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Watching a "Swatting" Slowly Unfold
netbuzz writes That online gamers have been victimized has unfortunately allowed us to see what "swatting" looks like from the perspective of the target: terrifying and potentially deadly. A similar type of criminally unnecessary SWAT scene played out Saturday night when a caller to police in Hopkinton, Mass., claimed to be holed up in the town's closed public library with two hostages and a bomb. The library stands within eyesight of the starting line for the Boston Marathon. An editor for Network World, there by happenstance, watched for two hours, and, while it was a hoax and no one was hurt, his account highlights the disruption and wastefulness these crimes inflict.
Wouldn't it be smarter for the police to call back the library, and ask if there's anything going on ?
So we do need to collect more meta data? Or just live with "falsies" as a way of life? A compromise could be for the ISP to keep such info for say a week or two so that authorities can potentially dig through it if necessary, but otherwise authorities do not store it themselves.
Table-ized A.I.
Moderately interesting article. Too bad they decided to add the clickbait boston marathon reference. Makes me feel a little dirty for giving them a click.
Would it be overkill to consider swatting a form of domestic terrorism?
It places people in imminent threat of bodily harm, definitely spreads fear - and the one that seems to tip the scales for me is that it intentionally disrupts the police's ability to respond to real threats and is basically derailing society's ability to defend itself.
Okay, labeling it terrorism would probably be too much, but things like swatting strike me as attacks on society itself - which to me falls under my own definition of terrorism.
Is because of the predictably over-the-top military reaction by the police.
Why kick someone in the balls when you can shine a laser pointer at his crotch, and have his dog bite him there?
De-escalate police reactions and you'll see this go away.
The real problem here is the hoax. The mistakes authorities make is a matter that needs to be dealt with separately. Fact is, there are numerous hoax that are responded to properly and the odd one that makes the news for being outrageous.
So instead of blaming the responders we need to blame the people pulling the hoax. There needs to be severe punishment and methods to capture the offenders. The hoax themselves are dangerous and a massive waste of resources.
Authorities needs to put better procedures in place to help weed out potential hoax while keeping the same level of response to critical calls.
>> An editor for Network World....his account highlights the disruption and wastefulness these crimes inflict.
Or encourages other people to aim their hoaxes at other cities with high per-capita media, such as New York, LA, DC...in the hopes they get national attention too.
I'm from that town and the library is closed on the weekend, so the claim of a hostage situation was suspect from the jump. They shut the main street and the side street down for most of the day.
Cant they track these pranksters throw phone records, nothing cures them better then swatting them and thorwing them in prison for waiting to be charged for who knows what crimes...
Better to call it "terrorism by proxy".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If someone calls in an active shooter situation, the police don't have time to get a patrol car out there and check it out. They need to respond like yesterday. A hostage situation probably allows for a greater degree of surveillance, but depending on the wording of the threat the police may be mentally put into a situation where they can credibly, fairly say they thought it was "now or never." Remember with Columbine, the police waited and a lot more people died. The VA Tech shooting was much the same way. When there's a situation that calls for a SWAT unit to be deployed, it is supposed to be dealt with using overwhelming force.
We all can agree that SWAT units are frivolously deployed and most jurisdictions shouldn't have them. That's not relevant to this particular issue. Even if no SWAT units existed, the expected response to an active shooter situation would be the police rushing in with a presumption that the use of deadly force is authorized and to be applied without too many questions being asked.
SWATters should be charged with attempted murder in the first degree, be judged under strict liability and do hard time, even if they are only 13 years old.
... why is nobody asking how come the police is so easily provoked into taking hostile, deadly enemy action against the population it is supposed to protect and serve?
Why does every police corps down to the stupid little podunk ones have at least one trigger-happy SWAT team on the ready, as well as sometimes quite a lot of surplus army equipment? Isn't one army enough?
Because, you know, those things are there and therefore will be used, and against anyone. The crime of wilfully provoking the police against someone else is bad, but it wouldn't half as bad if the police was so overly happy to play along.
Police SWAT teams are now tools of escalation, not of de-escalation. Don't blame sickminded pranksters for the damage the police knowingly and wilfully add to their sick pranks. Both ought to know better, the police moreso.
the BSD lic3nse, is dying.Things
Swatting is our warm colloquialism for the unintended consequences of the slow but progressive militarization of our local and regional police forces. forty years ago, the war on drugs and whats known in our nation as 'tough on crime' policies began to take the form of whatever our politicians fever-dreamed the nature of crime to be. California came out with 3 strike laws that relegated everything from bounced checks to jaywalking third offences to a minimum life sentence in prison, and the idea of civil forfeiture became a smart way to enact real-world consequences for movie-screen criminal caricatures. In america as it stands, thanks to the policies of carter, reagan, nixon, bush, and johnson, police officers can now purchase surplus military equipment for free, less shipping. And since america's chief export is war these days, we have a lot of surplus military equipment waiting to be used. This program ramped up after 9/11 and before we knew it, sleepy towns like Dothan Alabama owned tanks, mine resistent personnel vehicles, and millions of dollars in tactical military hardware such as night vision and machine guns with no realistic opportunity or purpose to utilize them.
