[idontgno]

If any of the charges applied to the punk were felonies (and I think at least two are), and they stick...

If someone had died because of this "prank", the phrase "felony murder" would be coming up in discussion right now.

Re:Would not have been murder

[Firethorn]

Depends on the state.

There are states that would view this the same as deaths involved with something like a bank robbery - there are criminals that end up with murder convictions because a police officer or guard kills their partner.

The 'kid' committed a several criminal acts that resulted in death - it might be 2nd degree murder, but it could still carry a murder rap.

Re:Would not have been murder

[Cajun Hell]

it would be hard to argue that you weren't intending someone to die when you send a van full of armed men to their house.

Interesting. The fact that the armed men are cops, doesn't change that? Is there an expectation that cops should shoot someone?

If a jury were to agree that sending cops to someone shows intent to kill (rather that, say, detain (or if you wanna spin it this way: kidnap)) then I would reluctantly have to argue for the abolishment of cops.

Cops are weapons, but they're supposed to be thinking weapons, safe to have around in society. Even if this hadn't been a malicious false-alarm, it's still quite possible for SWAT to be deployed against innocents. Authentication is of course important, but it must not be the only thing that protects people from getting killed by cops. No matter what second-hand "intell" a cop has that they are facing a dangerous suspect, each individual cop damn well better have a first-hand-verified reason to kill someone, before they shoot.

Re:Would not have been murder

[neil-ngc]

Doesn't matter. A murder charge can be placed against someone who either intends to kill, or shows a willful disregard for life. Dispatching a SWAT team, knowing full well that in a tense situation like a SWAT raid, there's the distinct possibiility someone might come out in a body bag, certainly seems to fit the latter. Cops are trained in such a way that they can usually take control of the situation without firing shots (this would be the Tactics part of the acronym), so the odds of a death aren't high, but there's so many ways things can go south, that it's certainly irresponsible enough to merit a murder charge if someone does die.

Re:Would not have been murder

[realthing02]

I've heard of that. IANAL but i think it's a death in furtherance of a crime. The crime being fraud, and the resultant death coming from a direct act of the fraud.

Re:Would not have been murder

[SuperBigGulp]

Almost doesn't matter...the ensuing *civil* wrongful death suit would have clobbered the prankster.

Re:Would not have been murder

[bjohnson]

The principle is called 'Felony Murder' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder as causing a death during the commission of a felony, not necessarily in futherance. It can be incidental. If you commit a violent armed robbery of a bank, and a customer inside dies of a heart attack from the fright, you certainly could be charged.

It certainly would apply in this case.

Re:Would not have been murder

[NMerriam]

Is there an expectation that cops should shoot someone?

No, but the legal standard used in most places is not whether or not you EXPECT harm to happen, rather whether the harm is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of your action. Most juries would agree that sending armed officers to a house in the night represents a pretty predictable and finite set of outcomes, some of which involve violence (whether to the resident or the police).

So, for example, if you rob a bank with a toy gun, you're obviously not intending to shoot someone, but if the security guard shoots at you and hits an innocent bystander, you'll be charged with that death because it was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of waving what appeared to be a weapon in front of an armed guard.

Re:Would not have been murder

[stonecypher]

You're misunderstanding. Murder requires intent. The worst he could get would be reckless endangerment / manslaughter 1.

Re:Would not have been murder

[ConfusedVorlon]

well, our cops are trying to argue in a court case right now that they didn't put the public at risk when they follwed a chap, then shot him 7 times in the head with hollowpoint bullets.

-There was no 'stop or we shoot. They just shot.

It seems that just suspecting someone of being a terrorist was enough to kill him.
It was made more embarrasing to the cops when the chap they shot wasn't even their suspect.

Re:Would not have been murder

[Rogerborg]

It's SWAT. They execute people for a living. You don't send SWAT unless you want a body count.

Re:Would not have been murder

[charlesnw]

Um. No? You send swat when you want to resolve a situation that requires rapid dominance and a safe resolution. Often its more desirable to apprehend a suspect then to kill them.

The real crime here

[Critical Facilities]

is that kid's hairdo. Yo kid, the 1987 season of Growing Pains called and wants its hair style back. This guy + this guy = this guy?

Re:The real crime here

[russ1337]

is that kid's hairdo. Yo kid, the 1987 season of Growing Pains called and wants its hair style back. This guy [friendlyatheist.com] + this guy [wikimedia.org] = this guy [ocregister.com]?

Nice!

*starts slow clapping*

*clap* ....... *clap* .......

Re:The real crime here

[Anonymous Coward]

is that kid's hairdo.

Absolutely right. I remember an episode of Cheers where some kid was being a jackass. At the end of the episode Sam Malone gives the kid a few bucks and tells him to get a haircut. Sam finishes by saying, "There are no bad kids, only bad haircuts."

Re:Stupid Kid. Lucky Kid.

[Anonymous Coward]

He's also lucky he didn't pick a house with pet dogs. Where I live the cops like to shoot them when doing a raid.

If you got to be arrested, be it by swat

[SmallFurryCreature]

They are the real pro's and will NOT shoot you just because you got a knife. That is because unlike regular police they get to train, and train, and train, and train. A regular cop is someone who was given some extremely basic weapons training ages ago, vists a static shooting range every year or so and then in a split second has to go from ordinary average day routine into making a life and death decision.

CAR ANOLOGY! (Didn't think I could do it in this story, well I can)

You are an ordinary driver, you might have one day learned about what to do if you get into a skid, you may even have taken some training, but when you are just driving around and suddenly it all goes wrong and you are expected to suddenly get that 2 tons of metal out of a high speed skid, you probably will NOT do it as the book says.

Unlike a rally driver, to whom this is routine.

IF we want our regular police to be highly capable, and react correctly in an emergency, we better be prepared to pay them for endless training. Are we? No.

Most people understand this, if you got a medical emergency, where do you go, the hospital OR your family doctor? To a building filled with strangers who deal with emergencies ALL the time, or the guy you know and trust but whose last training was 30 years ago?

The swat team did what they are trained to do, lets hope this guys cellmate does what he has been training to do. He is going to get his ports probed.

Re:If you got to be arrested, be it by swat

[LWATCDR]

I know several police officers including a member of a SWAT team. Frankly all of them are professionals. Sure some shouldn't have a badge or abuse power but that is a tiny minority. Consider how may times a day the police arrest people in the US the number of misdeeds in the US is very small. Yes every one is serious and should be taken seriously but jumping on the police in this case is just stupid. They did a great job in this case and should be commended.
Helpful hint. If you hear a sound in your backyard don't grab a knife and check on it. A knife is probably just going to get you killed.

Re:If you got to be arrested, be it by swat

[TamMan2000]

Helpful hint. If you hear a sound in your backyard don't grab a knife and check on it. A knife is probably just going to get you killed.

In most cases all you have to do if someone is prowling in your yard is show that you are home, and they will move on to the next target... your statement seems to assume that the person in your yard is armed, most of the time they aren't...

Re:If you got to be arrested, be it by swat

[LWATCDR]

Exactly just turn on some lights and make sure all the doors are locked. If you are still worried call the police. Going out armed with a kitchen knife? Just dumb.

Re:If you got to be arrested, be it by swat

[Puh]

Bah, I'll see your analogy and raise. Kids these days have it so easy.

Back in my days we didn't have no fanzy-pants ESD-systems, no sire. And no one ever bothered to melt the ice on roads either. We were constantly skidding from October to May, I tell you. Later in the winter the going got easier when the snow walls alongside roads got high enough to lean on.
And I tell you, we Finns even have more firearms at home than you Yankees, and still no one kicks down my door at night, not even the police. You know, the SWAT team here (we do have one in this country too, you know), those boys use an APC for transportation, not some sissy black vans.

Well, I guess these are just your regular cultural differences, so there you have it!

(Point, what point? I just like them analogies, that's all.)

Re:If you got to be arrested, be it by swat

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

lets hope this guys cellmate does what he has been training to do. He is going to get his ports probed.
Why is it that people in this country encourage rape as part of punishment? That sentiment is absolutely sickening. If that was your brother, or your son, or your father -- would you want his ports probed, even if he did do something incredibly stupid? What about your mother? Would you want your mother raped repeatedly over the course of years if she was found with a piddling amount of a controlled substance (even a tiny amount of cocaine or other drugs can get you locked up for years in this country)?

