ALAN W. FILION,
a/k/a "Nazgul Swattings,"
a/k/a "Torswats V3,"
a/k/a "Third Reich of Kiwiswats,"
a/k/a "The Table Swats,"
a/k/a "Angmar," and
a/k/a "Torswats"
https://www.wired.com/story/alan-filion-torswats-swatting-ar...
> from approximately August 2022 to January 2024, Filion made more than 375 swatting and threat calls, including calls in which he claimed to have planted bombs in the targeted locations or threatened to detonate bombs and/or conduct mass shootings at those locations.
( from https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-teenager-pleads-gu... )
Do you mean for the US, rather than the human race? Some of us live in countries where the only weapons most cops carry are truncheons and tasers.
As a side note, when trying to research this you'll see weird double speak fact checks like below:
> Fact Check: 11-year-old arrested on suspicion of violent disorder after riots, not ‘mean tweets’
> Sending grossly offensive, obscene, indecent, or menacing messages on public electronic communication networks is a criminal offence in Britain under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003
> Misleading. An 11-year-old was arrested on suspicion of violent disorder, not for social media posts, during a swathe of arrests by British police targeting those involved in rioting.
But then the authors don't write what 'violent disorder' is.
Then they try to further confuse the matter by talking about a completely unrealted 11 year old boy that was arrested for suspicion of arson
> The spokesperson said the 11-year-old, one of five juveniles arrested on suspicion of violent disorder by the force on Aug. 28 in relation to the riots, was later bailed.
> Cleveland Police arrested another 11-year-old on suspicion of arson after a police vehicle was set alight in Hartlepool on July 31, according to the spokesperson and an Aug. 1 statement, opens new tab . The child was also released on bail, the spokesperson said.
And this isn't some weird online political rag, it's Reuters. It's all very strange.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/11-year-old-arrested-susp...
"Violent Disorder" is a specific offence listed in the Public Order Act.
> Then they try to further confuse the matter by talking about a completely unrealted 11 year old boy that was arrested for suspicion of arson
The way it reads doesn't seem like it's "completely unrelated" at all.
So the article should explain it.
> The way it reads doesn't seem like it's "completely unrelated" at all.
How is this related apart from the person sharing the same age and the town being the same? One is suspected of arson and the other of Violent Disorder? Does this add value to the fact check?
But I think a lot of it needs to be treated as a significant mental health issue
As Musk said: state sponsored propaganda(1).
I don't like the guy, but this one he had it right. (1) NGOs, i know.
What makes you think they aren't? All news media is inherently biased if they want or not. Not to mention "fact checker" are a prime candidate for corruption.
> The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
https://ia600300.us.archive.org/30/items/the-ted-k-archive-t...
But if you believe that only the US has this problem, I am sad to inform you that Taylor Swift and Hollywood Movies are not the only American cultural exports eagerly consumed around the world.
I am pretty happy with the police hardly ever killing anyone, and that almost always someone who is a real danger to others. I am happy fewer people being killed by police so far this decade (and that includes road accidents involving police!), than have been killed by police in the US so far this month.
Do you really think that dressing in military special ops tactical clothing, with advanced and powerful weaponry, balaclavas, helmets and responding to a call in a armoured vehicle doesn't create any weird expectations on the mind of police officer of how they should behave in a call?
The separation of empathy from an 18 year old online kid from his peers is the true tragedy here.
It sucks this person was so angry and unfeeling to the world at a young age.
The big guns are hidden from sight anyway, and only brought out when need be. We don’t need any Oct 7th type attacks happening on home soil.
Well homegrown attacks happen DAILY. "Averaging almost 50,000 deaths from firearms annually". But no, once they're not on the news like the Oct 7th attacks where, it's fine I guess.
https://www.statista.com/topics/10904/gun-violence-in-the-un...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/249803/number-of-homicid...
You pulling an argumentative sleight of hand here conflating your run of the mill gun violence with terrorist attacks or mass shootings isn't cool.
It doesn't matter how the police is equipped, they can't stop a guy from walking up to his neighbor and shooting him in the face unless they're already there pointing guns at him. Although, maybe some sort of remote mind control chip is the answer there?