So without real use, these systems degrade and deteriorate and the cost to maintain them is, well, very expensive. as a result, police departments found themselves shoehorning equipment requesitioned from hand-me-down government transfer projects and knee-jerk terrorism overfunding into everything. Warrant service for taxes? SWAT and a 40 ton tank can handle that. peaceful parade against planned parenthood? sounds like a job for machineguns and nightvision. And finally, the SWATting. Its an innocuous situation where some crank-yanker calls in an odious situation that requires immediate action. Hostage situations and school shootings arent oustide the american experience, but our response is nothing short of lethal interception no matter how far fetched it seems that a hostage situation in the Dugal county truck stop mens room is taking place.
Cops are baked in it. Theyve spend 30 years growing into this nonsense, that everything that isnt pulling over minorities in classic cars should be handled like a van damme movie. Their defense is often pretty good, noting that america is relatively unique in that citizenry can openly and easily procure weapons capable of quickly defeating both their body armor and their general defensive capability. But municipalities have no excuse for continuing to perpetuate this police-state response other than the obvious: theyre run by boomers and the elderly. People who have direct influence over the tactics and policy used by our police are obviously easily frightened. 24 hour news and internet forwards from grandma have reduced what should be a responsible, level-headed committee to a clamouring rats nest of assholes hovering somewhere between religious nationalism and dictatorial rule of law. the bottom line: cops arent soldiers, but we liketo pretend they are to make sure theyre ready to fight our boogeymen.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"Dozens of law enforcement vehicles arrived in a steady stream" That's complete and utter bullshit. Fuck the police.
...by an ideological hack.
The best part is when you assume that "those outside the US" somehow are unaware of what you perceive to be heavy-handed police tactics, when the sad (to you, anyway) truth is that people outside Western nations routinely live under oppression and police abuse that is orders of magnitude, to the point of being in a different universe of description, different than what you describe here.
To encourage more swatting simply:
1. Post videos of swatting online.
2. Post interviews of swatted people onlne.
Also works for mass-shootings.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Why this pretty much happens only in the land of the free/brave...
1/31/2007
nevar foget.
Could it be the guy interviewing with network world? Seems like an absolutely perfect situation for a person interested in this sort of thing to find themselves in. My money's on that guy being the culprit.
The solution is to re-examine SWAT team usage nation wide, and how they are used and for what. Until we do, SWATing will always be a threat. The solution is to fix the vulernbility by replacing a dangerous and broken system with one that works better.
I find it extraordinary that an anonymous phone call is ever enough justification to merit the dispatch of armed personnel.
Here's a way to stop swatting.
When an 'anonymous source' reports a hostage situation and there isn't one, issue arrest-on-site warrants for the user/owner of the phone that made the call. Attempted assault, false reports,reckless endangerment, attempted manslaughter, at least two felonies' worth. If possible, send an officer with zip ties to that address immediately (if a landline) or at least the last known position of the cell and see who happens to be lying around.
That'll get the dipshit in question picked up quickly and sent to the can with a fairly outrageous bail.
Please have the officer that does the arresting have a bodycam active, so we can see the whiney little twat that does things like swatting blubber and cry and piss themselves.
Then throw then in jail for a couple of years minimum.
Pretty sure the swatting would stop fairly quickly once the beginning steps of this process were taken.
when it affects someone in power.
> his account highlights the disruption and wastefulness these crimes inflict.
It also highlights the intrinsic stupidity of militarizing the police and then keeping special attack teams ready to spring into action on an instant's notice of something that is never confirmed, let alone analyzed, as needing any police response at all. This tactic is only possible because the government can no longer merely react it can only over-react, and seems incapable of stopping itself. To the contrary, it congratulates itself on its over-reaction as an example of the proper reaction had the situation actually required such a reaction - which none ever have.
"The library stands within eyesight of the starting line for the Boston Marathon."
So the fuck what?
Yes, before he was caught. A sentence of a billion years probably wouldn't have prevented those 19.
I do. A cost/benefit analysis suggests we often over-detain for "feel good" political reasons.
In some cases it makes the problem WORSE because the thought of long sentences makes the chasee take bigger risks. One rapist told investigators he killed his under-age victim because the penalty for murder was only slightly more than the rape sentence. The "jail math" thus lead him to remove the "witness".
Table-ized A.I.
Intentionally make a false report to police that results in armed response: attempted murder. Police actually end up shooting someone over it: premeditated murder. The punishment should be the same as if they actually pulled the trigger themselves.
When police procedures allow an anonymous tip to endanger someone's life, the police are at fault.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Make it punishable by life in prison, and it will happen much less frequently.
If there are 20 fake calls for every real one, and if the fake calls send SWAT to visit politicians' and judges' families homes, the police will have to change their attitude and their tactics in order to survive.
Yeah, clickbaiting has gotten completely out of hand. I recently watched an informative news program about the psychological effects of clickbaiting. It turns out that there's a formula for clickbait, and you can learn to recognize it in advance.
Click here for a list of signs that a headline is clickbait.
This had swatting written all over it. However let's ignore that for a moment.
Dude calls up for a swatting. Do you:
A) Send in the swat team
B) Send a uniform car
C) Send in an undercover guy
D) Send in a pizza/delivery/utility guy
If you answered D - ding ding ding - you get the prize. A utility guy could check it right out with a clip board. Next time it could be a pizza guy, rotate them around. It would render this all useless. Mean time, track the asshole down and swat him. Swat him good. If he's still alive, hang 'em. Hang 'em high!