Rape is not, and should not be a part of incarceration in America. It is not helpful for punishing or rehabilitating criminals -- you're many times more likely to perpetrate sexual crimes and violent crimes if you have been sexually assaulted yourself. That assholes like you think it's funny to contemplate male rape while likely voting to strip homosexuals of basic human rights is a pure travesty.

Re:If you got to be arrested, be it by swat

[mrchaotica]

Helpful hint. If you hear a sound in your backyard don't grab a knife and check on it. A knife is probably just going to get you killed.

What should you do then? Stand just inside your door and attack the first person through it? (No good; you're probably more likely to be shot for that than going outside!) Put the knife away and lay prone on the floor? (No good; what if they really were home invaders, rather than cops?) Can you think of any other options?

In my opinion, this was the best possible outcome: he made himself known to the cops before they were in full attack mode, and did so from far enough away that they didn't consider him an instant lethal threat. He's damn lucky; if he'd been standing inside with that knife when the cops burst through the door, I firmly believe he'd have been killed.

Re:If you got to be arrested, be it by swat

[mrchaotica]

If that was your brother, or your son, or your father -- would you want his ports probed, even if he did do something incredibly stupid?

"Stupid" is one thing; psychopathically malicious is another!

Would you want your mother raped repeatedly over the course of years if she was found with a piddling amount of a controlled substance

There's a difference between approving of it for someone who actually deserves to be there and approving of it for all prisoners. Every time I've heard or read someone glorifying about prison rape, they were referring to it being applied to someone who committed a really heinous crime.

In other words, that's a big fat strawman.

Rape is not, and should not be a part of incarceration in America. It is not helpful for punishing or rehabilitating criminals...

Rehabilitation? Sure, rape's not good for that... but then again, neither is prison itself.

Punishment, on the other hand, is something prison is really good at. And once you start realizing that crininals are there to be punished, it becomes that much easier to ignore the situation when the other inmates take it upon themselves to be "cruel and unusual." Now, that doesn't mean prison rape is okay; far from it! But it does mean that prison rape is not as bad as rape of a non-criminal. And, dispite being cruel and unsual, rape is an effective punishment.

Re:If you got to be arrested, be it by swat

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

Punishment, on the other hand, is something prison is really good at. And once you start realizing that crininals are there to be punished, it becomes that much easier to ignore the situation when the other inmates take it upon themselves to be "cruel and unusual." Now, that doesn't mean prison rape is okay; far from it! But it does mean that prison rape is not as bad as rape of a non-criminal. And, dispite being cruel and unsual, rape is an effective punishment.
So you're admitting that it's a constitutional violation, ineffective in rehabilitating criminals, and immoral, but you're defending it anyway? Regardless, prison is a very strange punishment, if that's what you think it is. I'm assuming you've never actually been inside a prison -- or you'd have a better idea what life is really like in lockup.

On the other hand, while I was doing research investigating patterns of conflict in prisons, I got the exact opposite impression that you express here. Far from "punishing" criminals, prison reinforces criminals' social schemas and increases the likelihood of violent crime. Most inmates I talked to said "yeah, prison sucks, but it's not so bad -- at least the people here understand me." Studies on recidivism consistently find that many criminals commit crimes after release because they have no social outlet or support on the outside -- they only "fit in" in jail (institutionalization).

Of course, most people probably identify this clearly with Red from "Shawshank Redemption" -- he's an institutional man; he's a nobody on the outside. Another good pop culture scene that actually mirrored my observations in prisons is from "Blow" -- "I went in with a bachelor's in marijuana and left with a doctorate in cocaine." We're doing our inmates and our society a disservice in the way we handle criminals in America (but that's another story).

More to the point -- this case. You call this guy "psychopathically malicious." Now, ignoring the fact that you clearly misuse and misunderstand the idea of psychopathy, let's look at how risky what he did is. He called SWAT down on a house, and everyone was fine. As a matter of fact, the grand, grand majority of SWAT stings go down just fine. The fact that so many raids are carried out daily without incident is a testimony to the efficiency and training of most SWAT teams. Furthermore, I don't agree that it was malicious at all. Malice is generally typified by an extreme emotion toward your "victim" -- in this case, the guy was clearly not emotionally attached to the victims; he selected them at random. Furthermore, we can't say that he intended anyone to be hurt, although he clearly wasn't using very sound judgment (e.g., he was "stupid").

I would estimate that the risk he created is approximately equal to that of a typical (very) drunk driver -- would you say that all drunk drivers also deserved to be raped? Many people have driven intoxicated in the past, perhaps even you.

As to my "straw man" -- you think that just because you wouldn't personally advocate it, it doesn't occur, or nobody else advocates it? The attitude of "ha ha you're going to get raped in prison" creates a social atmosphere where prison rape is OK -- even if it's just rape of your marijuana-possessing mother. It also creates a generation of violent criminals with a history of sexual assault -- which is likely to be passed on to their children and other people in "free society".

There is no good reason to advocate, joke about, or create a socially acceptable atmosphere for any rape, even in prison. Even if prison is for "punishment" (which I don't accept) -- rape isn't supposed to be part of the package. If we, as a society, really think that it should be, then we should own up to it and institutionalize it (everyone gets raped at the door or some such nonsense).

New hacker category

[Anonymous Coward]

For people who do this kind of stuff.

Whitehat Grayhat Blackhat Asshat

It may be the police's / politician's own fault for having the unprotected system and bla bla bla... But when they catch the guy who did it, 5+ years in the slammer I say. That's the kind of situation when you can take the Hacker Manifesto and wipe your ass with it.

Re:New hacker category

[Myopic]

I think four or five years is appropriate -- per count of attempted murder, which in this case is one for each member of the family, all of which could have been killed. So that's ten years (round up). Add serious computer fraud, so let's say another four years (first conviction). I guess they layered on a "false imprisonment" charge, which I guess is accurate, so let's say another year.

See ya in fifteen years, kid. Good luck in PMITA prison.

Re:New hacker category

[ArsenneLupin]

That's the kind of situation when you can take the Hacker Manifesto and wipe your ass with it. And be sure to wipe it deep. Indeed, there's nothing that Bubba hates more than shit on his peepee...

I smell a new Bravo show...

[jpellino]

"The Real Hackers of Orange County"

I vote Mr. Ellis gets trained as first responder for the Snohomish County bomb squad.
And the vets get to stand behind him with balloons and pins as he practices.

Owned

[Anonymous Coward]

Owned, bitches

LOL

[SydBarrett]

At least Mr. Buttle wasn't hurt..

or was it Tuttle?

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey...we're all in this together!

Re:LOL

[stonecypher]

At least Mr. Buttle wasn't hurt.. or was it Tuttle?

Well, it certainly wasn't Mr. Subtle.

'Prank' a very *poor* choice of words

[AHumbleOpinion]

True, but in a good way. It's a pretty harrowing experience for the innocent victim but at least it was just a prank

'Prank' is a very poor choice of words. A prank does not put innocent people in mortal jeopardy. SWAT teams are trained for high risk arrests and when they make an entry they are a fraction of a second away from firing. If that innocent husband or wife accidentally made a suspicious/threatening move they may have been killed.

It is funny . . .

[Rob the Bold]

Fucking with the cops is only funny in the movies.

Ya, I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there . . . As Mel Brooks said:

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."

Re:It is funny . . .

[LilGuy]

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
- Clarence Darrow

Orange County SWAT got pw3ed

[GoatRavisher]

Ph33r |\/|y 1337 sk1llz l4m3rs!

Rape is not funny

[Loundry]

Most rapes occur in prison.

The ones that occur outside of prison usually happen to women. That's a "crime against women" or even a "hate crime".

The ones that occur inside of prison usually happen to men. That's a punch line for really stupid reasons.

Most rape victims are men.

Rape is not funny.

And the fact that being incarcerated for minor offenses is tantamount to being sentenced to rape is the most unjust aspect of the American justice system.

Re:Rape is not funny

[jafiwam]

Rape is not funny. Unless you are raping a clown.