Also, I'm certain every shooting ends up on local news.
Despite that the teenager will likely be going to jail, the most damning indictment is of the police forces that were repeatedly co-opted by the teenager. It should really take something much more clever to trigger this kind of systemic response repeatedly.
I'd challenge that view by claiming that if the threat is of someone holding their family hostage threatening to kill them (just a guess at what these "swatters" might say to the dispatcher to get cops to actually kick in some doors, I don't know what their state-of-the-art accusation is), then sending one cop car, poorly equipped, sounds a bit silly for multiple reasons.
USA has 1-2 mass shootings everyday on average. This is far worse than a singular big attack. And how long would the reaction of police to any big attack even take? Is it actually realistic that they will have a useful impact with big guns?
2+ victims is a mass shooting per the FBI definition so while what you say is technically true it's also a particularly evil way to mislead the reader as the typical mass shooting of the FBI definition consists of 2-4 people shot over the course of an otherwise normal crime wheres the colloquial definition of "mass shooting" is more along the lines of a crazy suicidal person killing as many others as they can.
> Mass shootings like Columbine happen every day in America.
The guy you’re replying to (and I as well) are saying that this is an intentionally misleading statement. Three people being wounded but not killed in a shootout they started is still considered on the same level as dozens of innocent children being hurt and killed. IMO that’s straight up misinformation. It’s designed to illicit the strongest emotional reaction possible, while being not even technically wrong.
America has lots of problems, and guns are definitely one of them. Everyone agrees with this, we just disagree on how to fix it. Twisting words and lying is never helpful.
> I'd love to see some statistics about how much worse it is now that we have professional police,
How fortunate that they're willing to collect statistics on their own performance for you.
Claiming that police are being militarized is a very broad statement. Depending on your perspective it can be positive or negative.
You could argue that consistency and having a common operating model with accountability is a good thing. Unfortunately many would argue the adopted model is very flawed and that the level accountability is tied to public outrage or scrutiny.
I think everyone would agree that adequate training is essential but we would disagree on what type of training is appropriate. Some argue that sensitivity and deescalation training are where the focus should be, while others are arguing for the warrior training.
The true conservative would say that we can't do it right so we shouldn't attempt because doing it badly will be more harmful than not having done it at all.
Why would that require that a "captain" has several subordinates ranked "Lieutenant" and "Sergeant"? Why do the highest ranked police have caps with brocade, and gold braid on their shoulders? Is that part of the consistency? Why does the NYPD have dress uniforms? Why do they give military style funerals for those who die, or x-gun salutes? We're often told they're out there fighting "wars", though everyone is always vague about who the other side is.
I'm not making the claim that they've been militarized recently. It seems to have been the case no matter how far you go back.
> I think everyone would agree that adequate training is essential but we would disagree on what type of training is appropriate.
I don't think this is a training problem. When they shoot some grandma or shake down travelers for the cash in their wallets, I don't think this could ever be corrected no matter how much or what sort of training they are required to undergo. This is some baseline ethics problem, that could only be corrected with initial selection, and then only if the selection process itself were relatively uncorrupted (and it's not).
Your comment doesn't just suggest you are mistaken about this or that, but that you aren't in a frame of mind where you could recognize or appreciate that there is a problem.
> The true conservative would say that we can't do it right so we shouldn't attempt because
What if the task were something absolutely morally abhorrent? What if the task was to efficiently and artfully carve the hearts out of newborn babies and toddlers, and to terrorize the parents with the mutilated remains of their children? But you've been doing this task for so long, that you and everyone else just assumes that it's something that needs to be done. You're sitting around arguing "ok, maybe we need to do only have as many satanic baby sacrifices, and I won't listen to the people who say we need to have more not less". And there's another guy sitting next to you saying "I don't know why we need the terror... we could kill just as many babies without being cruel, they could get anesthesia, and we could do grief counseling for the mom and dad".
And you endlessly yammer about this stuff, for decades, never noticing that you're all lunatics. The concept that this just shouldn't be done at all, in any manner, it's something you can't possibly hear. Even those who can understand this like to whine that they're powerless to stop it, that they don't have the tools to put a stop to it, etc. The truth is we all have the power to stop, none of you want to.
