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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.
> His mother, Brenda Willson, says her son is innocent and does not smoke, drink or have tattoos. "He would never swat," she says.
With a mother as stupid as this, no wonder he's behaving like an asshole.
This isn't a prank. This is attempted murder by cop.
Also, the cops should better assess the situation before invading people's houses at gunpoint.
Dear mother, smoking, drinking and having tattoos are not good traits, but they are not necessary for someone to be a nasty criminal.
Curious - what is necessarily wrong with those traits? Obviously, from the story, one can be quite devastatingly evil (causing an incident resulting in innocents at gunpoint) without them.
Smoking gives you cancer, drinking ruins your liver and can result in uncontrolled behavior (brawls, DUIs, etc), and tattoos basically ruin your chance at a lot of jobs. They're also all correlated somewhat with anti-social behavior (of various kinds) in general, which I think was the point the mother was relying on. "Because he lacks traits correlated with bad behavior, he must not have engaged in bad behavior." Obviously, this is faulty, but mothers often aren't rational when it comes to defending their kids.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Brenda Willson, says her son is innocent and does not smoke, drink or have tattoos
WTF? What do smoking, drinking, and tattoos have to do with calling the freakin' SWAT in on some poor gamer? Is this some correlation I had previous not heard about?
SWAT: Smokes Whiskey and Tattoos
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
How the hell did we get such a militarized police force anyway?
Here's your answer.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
So was Lucifer.
I feel strongly that there is a response in between ignoring anonymous calls, and roaring to the scene in full-on SWAT mode, busting down the door and giving everyone who is unlucky enough to be inside the worst day of their lives.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Because the PR hit for overreacting to a "threat" is far lower than the PR hit for failing to react to one (and even that's better than silently snuffing out a threat -- bad PR is better than no PR.)
Actually protecting the public isn't all that much of a concern. And for the most part, the public likes it that way because feeling safe is more immediately obvious than being safe. The former is defined by action (the police caught some bad guys!) whereas the latter is defined by inaction (nothing terrible happened to me today..)
Read up on security theater. I'm not sure that this would technically fall into that category, but its the same mentality nonetheless.
That happy middle is called due diligence via police work. You don't send a swat team to do a detective's work, and that's exactly what more and more PDs are doing every day. It's a disgusting lack of intellectual effort on the part of the PDs, and exposes them for what they are: Soldier wannabes who are too cowardly to actually enlist.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
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.