Nah.

[SatanicPuppy]

It's a prank call. Cell phone, pay phone, public phone. The "traditional" fake call.

The thing that added to this one was the fact that the house actually seemed to BE the house, so the call was much more believable than if it had been coming from a random pay phone.

So

[scubamage]

Is the bug patched yet? Or are they waiting for something serious to come from people exploiting this sytem? Serious being something really bad... like, I dunno, copyright violation?

More details on how he did this...

[Kronos666]

http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071017/NEWS02/710170400 Basically he used a system for the hearing impaired to relay a message... the operator then called the police. He also tried to do the same thing to someone else who was "cheating in an online game". You have to love these kids...

Re:More details on how he did this...

[complete loony]

He also tried to do the same thing to someone else who was "cheating in an online game". So the next time you're speed hacking in CSS, some *real* counter terrorists might break down your door.

You're a Friggin Idiot!!!

[spiedrazer]

"But in a good way"!!!, "Just a Prank"!!! Have you the slightest clue what is going through the minds of armed officers entering an unknown residence at 2:00 AM. Anything can happen, and to just randomly select an address and send the cops there full force is about as irresponsible and criminal as I can think of. If you are really worried about fixing the system, why not suggest that they just point out the flaw and the underground community trying to exploit it! You really need to get your head out of your ass before you post someting that demonstrates such a total lack of thought or contact with the real world.

this country

[ryanwneumann]

This country never ceases to amaze me. Isn't the very reason that we have police to protect the innocent? A District Attorney quoted: "It's not a prank, people's lives were in danger." For what reason would the victims be in danger? After all, if they hadn't done anything wrong, why would they be in danger? Is it common practice for police to start shooting people?

Re:this country

[gujo-odori]

If you RTFA (Yeah, yeah, I know, this is Slashdot. Still...), you'll find that the main point of danger was that the guy thought a prowler was in his yard and went outside with a kitchen knife. Under the circumstances (yes, that was a dumb thing to do, he should have called 911 himself), he could have been shot. Or, if the swat team had broken the door down, what might have happened? If someone broke your down in the middle of the night, in the dark, and rushed into your house, wouldn't you be likely to try and resist? Especially if you had a wife and kids and you thought you were being attacked? What if that had happened and he'd had a gun? Many people, in such circumstances, would assume it was a robbery and shoot. Then the SWAT team would have returned fire and killed him.

Yes, this guy needs to go to jail for a long, long time. Not to Federal prison, though, but to state prison, which is where the ass-pounding problem exists. Federal prisons are mostly filled with non-violent offenders and relatively easy time, which is where the "Club Fed" nickname came from.

That kid needs to pay

[Libertarian001]

That kid needs to pay, like going to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for 25 years or so. Calling 911, stating that drugs are involved, that you've been shot and that you think they're going to kill your sister is not even remotely funny. This could easily have gotten someone killed. In the debate of intent vs. effect, I'll side with intent on this one. This kid intended to get people hurt and he needs to pay for it. And it needs to be a big, nation-wide story: Don't place crank phone calls to 911 or you will pay.

Re:That kid needs to pay

[Anonymous Coward]

The Kids should POUND YOU in the ASS. Its not calling 911 you MORON. But then you are reading slashdot..

I'm slow, but I get it right every time now!

[weston]

It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion.

Yeah! Well, it took me a while, but I've gotten to the point where I don't even have to wake up to tell the difference!

Just last week I woke up to find my already splintered and duct-taped door kicked in yet again, and I'd slept right through it! I'm pretty it was the police based on what they took and what they didn't take.

See, I've gotten to the point where I keep two packages handy whenever I go to bed: one with ID, a personal statement, some donuts, coffee, milk, etc., and the other with a few valuables and convincing amount of cash I round up before I go to bed. I give the appropriate one to whoever breaks in that night. I used to mess up *all* the time -- and while, sure, the thugs appreciated the donuts, they'd always want the valuables, too, even though they'd get nicer about it if the donuts were good. And you could see the police really had their feelings hurt when they thought I was trying to buy them off, and nobody wants that.

But I've gotten it right the last 15 times -- even last week, when I woke up in the morning to find out I'd slept through it all. The donuts were gone and the valuables were still there! I'm looking forward to the time when this will all be sorted out and I can just buy myself another door and stop spending all this money on donuts, duct tape, and miscellaneous valuables, but in the meanwhile, I'm glad I've adapted and learned to cope before doing anything really stupid like overreacting when someone breaks in.

Re:I'm slow, but I get it right every time now!

[nomadic]

But I've gotten it right the last 15 times -- even last week, when I woke up in the morning to find out I'd slept through it all. The donuts were gone and the valuables were still there!

I think that was Santa Claus.

Re:I'm slow, but I get it right every time now!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh man, this is the single greatest post I have read on /. in the last 5 years.

The cops did everything right.

[The Breeze]

Oh, bullshit.

Welcome to the world of emergency response, where seconds matter and people get killed every day.

Sure, there's a lot of fascist crap going on in the US today. Is the government out of control? You betcha.

But in this situation?

A call comes in, saying that one person is dead and another is ABOUT TO BE MURDERED, and the cops respond appropriately - they burst in with guns drawn and in overwhelming force. And, the cops even have the presence of mind to take down the armed homeowner (who, from his perspective, is conducting a lawful self-defence of his home with a knife) with non-lethal force.

I say yay to the cops. They did everything right. For, 99.99% of the time, when the call comes in saying someone is getting murdered, SOMEONE IS GETTING MURDERED. What would you have the cops do? "Hey, there's a report that there's a drug-addled maniac in there who is about to kill a kid. Let's knock at the door and have a chat."

Cops, generally speaking, are trained to not usually knock at doors. They are instructed in many jurisdictions to stand to the SIDE of the door, so that a shotgun blast through the middle of the door won't take them out. That is how they are trained to knock on a door in a NON-CONFRONTATIONAL SITUATION, because cops have been blown away simply for knocking on a door to let someone know their car lights are on or some stupid shit.

We have a court and legislative system to fix fascist abuses AFTER THE FACT, because such abuses can be discussed in a calm, reasonable matter. This allows the cops to use overwhelming force to secure a situation IN AN EMERGENCY, securing the site and figuring out what happened afterwards. And yet, cops are STILL killed in the US every single week, despite all their precautions.

It's not the cops' fault that the court and legislative system is currently broken. Police investigations usually are designed to preserve evidence for trial; SWAT team responses are designed to preserve HUMAN LIFE first and foremost. Why? Because we can ultimately, in theory fix any abuse of procedure through the court system, but we cannot restore human life once taken.

If the cops think a kid is about to die, they're going to come in with guns drawn and ready. They're going to come in hard. And that's just the way it should be. The cops should be able to trust the tools they are given. Blame here rests with the worthless piece of subhuman flesh who committed the crime (compromise of the system) and whoever in IT screwed up the system security. Don't blame the cops.

This crime was not a "minor offense"

[Anonymous Coward]

This crime was not a "minor offense". A couple was put in grave mortal danger. Toddlers in the next room were put in mortal danger to a lesser degree.

Not a minor

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes me smile that the asshole that made the call is 19 years old and just old enough not to be tried as a minor.

Irrelevant.

[SatanicPuppy]

That may well come up in the trial, over whether he can be charged with proxy assault (which is normally reserved for gang leaders and such) for sending police officers to kick down someone's door. The cops themselves were acting under the understanding that there were armed intruders on the property, and at least one person had already been shot.

I think under the circumstances they did a damn good job. Being confronted with a genuine armed target, they reacted correctly, neutralizing the threat with non-lethal force, and securing the situation.

There's really no possibility of completely eliminating civilian casualties in a SWAT situation...There is no such thing as a safe weapon. I don't think that means we need to eliminate SWAT, and if we could eliminate the sort of situations that call for SWAT teams, I'd assume we'd just go ahead and do that.

I'm not going to ask them to stand there and get shot because they can't be certain that they're shooting at the right guy with the gun. There is going to be a certain amount of risk, and I trust they'll be out there trying to minimize that risk, but it'll never be eliminated.

