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Online "Swatting" Becomes a Hazard For Gamers Who Play Live On the Internet
HughPickens.com writes Nick Wingfield reports at the NYT that practical jokers who call in bogus reports of violence provoking huge police responses have set their sights on a new set of victims: video gamers who play live on the Internet, often in front of huge online audiences. Last month, several hundred people were watching Joshua Peters as he played RuneScape from his parents' home as video showed Peters suddenly leaving his computer when police officers appeared at the house and ordered him and his family at gunpoint to lie face down on the ground after some had called 911 claiming Peters had just shot his roommate. "With the live-streaming platforms, it amplifies the entire situation," says James Clayton Eubanks who says he has been swatted about a half-dozen times while he streamed his Call of Duty sessions. "Not only do they get to do this and cause this misery, they get to watch it unfold in front of thousands of people."
Game companies like Twitch have publicly said that swatting is dangerous, but that there is little else they can do to prevent the pranks. Tracking the culprits behind the pranks is difficult. While bomb scares and other hoaxes have been around for decades, making threats anonymously has never been so easy. Swatters use text messages and online phone services like Skype to relay their threats, employing techniques to make themselves hard to trace. They obtain personal addresses for their victims through property records and other public databases, or by tricking businesses or customer service representatives at a victim's Internet provider into revealing the information. Brandon Willson, a gamer known online as "Famed God," made up a murder to get police to go to an unsuspecting west suburban resident's home last year and ended up behind bars in Nevada awaiting extradition. As part of the investigation, police traveled to Las Vegas to help local police execute a search warrant at Willson's home. Computers seized there contained evidence of the swatting incident, as well as similar incidents across the country, prosecutors claim. Willson faces up to five years in prison if he is convicted on charges of computer tampering and one count each of intimidation, computer fraud, identity theft and disorderly conduct. His mother, Brenda Willson, says her son is innocent and does not smoke, drink or have tattoos. "He would never swat," she says.
Game companies like Twitch have publicly said that swatting is dangerous, but that there is little else they can do to prevent the pranks. Tracking the culprits behind the pranks is difficult. While bomb scares and other hoaxes have been around for decades, making threats anonymously has never been so easy. Swatters use text messages and online phone services like Skype to relay their threats, employing techniques to make themselves hard to trace. They obtain personal addresses for their victims through property records and other public databases, or by tricking businesses or customer service representatives at a victim's Internet provider into revealing the information. Brandon Willson, a gamer known online as "Famed God," made up a murder to get police to go to an unsuspecting west suburban resident's home last year and ended up behind bars in Nevada awaiting extradition. As part of the investigation, police traveled to Las Vegas to help local police execute a search warrant at Willson's home. Computers seized there contained evidence of the swatting incident, as well as similar incidents across the country, prosecutors claim. Willson faces up to five years in prison if he is convicted on charges of computer tampering and one count each of intimidation, computer fraud, identity theft and disorderly conduct. His mother, Brenda Willson, says her son is innocent and does not smoke, drink or have tattoos. "He would never swat," she says.
Done and done.
"Tracking the culprits behind the pranks is difficult."
Ummmmm, why?
This is one of those times when our government's all knowing, all access panopticon would actually be useful. Seriously, our cops can't trace the swatters?
A couple cases of kids going to jail will limit the problem. Teenagers are always going to test limits, and some do so to the extent that the adult legal system is required to help motivate them not to cause problems for other people.
It was not so long ago that the telephone was a new thing, many parents were not raised with it, and did not really know how to manage it with the kids. Kids got into trouble, and laws were passed to help define what was good and bad behavior.
I know that adults say this all the time, but if we do not figure out how to play with our toys nicely, we are going to lose the privileged of unencumbered play.
From a personal point of view, from personal experience, in my opinion there is no punishment too great for someone who files false police reports, and that goes doubly so for those cowards who hide behind computers.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Swatters have been known to intentionally act irrational/hysterical, and put time pressure on the police. They could talk about how they're going to kill someone in the next hour, and perhaps talk about how they'll kill any police that they see as well. They may tell the police that if anyone tries to call them back or contacts them in any way, they'll kill a hostage.