I don't know when we as a society started thinking that we ought to be sacrosanct in our persons. I don't want anything bad to happen to me or mine, but I'm not going to go gunning for the cops when one of my loved ones get caught in a crossfire between cops and criminals, or in a situation like this, where a third party put them all in harms way.

Re:Irrelevant.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm not going to ask [SWAT] to stand there and get shot because they can't be certain that they're shooting at the right guy with the gun. There is going to be a certain amount of risk, and I trust they'll be out there trying to minimize that risk, but it'll never be eliminated.

They don't have to stand there. They control the timing and nature of the confrontation. From the mostly anecdotal evidence I've seen, a remarkably high proportion of bad shootings by police officers started with a simple confrontation being mishandled, resulting in a fast moving situation with panic reactions rather than a controlled challenge with safety paramount. The whole point of having trained public servants to do this rather than any old Joe is that the trained guys are supposed to be better at it.

I don't know when we as a society started thinking that we ought to be sacrosanct in our persons. I don't want anything bad to happen to me or mine, but I'm not going to go gunning for the cops when one of my loved ones get caught in a crossfire between cops and criminals, or in a situation like this, where a third party put them all in harms way.

I don't know when we as a society started thinking it was acceptable for police to get away with murder, either. But seriously, when was the last time you saw a cop in any western country successfully prosecuted for shooting an innocent person dead? "Friendly fire" might be an unfortunate reality in war, but there's not much excuse for it in everyday life. I would rather the police always erred on the side of caution in this sort of encounter rather than risk shooting someone innocent. At least that way, if bad things happen, it's not our own authorities doing it to us.

Re:Irrelevant.

[linzeal]

The real people that should be charged over this are the people of California. How can they allow SWAT teams to be sent to anywhere without checks and balances?

Re:Irrelevant.

[mrchaotica]

I would rather the police always erred on the side of caution in this sort of encounter rather than risk shooting someone innocent. At least that way, if bad things happen, it's not our own authorities doing it to us.

Exactly: it's better for an officer to end up dead than an innocent -- the officer signed up for it.

Re:Irrelevant.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Exactly: it's better for an officer to end up dead than an innocent -- the officer signed up for it.

I don't know whether that was intended as serious or humorous. I don't think it matters, though: officers are the people least likely to suffer injury or worse, because the officers should be the ones controlling any potentially violent encounter, and should take steps to do so from relatively safe positions. Unless you are calling in cops with firearms because there is a guy with a gun literally shooting people right now, or something similarly urgent but similarly obvious, it should be possible to completely avoid the sort of confrontations we see all too often.

If you give the guys on the ground these split-second, life-or-death decisions, they will inevitably get wrong sometimes, no matter how well trained and well intentioned they may be. A cop with a gun is still only human. The point is that they shouldn't be there, with that high-pressure decision to make, in the first place. Better planning from the senior officers could have avoided such tragic showdowns in almost all of the cases I've heard about.

Well, that's Boston, though.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Boston PD is the laughingstock of the nation for a reason, you know.

They blow up their own traffic counters, stand in a ring pointing full auto weapons at a college student, can't tell a prank from a bomb, literally scare priests to death, the list is long. And that's just the stuff they get caught doing, and given the police culture there you have to figure what gets reported is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you see a Boston cop, you should probably hit the deck screaming "don't shoot" just as a matter of course!

SWAT teams are insane. Radley Balko's warning.

[Anonymous Coward]

No one should be swinging that kind of steel without getting a visual confirmation of the incident first. SWATs are just steroid-fueled-power-crazy-insane. Read Radley Balko's excellent book "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America" (full book pdf here).

Remember that shooting in Wisconsin last week? Besides being a part-time town and county LEO the shooter was also a SWAT trainee. Oh, and the AR-15 used was SWAT gear.

Sleep well kiddies.

Basically you just need to place a call

[unity100]

it is like this in many countries unfortunately. "information". information my butt. you dont know who i am what i am what am i doing what are my intents blah blah. you are proceeding on the information i, a totally unknown person gives to you, the police. thats the problem.

What should change?

[mosb1000]

"It's sad that the most basic of methods to protect the people is so vulnerable."

Basically, it seems that the only "hacking" he did was making it seem as though he called from a different location that he was actually calling from. Most of the work he did was probably sounding convincing on the telephone with the 911 operator. I guess my problem is that I don't see how the system could be made more secure. It's always going to be (relatively) trivial to give misinformation about the location of a caller, and you'll always be able to lie to a 911 operator. The swat team was sent in to help a person who they believed had been shot, so they believed it was an issue of mortal danger where inaction or delay could lead to death. Moreover they believed that armed assailants were still at the home.

What response do you feel would have been appropriate? Or how do you feel that the system could have been more secure? It just doesn't seem possible that this situation could've been handled better.

Blame the hackers? No... blame the government

[guruevi]

'Other law enforcement agencies have seen similar breaches into their 911 systems as part of a trend picked up by computer hackers in the nation called "SWATting"'

Well, if they already have a name for it and they still don't fix a critical system like this, I don't know whether they're ever. If some script kiddie can break into 911, then the OMG TRAINED TERRARIST FROM EASTERN BLOCK can certainly do it as well.

Yes, but you are over reacting

[geekoid]

First off, 'pound in the ass' should not be part of prison, but that's another issue.

I think there are better ways to make him pay, and be less of a strain on the prison system.
25 years of community service would by a great punishment that can benefit the community as a whole.

The person can still work, go to college pay taxes, and contribute. But every weekend from now until 2032 picking up trash? helping people learn computers? setting up systems for libraries?
Isn't that better then paying 50,000+ dollars a year to keep a non violentoffender in prison?

Re:Yes, but you are over reacting

[Anonymous Coward]

> Isn't that better then paying 50,000+ dollars a year to keep a non violent offender in prison?

He is actually a violent offender. He hacked to send a unit of up-armed SWAT police to an innocent family and those guys knocked down and handcuffed both the husband and wife right in front of their little kids. I think the hacker should be charged with hostage-taking in addition to the armed assault by proxy item. I hope he gets eight years' cooler no parole and a further ban on using computers and terminals for 7 years.

Re:Yes, but you are over reacting

[MLease]

Isn't that better then paying 50,000+ dollars a year to keep a non violentoffender in prison? He may not have been the one pointing the guns and slapping the handcuffs on the victims, but he most certainly did cause violent assault to be visited on them (and they're lucky they weren't shot and killed in front of their own children). If he doesn't deserve prison, nobody does.

-Mike

Frankly.

[SatanicPuppy]

Frankly it pisses me off just as much when someone like you maintains they should just be able to shoot whoever the hell enters their house without bothering to verify their target first, as when the cops shoot an innocent person.

If I'm driving down the road at 3:00am, and I see someone's garage is on fire, do I kick down the door to their house and try to get the people out, or do I just keep driving, because there is probably some crazy bastard in there with a gun under his pillow, just itching to blast 14 rounds through the wall in the direction of his front door? I could call the fire department I suppose, but why should I do that if I'm afraid to go in myself for fear of being shot?

If you don't verify your target, yes, even in your own damn house, you're criminally negligent. Maybe Texas doesn't agree, but most other states do.

Re:Frankly.

[Darkninja666]

So your argument against someone protecting their home and family is...You might want to break into someone's home, with out knocking, to save them from a garage fire.

LOL

Do you really think that they would be waiting, armed, in a house that's on-fire for you to try and enter? Wouldn't you, like, try knocking first???

If your arguing against allowing people, even homeowners, to setup booby-traps then I'm with you. If you saying there shouldn't be "Make my Day" laws then you and I are definitely on differing sides.

Re:Frankly.

[Kreigaffe]

So you're going to bust in to the house, and sneak around trying to find the homeowner? What? Without knocking on the door and yelling "FIRE!" first? If you're that dumb maybe you deserve to be shot. There's no reason to jump right away to busting-down-the-door. Nobody could even be home. You don't know. Step 1 is to call 911 and report the fire, and let the trained professionals go in. If the fire is small enough they're not in immediate danger, there's no reason for you to go INSIDE. If it IS that severe, going inside will probably kill you anyway.

Re:Frankly.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Frankly it pisses me off just as much when someone like you maintains they should just be able to shoot whoever the hell enters their house without bothering to verify their target first, as when the cops shoot an innocent person.

We don't have (legal) ownership of guns here for the average guy, so this doesn't really apply to me. However, if I wake up in the middle of the night to find someone sneaking around in my house, potentially armed or with accomplices, in the dark, then I think they are a legitimate target for anything I do have: kitchen knife, bat, whatever.

I have only two options, unless I can somehow hide everyone safely and wait for the police, which is obviously preferable if I don't know what I'm up against. One is to challenge the intruder directly. This will soon verify who they are and whether they are armed and/or accompanied. Unfortunately, it will only do so by dramatically reducing my own survival chances if they are willing to use violence.

The other option is that I surprise them, and do whatever is necessary to incapacitate them before they have chance to react and potentially fight back. This is the option I am going to choose, if I have to make the choice. Moreover, unless I am absolutely sure they are alone and unarmed, I am going to err on the side of caution and hit them with everything I've got, and keep going until they are either held securely or too broken or unconscious to pose a continuing threat. At that point I stop: I am concerned with protecting me and mine, not vigilante "justice". But anything less is risking my life and those of my loved ones to protect an intruder who is already breaking the law. I am legally allowed to use reasonable force to protect myself, and against an unknown aggressor, breaking them or rendering them unconscious is reasonable until you can be sure they no longer pose a threat.

If it comes to court and anyone thinks this is not reasonable force under those circumstances, I will be happy to demonstrate the less than one second it would take me to deliver multiple likely lethal strikes with a concealed knife to an unarmed person who challenged me openly if I were the intruder. Many law enforcement groups around the world have much more liberal rules of engagement than this during incidents where an armed or potentially armed threat is involved, and I would expect the same consideration to be given to anyone who acted realistically to protect their home from an intruder in otherwise unknown circumstances.

Re:Frankly.

[Cederic]

I will be happy to demonstrate the less than one second it would take me to deliver multiple likely lethal strikes with a concealed knife to an unarmed person who challenged me openly Would this be on the judge, members of the jury or the prosecuting lawyer?

I'd recommend the lawyer.

Re:Frankly.

[elrous0]

Frankly it pisses me off just as much when someone like you maintains they should just be able to shoot whoever the hell enters their house without bothering to verify their target first

If someone is in my locked house, it's pretty strong defacto evidence that they are AT LEAST a burglar. In that case, it's a safe presumption that they are also armed and dangerous (at least in the U.S.). Now, it would of course be different if you had neighbors and family in and out of the house all the time and left your front door open. But if my house is locked and only I'm supposed to be there, that dude had better get his hands in the air VERY quickly and keep them there or he's leaving on a stretcher.

Re:Frankly.

[Copid]

Frankly it pisses me off just as much when someone like you maintains they should just be able to shoot whoever the hell enters their house without bothering to verify their target first, as when the cops shoot an innocent person.

You don't have to shoot (with or without verifying your target) for a situation like that to end in disaster. If you're armed at all (which is pretty reasonable if you're concerned about your safety in the middle of the night) when the cops come through the door, the odds of it being a really bad night increase dramatically.

the real story

[WMIF]

i found a few other articles about this and other incidents that appear to have been related. it is mentioned that this "hacker" used a free web hosted hearing impaired service to have the operator relay the story to the 911 service. there was no hacking involved. http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20071014&Category=NEWS02&ArtNo=710140456&SectionCat=ETN&Template=printart http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-hacker17oct17,1,2753897,print.story?coll=la-headlines-california&ctrack=1&cset=true

Could Have been worse...

[monopole]

...He could have sent the Irvine PD Bukkake Squad our motto "Shoot first, ask questions later!"

Ugh, more TDD abuse

[Sycraft-fu]

This shit happens with business all the time. You get a call from a TDD operator, basically the operator has some guy typing to them, generally on the Internet these days but it could be with a physical TDD device, and they relay everything to you. I've used it a few times to speak to a deaf friend prior to IM becoming big.

At any rate, guy I know owns a computer store. So he gets a TDD call from someone overseas who just happens to need his no-name local shop to ship out a ton of high end hardware, next day air. Price is no problem, he's willing to pay it all. The reason is, of course, it's a stolen credit card number. If the business actually shipped, they'd be stuck holding the bag. It's fraud, pure and simple.

The problem is that it is an ideal system since it is very anonymous. I don't know all the rules but more or less its a case of "The operator may not report on or in any way interfere with the conversation, they have to relay it verbatim to both parties." Also with the Internet connectivity, it is extremely easy to be untracable.

One of those cases where assholes are abusing an accessibility service for the disabled.

Re:Ugh, more TDD abuse

[G00F]

I work for a company that provides services for the deaf.

There has been lots of problems like that. While the operator is not allowed to inject to the parties on the phone if they think it is fraud or not, they are allowed to IM their suppivisor. They also have a list of things to watch for.

At one time 50% of all calls we proccesses was thought to be fraud, we have done several things to fix this.

One thing, is that when our company goes after these spammers, it is a lot of hassel and work, and very little happens against them.

It is sad that a punk kid would use this for such a dangerious prank.

This is a new 'thing' for hackers?

[VoxMagis]

A great example of people asking 'can it be done' before asking 'should it be done'.

This is becoming one of the greatest problems in America today. You see it happening all the time, whether it's some idiot teenager or Microsoft. SHOULD and COULD are two different things.

Sounds like Brazil

[Oldsmobile]

Remember that movie Brazil by Terry Gilliam? They botch the paperwork and Buttle instead of Tuttle gets arrested by the swat team.

Also, the clip is on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIDggzJ1mWc

He's just old enough...

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes me smile that the asshole that made the call is 19 years old and just old enough not to be tried as a minor.

He's just old enough to be the freshest prime piece of bitch-meat in whatever prison he gets sentenced to.

Caught?

[hayek_fan]

He is not hacker - he caused a lot of damage and got caught . Must have been pretty simple to start the prank if it id someone from home.

Bunch of Hooey

[graviplana]

Sounds like total bullshit to me.

Now rape is funny again.

[Loundry]

This crime was not a "minor offense". A couple was put in grave mortal danger. Toddlers in the next room were put in mortal danger to a lesser degree.

I wasn't referring to that offense, but, nonetheless, you've convinced me.

Now I believe that some prisoners deserve to be raped as apt punishment for their crimes. Furthermore, since support the death penalty, then the most egregious offenders should be raped to death.

However, I believe that women should also be punished with rape, as the status quo violates equal protection laws.

And we should all have a big guffaw about it, because rape is HILARIOUS!

Re:SWATmy butt

[Score Whore]

Given that Orange County California has a population of about 3 million, I would imagine that the county sheriff might have four or five hundred uniformed officers. Add in being sandwiched between San Diego and Los Angeles, I think it makes a lot of sense to have a SWAT team. What surprises me is that this isn't obvious to anyone who even has a minor bit of a clue about geography.

Who said he was referring to this crime?

[TamMan2000]

Any man who gets sent to prison, for anything, has a good chance of becoming a rape victim. And even if it were the case that only those who commit major crimes got raped in prison, that would still not be funny. I find it to be completely unacceptable.

X-files

[Lurker2288]

Didn't that happen in an episode of 'The X-Files?' The evil AI takes out its creator by locating the coffee shop he's in, and then phoning every convicted drug dealer in the area to tell them that a snitch from their gang would be in the coffee shop. Once the place is full of a bunch of trigger-happy gangbangers, the AI calls the US Marshals office and tells them that a terrorist fugitive is hiding inside. Voila, instant bullet festival. Very cool; written by William Gibson, as I recall.

Re:Doesn't law enforcement have some responsibilit

[vishbar]

The call was seen as coming directly from the house. I'm not saying that everything about the situation was hunky-dory, but if the call was true, then they'd want to respond ASAP.

Why not...

[ePlus]

...Send the SWAT to houses of RIAA management? THAT would give them a taste of their own medicine...

Boston

[grassy_knoll]

Well, from this:

10 years ago a SWAT team here in Boston made a felony entry into the wrong apartment and ended up roughing up an elderly priest named Accelynne Williams so badly that he ended up dying of a heart attack.