This leaves the police in a quandary. In the case of the Columbine school shootings, the police were criticized for waiting too long before moving in, and subsequently changed their tactics. Now they're criticized for rushing in too soon.
We got a militarized police force when people started holing up in places with guns, sometimes taking hostages, sometimes just killing people randomly. You talk about how they "just go in armed to the teeth ready to shoot anything that either moves or doesn't move fast enough", yet to my knowledge, no one has actually died as a result of a swatting yet, despite *many* incidents. That demonstrates that those police teams in question are showing a significant level of restraint in what, to their knowledge, may be a life-and-death situation.
It's easy to criticize. It's a bit harder to actually figure out how to solve the problems.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
No, and you also might think "She would never do that." That doesn't make you an "idiot parent", despite what the OAC said.
If a plainclothes officer knocks and pretends to be a Jehovah's Witness at first in order to access the situation, even unstable armed murderers do not have a history of shooting.
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I'd guess that it's because the US is at the top of the list of "the person whose house you're about to invade is likely to be heavily armed."
I spent two weeks in the UK recently, with their largely-unarmed police force in full showing (mind you, I also walked by Buckingham Palace and Parliament, where I saw very heavily armed cops). They know that the vast majority of their citizenry is similarly unarmed.
Compare that to the US. I'm guessing SWAT officers are rather more trigger-twitchy because of that. I would be.
1) When people are arrested, their friends, family, and neighbors routinely say "I can't believe he did that. He seemed like such a nice guy."
To be fair, when have you seen a news report where a friend or neighbor said, 'Yeah, he was a dangerous nut job that should have been locked up years ago. it's a shame that the SWAT team didn't just kill him and save the state the trial cost'.
Swatting is an activity that the 'Internet' seems to think that it can get away with, because it is a novelty. Once Law enforcement accidentally kills a couple of young children by accident in a bumbled raid, you will get a couple of outraged senators who will make this a federal offense punishable with ten to twenty. The law is slow but it always catches up with society changes.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The thing I don't get is what kind of doors you guys have in USA. I want to believe that what you see in TV is just fiction and that doors don't go down with a kick, but even then...The average door in Europe is reinforced and it would take some ram hits before going down, and that assuming the door is not bolted. Heck, the police usually needs to call the firefighters to come with their heavy duty saws when they need to evict someone. So even if police were so reckless here to enter houses guns blazing (which they don't) they would have a pretty hard time doing so.
I think this is the bigger problem. This.. and pretty much ignoring common sense across the board when it comes to any excuse to allowing the government to become more heavy-handed (and frankly, fascist). The media will report this like 'people doing the swatting' are the problem. But, bomb threats and other similar attempts at mayhem have been around since way before the Internet and the police used to respond to them in a sensible manner. I am not saying the police should ignore a 'swat' call - but I am saying they should have some common sense before they suit up 20 officers for warlike conditions and inject them with a 'spasmodic roid rage only-for-the-movies attitude.' I don't care what a random guy on the phone says - it does not mean the other party should forfeit all of their Constitutional rights and have their front door knocked down. In all of this, I would say the biggest problem is not knocking by the police. However, this all fits if you realize the purpose of police militarization and the ridiculously disproportionately expensive warrior on terror is to move us (the US) in a fascist direction since fascism benefits the people currently pay our lawmakers (ie.. the 1%).
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Why do Americans automatically accept that kicking the door down and holding everyone at gunpoint is a reasonable response to an anonymous 911 call?
Yes. This is the question that no one asks. Why we tolerate a culture in which police are empowered to kick in doors all the time.
a) Hollywood/media makes guns glamorous
b) it doesn't affect us personally (until it does)
c) there are other issues that are affecting us
d) our leaders have no interest in the matter (with rare exception).
e) out political system is broken
basically, the status quo is really difficult to change because it's controlled by groups of people that only change when members of them die.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
There's also the fact that she very likely was coached by her son's Lawyer/Public Defender to make that statement. Whether or not she really believes it, the public will never know...
...until she releases her book a year after the case is settled.