I'll have to assume blinky lights were involved.

back to the 80's?

[hitmark]

this sounds like something thats straight out of the 80's or something...

What about the police?

[samotano]

Let alone the stupidity of the hacker whose actions could have easily got someone killed. But what about the police?! Do they just storm in without having a clue? What if it was the wrong address?

Re:What about the police?

[jjohnson]

Say you're in charge of the SWAT team, and you get a 9-1-1 call about intruders shooting people at a house. How do you verify that the reported crime is actually occurring at the address without, you know, going there and checking? Do you send in an unarmed cop to see whether or not there's someone there who's got a gun and is shooting people before sending in your own guys with guns?

Re:What about the police?

[LingNoi]

In the system we trust. Forgot the hacker. This is just showing GIGO in action.

This is why we need to stop these anti-terrorist systems that have no paper work and to start questioning every step of the way.

It's times when action needs to meaninglessly be taken in a split second and no one stops to think about what they are doing when innocent people get killed.

Maybe while the UK police were waiting for the Brazilian they shot in the head 5 times, maybe if they had questioned themselves in that 5 hours of waiting.. what are we doing here? What's the real situation? But instead we got the police action squad waiting for hours doing nothing and then "OMFG WE NEED A SPLIT SECOND DECISION! SHOOT HIM! AGAIN! AGAIN! AGAIN!"

Re:What about the police?

[samotano]

Who received the call? What did the caller say exactly? Did the police assess the situation in the neighborhood (if someone's shooting, you should be able to see that maybe something is going on in that neighborhood). Did they attempt to call the residence to contact the intruder? Did they shout to the residence from a distance to establish a contact with the intruder or the hostages? Did they observe and try to analyze the situation from afar? IN the end, we don't know enough details to be able to tell. But too often, police just assume they have to use brute force and show their muscles without using the brain first.

Re:What about the police?

[jjohnson]

Sure, there's a lot of things they could do analytically beforehand. And then a Columbine happens, where the police set up a perimeter and try to initiate contact, while Klebold and Harris continue shooting students, and a teacher who was already shot bleeds to death. Police were on the scene at 11:24 a.m.; *after* their arrival, the two killed or injured 21 students. SWAT didn't enter the building until 1:30 p.m. As a direct result of the deaths that occurred, a lot of police departments changed doctrine to immediate entry.

It's easy to second guess in a situation like this and say they should be more cautious, but there'll always be situations where the opposite should have been done. Personally, if I call 9-1-1 and tell the cops there's someone in my house with gun trying to shoot my family, I hope they don't knock on my neighbor's door first to ensure that it's not a crank call.

Just a little absurdity to make a different point.

[weston]

Frankly it pisses me off just as much when someone like you maintains they should just be able to shoot whoever the hell enters their house without bothering to verify their target first, as when the cops shoot an innocent person.

I don't think I said anything like that. I'm mostly pointing out a bit of absurdity in the statement "it's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion." At the very least, anybody who can *really* make that statement from enough experience to assert it with real confidence is already in a pretty absurd situation and has my sympathy. The odds seemed low that you're one of them, but hey, if I'm wrong, accept my apology and condolences and feel free to share.

I do think it's wrong when an amped-up cop thinks he sees something that's not there or otherwise gets caught up in a conflict and shoots someone who isn't armed (or otherwise doesn't deserve to be on the receiving end of deadly force), and I think there should be more accountability for that, but I also think with the tension and threats inherent in the situation I can understand it. Doesn't make it right or desirable, but it's understandable.

Likewise, I think it's probably not right in the strictest sense for somebody to wildly shoot at anything moving in their house at night without determining who/what it is. But I think I can understand it -- I startle pretty easily from familiar people waking me up in the morning. So it's not at all hard to imagine that however easy might be to tell a SWAT team from random gangsters with good lighting and time to observe, if you're suddenly, loudly, and violently awakened and it's dark and you don't know what the !@$% is happening, you *might* react quickly with whatever you have available, including firearms.

The police and other authorities ought to understand this, and *better* than most given that many of them have been, as you point out, in a pretty similar situation. The idea that anyone should expect (let alone rely on) my hypothetical protagonist who's become calm, collected, and prepared for people busting down his door is the other absurdity.

Thumb up..!!

[TT075127]

Internet with no boundries. "One Click to Rule Them All"

Did someone check on the address for this raid?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why doesn't anyone check on the address of the intended victim before they do this stuff. This is sort of like the US invading Iraq for looking for weapons of mass destruction. In both cases no one did their intelligence homework.
I hope that this family is going to file lawsuit against the police for this one and I wish that the family will win or settle out of court for huge sum of money.
We spend so much money on intelligence gathering but it appears no one really sits to check if they have been given a bunch of bull shit from some informant or is this real stuff.

Never mind Phillip K. Dick, Gibson did it...

[big_paul76]

Never mind St. Phillip K., in either "Idoru" or "Virtual Light", this was how Barry Rydell got fired from IntelSecure... Bunch of hackers set up a phony emergency call to private security covering a gated community.

Of course, in contrast with this story, when the cops showed up in Gibson's book, the lady of the house was entertaining her gardener in private, wearing only some leather and a pair of nickel-plated Smith and Wesson handcuffs...

Re:SWATmy butt

[unity100]

whats the average percentage of americans that can show washington dc, heck, leave aside that, united states on the map

Why involve the FBI?

[Gazzonyx]

Yeah, and he, more importantly, crossed state lines to make his point. Anyone who has ever had a...ahem colorful... past knows that you don't want to make it a federal issue if it doesn't have to be.

It would have been better for him to break in to a computer in China (or Cuba, North Korea, etc.) and then from there break in to the 911 dispatch center in another state.

Lawyer: murder

[hawk]

I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. In fact, I cannot think of a situation offhand where a lawyer could provide useful advice in similar circumstances other than, "Don't, stupid!"

Yes, murder. Murder does *not* require "intent to kill." Generally, it requires a "reckless disregard for human life." Additionally, *any* reasonably foreseeable death during the commission of a felony is "felony murder," which is (usually) capital murder.

Voluntary manslaughter is murder with mitigating circumstances (typically heat of passion type things), while involuntary manslaughter is death due to "criminal negligence."

Bottom line is that a death from such a "prank" would be murder, and possibly a death penalty case.
(To meet the other balancing tests for the death penalty, however, would be unlikely)

hawk

Re:Lawyer: murder

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

As far as I know, the death penalty is NEVER allowed (or at least has NEVER been the sentence) except when the person intended a death and did it him or herself.

Life in prison, now that's another story.

Re:Lawyer: murder

[hawk]

No, it's broader than that--thought that does describe *most* of the cases that qualify.

Easy contrary example: Fred holds the victim for George to torture to death. Or ordering a murder.

When someone is aware that death is a likely consequence, intent is usually satisfied.

With a bunch of handwaving (there is no shortage of exceptions), life without parole in murder cases tends to come from capital cases where either the jury doesn't choose death or the constitutional requirements for the death penalty aren't met.

hawk, esq

Note to self:

[anti-human 1]

Note to self:

Call international airport from home phone. Then, go to airport with weapons (nothing serious, just a knife, broken glass, etc.). Finally, laugh at guards after completing security checkpoint.

Sell video to major network telemagazine (dateline or some such). Make sure to use real name.

Gain 20k XP.

don't need hacking skillz

[Organic Brain Damage]

All you need to do is call the Sheriff's office from a pay phone and say: "The people at address XXX are making and selling Meth to babies." SWAT team will be there in no time.

this prank is irrelevant

[vsync64]

What you all need to realize is that this would have happened with or without the idiotic "prank" the kid pulled. U.S. citizens are routinely attacked in their own homes (in law, their "castles") and killed when they defend their family.

Send them to randoms?

[das_magpie]

He should of sent them to McDonald's or Krispy Kreme. The Cops would of loved him for it!

Lucky nobody died.

[k1e0x]

Cops are known to shoot first ask questions later when they go on raids.

felony murder

[westlake]

Interesting. The fact that the armed men are cops, doesn't change that? Is there an expectation that cops should shoot someone?

It was called "the felony murder rule" when I first heard of it years ago.

It means, simply, that you are responsible for any deaths, from any cause, that were set in motion by your criminal misconduct. You abduct a child who suffocates in your closet, or a woman who goes into a diabetic coma.

It is reckless endangerment, raised to the n(th) power.

Re:felony murder

[Cajun Hell]

I guess that makes sense.

Scifi == Reality

[pafein]

SWAT raid hacking is a significant plot point in William Gibson's Virtual Light.

Well, ok, it's a private armed response firm the first time, but same idea.

The second time it's SWAT.

Not his finest piece of work. ;-(

Obvious bash.org rip-off

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU ALL SUCK DICK
<tatclass> er.
<tatclass> hi.
<andy\code> A common typo.
<tatclass> the keys are like right next to each other.

http://bash.org/?5300

amazing

[binarybum]

this whole summary sounds like a fancy euphemism for a prank 911 phone-call. The ends are probably pretty similar.

What to do? - You ask.....

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution to this problem is quite simple.
1. Subject the selfish little b*stard that endagered this family to the most aggressive criminal and civil prosecution possible and plaster the media with the story.
2. Put our new public enemy # 1 in a cell with the most vicious criminals available just long enough to get him beaten ugly for a nice publicity photo.
3. Put the photo on a poster with the following in bold on Slashdot and every other tech friendly website "Hack 911 and end up like this loser...not feeling so smart now, is he?"

Man Hacks 911 System

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is a 19 year old computer nerd a man?

Re:Man Hacks 911 System

[ArsenneLupin]

Since when is a 19 year old computer nerd a man? Since he has a dick?

And soon, he'll notice that soap is slippery when wet, and that he has an ass too!

sending them to the wrong houses

[Hobyx]

See.. what they should really be doing is sending them to the houses of the power-mad - heads of Homeland Security, the TSA, the corrupt officials who are running this whole War on Terror load of crap.

If they're too high-profile, then send them to someone like Paul Bremer (the guy in Calif. who got put in charge of making $9 billion of the $12 billion of cash shipped on palettes to Iraq, disappear without a trace).

You know I mean, if you're going to mess with the system, do it with style..

What if the homeowner killed cops instead?

[swb]

This has to have happened already, but what's the outcome?

What happens when the cops raid your house by mistake and you zap a couple of them? Do you get charged with murder, or do you get a pass because the cops fucked up and guys with guns kicking in your door to rob you looks about like cops with guns kicking in your doors, or at least in the 5 seconds you have to grab your piece and open fire?

How would cops react to each other?

[Anonymous Coward]

Find two empty lots that are back-to-back, and build a wall between them with a door in the middle of it. Make it look like a house from both sides, and get SWAT teams sent to both addresses at the same time...

Who wants to hazard a guess on what would happen?

Re:How would cops react to each other?

[ArsenneLupin]

Wouldn't work. They use helicopters too.

False positives bad, false negatives diabolical

[LrdDimwit]

I can do one worse. There are direct applications of this vulnerability to cover up criminal activity. For starters, there is the signal-to-noise ratio problem: DOS the system with an avalanche of bogus reports, then commit [crime] on the theory that there are so many invalid reports, the odds are real good there won't be any response to your legitimate report.

If you have something specific in mind, you can use this scenario:

1. WHILE (police_responded EQUALS true) DO:
Trick the 911 system into saying "home invasion in progress at [location]".

2. ???

3. Profit!

So it plays out something like this.

1. You trick the 911 system like this dumbass, and report [crime] at [location].
2. The police respond to an apparently legitimate call (false positive).
3. You trick the 911 system again, to give exactly the same reading as before. (Better would be slightly different calls at the same address, but let's keep it simple.)
4. The police suspect something, but respond anyway (false positive).

This proceeds, until eventually the police begin ignoring the false alarms (true negative). Now you have a location and a crime that you are absolutely sure the police are going to ignore. If this doesn't strike you as sinister, you have too much faith in humanity. So eventually, you arrive at:

5. You commit [crime] at [location].
6. The police ignore the call, because they've been getting nonsense calls all week at this place (false negative).

huh, huhuhu

[boriquajake]

That is terrible. That is hilarious.

poor them

[TT076659]

I feel sorry for the family that has been raided. Good thing no one got injured.

The person responsible for the bogus raid should be sued or something by the family, but then again, it could be the police's / system developer's fault for not having a secure system that could even be hacked by a 19 year old.

Very uncool

[smchris]

Considering how paranoid and politically polarized segments of the country are, somebody's going to get killed drawing weapons.

Re:Doesn't law enforcement have some responsibilit

[stonecypher]

The call was seen as coming directly from the house.

No it wasn't. It was relayed by a TDD operator. At least read the article.

Yes.

[jd]

He's on death row, I believe, for murders by the DC area shooter on account of being the effective triggerman.

Accidental and mistaken shootings by cops

[jd]

...were the main reason 98% of cops in Britain voted against being armed on a day-to-day basis and why specialist armed response units tended to be safer. Yes, there were "accidents". The subway shooting was one. However, they tend to be very rare as a percentage of the population. Not that that helps those who are shot, of course.

The problem is that it would be impossible to introduce a more civil police force in the United States or in any other country in which guns are commonplace. It only worked in Britain because it was in nobody's interest (police or criminal) to mess with the balance of power or to change the status quo. Short of having UN peacekeepers flood in and disarm everyone to an equal level of firepower, you couldn't possibly achieve that kind of metastable balance. However, automatic weapons (currently legal in the US) and other high-power weaponry would make mincemeat of any existing body armor and the policeman inside it, if they weren't armed and psychotic enough to shoot first.

I think the current situation is far too prone to error and BSOD, I think armed societies are far too much a reflection of medieval past than desired future, and I think it's impossible to improve on a situation when everyone assumes the worst, but frankly I can't think of any even remotely acceptable way of fixing a society that is still fighting the Revolutionary War.

Re:Accidental and mistaken shootings by cops

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, guns are commonplace in Britain too, despite what the UK government wants you to think.

Re:Accidental and mistaken shootings by cops

[jd]

I wouldn't call them commonplace - one gun-related homicide a month in 2007 for a population of 60+ million in less space than almost any US State is a damn good ratio and is largely down to the fact that a farmer armed with a shotgun loaded with rock salt is considerably less dangerous than a maniac with a concealable handgun and quite possibly hollow-tip rounds.

If you eliminate from the calculation all weapons owned by sport shooters like Sebastian Coe, the farming community, and airport security guards*, I'm not convinced you'd have many left to account for.

Yes, abandoned mills have been converted into workshops for reactivating weapons and supplying them to gangs. That's a problem, but not a grave one because if there's a shooting, it's more likely gang rivalry than an armed robbery. For example, the only notable shooting in Marple, a town just outside of Manchester in the northwest of England, was the assassination of the leader of a drug ring. Yes, Mancunians are more likely to be wary of Moss Side, Hulme and other catastrophically deprived neighborhoods, but those are virtually saintly compared to the no-go areas in the US, where people worry when there isn't a shooting.

Is the UK perfect or idyllic? No. Not by a long way. It's a wreck, disjoint and schizoid. It's merely a lot less of a wreck when it comes to gun violence than many other nations.

And today's snowclone is...

[speedwaystar]

SHUT UP I SWAT YOU

Cover Story

[PPH]

Local police have somebody randomly hack the system and make a few phony 911 calls. These result in SWAT kicking in door, handcuffing innocent residents and searching premises. Realizing their "mistake" they back off and apologize. Once the susceptibility of the 911 system to such hacks becomes common knowledge, local police departments can now kick in the doors of suspects without warrants and just claim another 911 hack. If they happen to find contraband, well coincidences do happen.

Connectivity

[bogidu]

Let's see . . . System was hacked. Can someone provide me a logical reason why a 911 system would need to be connected to the Internet? Every computer in the world does NOT need to be plugged into this overly commercialized, bot rampant, information "super" highway. First rule of security, UNPLUG THE DAMN THING!

Re:Connectivity

[YrWrstNtmr]

Can someone provide me a logical reason why a 911 system would need to be connected to the Internet?

Maybe you can provide us a logical reason why you think "the Internet" has anything to do with this incident.

Stupid cops

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets just inflate this little tards ego why don't we. I strongly doubt that this was a case of a skilled wiz-kid busting the cops. For all that article tells us this kid just tuned into their cordless phone and dialed 911. Then again if he has a voip based system he could have just provided incorrect info to his provider. Alot of cops end up at peoples old homes because said people did not update their info when they moved. Little twits like this do this crap and then idiot cops don't pass the correct info to the media which just feeds these kids. I'm not saying the cops should tell us everything and jeopardize their investigation but tell the world enough so that the media cannot scream "Super-hackers have the system in shambles" the next day.

The Blue Nowhere

[El-Wrongo]

SPOILER

This actually happens in Jeffery Deavers book "The Blue Nowhere". The book, is about a ruthless hacker who kills for the challange and a convicted hacker who works with the police to stop him. Great book, where the hacking/coding/computer sequences are actually realistic, not to say that they are completely correct, but there is no flying inside tubes or space invaders CPU hacking sequence. Deaver did good research when writing this book.

Anyway, after the hacker have been defeated and killed, his AI Supercomputer sends out a SWAT raid at the address of the protagonists (Wyatt Gillette) ex-wifes home with the order to shoot to kill, since presumably the residents are radical terrorist suicide bombers. The SWAT team are also told not accept ANY orders from any source other than the computer, since apparently the "terrorists" may have people on the outside who can phone in and pretend to be police officers etc. This makes me think "what if someone did this in real life?". The police would certainly have a lot of blood on their hands because they didn't have strong enough measures to prevent their systems getting hacked.

probably something like

[Anonymous Coward]

aaaggghhhh I've been fucking shot, you mother fuckers shot me! oh my god I can't feel my fucking legs, I'VE BEEN SHOT oh my god oh my god oh my god

Re:Just a little absurdity to make a different poi

[Anonymous Coward]

Likewise, I think it's probably not right in the strictest sense for somebody to wildly shoot at anything moving in their house at night without determining who/what it is.

Hmm, now that you said that, I think strategically placed very strong spotlights that you can light with a remote (tucked under the pillow, next to your gun) that would blind nightly intruder(s) while keeping you in the shadows, would be advantageous in your domestic fortification. It would be good if same remote command would disable wall switches for normal illumination. Emergency spotlights should be battery backed up, if

Another thing would be reinforced bedrooms' doors - don't rely on single line of defense (front and back doors of the house) while asleep, make concentric rings of safety.

What a waste....

[pev]

Why send them to some poor random failies house? I'm sure you've got enough ***hole pro "police state" hardline politicians who could benefit from a first hand experience of what they're legislating onto the rest of the population to gain some perspective.

~Pev

Re:What a waste....

[pev]

g/failies/families/

never, ever admit they're wrong indeed

[airdrummer]

my brother had a friend who liked to get drunked up & shoot out streetlights:-( the last time he did that, he wouldn't give up the gun, there was a struggle, the gun went off & mort ce mort;-(his nick was a contraction of his last name...ironic, eh, morrisette?-)

the police report claimed suicide, so of course his widow couldn't collect on any life insurance:-( but, hey, at least the cops didn't have to face any investigation...

Vigilante Justice

[herbivore]

What happens if someone does this and sends the SWAT team to the crack house down the street?

Charles Manson

[FiniteElementalist]

Didn't Charles Manson get convicted for murder by use of a proxy? He used his underlings to commit murders, but got convicted for the crime as well as them.

WTF?

[boltik]

The police brake into couple's home, cuffed them, and their exuse is that they were eletronicaly prank-called? That is a lame one.

Don't Taz me Bro....

[Anonymous Coward]

that's all you have to say.

Not hacking

[botkiller]

This isn't hacking, it's cracking, and the most juvenile form of it, at that.

he forged ANI, not caller-ID

[vinn01]

911 systems use ANI, not caller-ID. The difference is explained below...

From http://www.tech-faq.com/ani-automatic-number-identification.shtml

ANI (Automatic Number Identification) is a system utilized by telephone companies to identify the DN (Directory Number) of a calling subscriber.

ANI serves a function similar to Caller-ID, but utilizes different underlying technology. In addition, although Caller-ID can be blocked by prefixing a call with *67, ANI is (usually) impossible to block.

ANI was originally developed for telephone company billing purposes. ANI technology is also now offered to commercial customers who may benefit from knowing who is calling them. In addition, ANI is one of the core technologies behind the 911 emergency service.

ANI data is usually transmitted in-band using multi-frequency (MF) signaling. However, ANI data can also be transmitted separately if you have an ISDN PRI.

Re:he forged ANI, not caller-ID

[davidphogan74]

http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071017/NEWS02/710170400 - This article explains it more. He used TTY services with a spoofed call ID it sounds like. Not a big deal of a hack to me.

dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of attacking some innocent couple. This hacker should of sent the SWAT team over to the house of an RIAA executive.
We could only hope that they would at least get arrested for cocaine posession or pot.

"Usually not that difficult" - well, not for me

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion. The cops will not even attempt to be subtle once they start moving in."

When the adrenaline starts flowing it can be very difficult to assess the situation - particularly if you're surprised, not used to it, etc.

During a ceasefire at a local rifle range I was down range scoring my target when these imbeciles at the other side of the range decided it was OK to resume fire. (For those not familiar with rifle range rules, you're not even supposed to touch your firearm until everyone is back from the targets and the range officer declares firing can resume. For the record, I was the range officer at the time of the incident.)

The point to this is that I cannot tell you how many of the several people involved were handling rifles or actively firing, even though it was a bright day and they were all in plain sight. I immediately focused on the first person I saw that was standing up holding a rifle pointed too close to my direction to be comfortable, and that I could hear shots being fired. Everything else was a blob.

Frankly I think no-knock police raids should be carefully controlled. Having them automatically triggered without substantial justification, careful pre-planning, and, (excuse me for mentioning this) a warrant is a danger to the public at large.

Dunno if you'd get away with it

[shentino]

Actually, in this case if they ever collar you for hacking into the system, you YOURSELF could wind up with a needle in your arm.

If making such a bogus police report is a felony, then it is entirely foreseeable that someone could wound up getting shot over the cops being told some dangerous madman was going on a rampage.

And, when you have a felony with the foreseeable consequence of death, and said death occurs, you are now guilty of: Felony Murder.

Even if you don't get collared for felony murder, here's something else to worry about:

You are using the cops as a murder weapon just as effectively as if you had pulled the trigger yourself.

One thing's for sure, doing this is risky.

Uh - maybe in the big cities, not in the burbs

[Anonymous Coward]

Many smaller cities have SWAT teams that do not "train, and train, and train". I found this out when coaching a police officer at a rifle match who was on the SWAT team of local bedroom community. I asked him about his team and he bemoaned that they didn't get much time off from patrolling to do a good job of training. That and the fact that he really wasn't that good a shot was a little bothersome.

I mentioned it to an acquaintance who is a retired federal marshal who stays plugged into law enforcement affairs. He said it's fairly common these days for small to even large communities to grab a federal grant, equip a team, and then expect them train on their own time after they've spent a complete shift writing speeding tickets.

Re:Drugs (and guns)

[psychicninja]

And legalized drugs doesn't mean there still wouldn't be a black market. Guns are legal (in the US), but there is still a thriving black market on weaponry.

Actually, I believe that the weaponry black market has more to do with the restriction and registration elements of gun ownership more than the legality of owning the guns themselves.

Technical, not political, question

[emailboy]

The report (at least in the L.A. times) says that he "hacked into systems operated by America Online and Verizon." Other reports say that he "hacked into the 911 system." So what exactly did he do? Was this a circuit-switched or VoIP call? Which systems were attacked, in what way?

Bad Joke

[bratwiz]

Given that cops have itchy trigger fingers and tend to shoot first and say "oops" later-- that prank could have had tragic results. Whoever did it ought to get a serious whacking-- or at the very least, someone should call the SWAT Team in on him unawares.

Can he be tried as a terrorist?

[slashdotusername]

Can the DHS go after this guy? At least we know he was a deranged maniac interested in terrorizing random Americans - he's already more guilty than most of the people at Guantanamo, why not give him the same harsh treatment?