Popping in here to say that it's funny how you said this then go on about baby sacrifice.
If you are a content creator, or someone who might be at risk for swatting you can call your local PD and explain the situation. You can let them know that you understand they must respond to those types of calls, but just wanted to call in and let them know it could happen. Most are happy to hear from you and take note.
Before swattings became popular, people used to send pizzas (popularized by old 4chan) and you would have to call all the pizza places in your area and get your address blacklisted. That was a pain.
Unfortunately, I speak from experience. I received a credible threat, called my local PD, and they began to investigate immediately. They also put notes in their dispatch system (which is shared by the local SWAT team) indicating that this had happened before, and to proceed with extreme caution.
The "swatter" never did follow through on the first attempt, but did follow through about 6 months later. I didn't get any threats from the swatter that time, but did get a call from my local PD while I was at work, and they let me know they'd driven by my place and called it off after being confident it was a false alarm.
Anticipating questions: no, there's no sort of protocol I setup with the PD. They have to investigate every threat, and even if we setup some sort of "shared secret" ahead of time, if a swatter says I'm cutting up my family in the basement, the PD can't know with certainty that I'm not. About the best I can do is make sure to answer the door when/if the PD shows up so they can more quickly establish things are safe.
Also: the attackers were after some OG Twitter accounts I used to use, and they thought they could intimidate me into giving the accounts to them.
Here is my reference for 3 events in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...).
Plus calls all over the country require national level investigation, not local police efforts. And that's what happened: the FBI had to step in.
A landline call tagged as "same town" or cell call tagged as "pinged tower near reported location" could be treated more seriously than a VoIP call from "Fly-by-night VoIP Gateway Plc".
They like opportunities to play with their tech toys and rough up some "suspects." A compelling story about someone in distress is the perfect excuse, whether the message comes in via VOIP, TOR or 4chan.
This is no more complicated than grade school playgrounds: don't give the bully what they want.
https://www.wired.com/story/alan-filion-torswats-guilty-plea...
If our legal system started recognizing that sending the police somewhere is equivalent to calling an assassin then we've got larger issues to address.
Regardless, this is unlikely to be much of a deterrent. The police need to be held accountable at some point.
Imagine a world in which someone is trying to murder you or your children. You know who they are, and you even have incontrovertible evidence they are doing it. Yet they get off scot-free every time because their bullets missed the mark.
(This is covered in the mandatory first-year criminal law course in law school, BTW.)
The courts wanting to make an example of those that have embarrassed the government is a different issue entirely.
As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people who cooperated with the US or the Afghanistan government against the Taliban. When the Taliban found out about such people they would go after them.
We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks because there is no way to know if the Taliban found them out through the leaks or through some other source. The odds are pretty good that it was more than one, probably a lot more.
The swatting teen on the other hand is known to have not actually gotten anyone killed.
A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you. They were there to do something that sometimes goes wrong and does kill, but most of the time that doesn't happen.
Someone coming to your house because the Manning leaks identified you as cooperating against the Taliban was there to kill you.
My bad, but still egregious nonetheless.
> As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people
You're after different people. It's Luke Harding and David Leigh from the Guardian that published the password to the unredacted files.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/unredacted_us...
> We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks
This is exactly what I meant by "unspecified and theoretical." The government had over 2 decades to point to any instances of harm. Where are they?
Also again, Chelsea Manning didn't publish the unredacted files. It's rich to blame her for Afghanistan deaths while ignoring the actions of Bush and every president after him, where the ultimate responsibility lies.
> A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you.
No, the crucial difference is intent. Swatting kills people, swatters know that, but they do it anyways for their own pleasure. Obviously, swatters aren't sending trigger-happy cops so that their victims can survive.
Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes. This is whistleblowing, not some selfish "leak." The intent here is to save lives, the exact opposite of swatting. I don't know how anyone can demonize whistleblowing while trivializing swatting.
His federal guilty plea appears to admit to 375 swatting calls. So I don't think the state or local courts can subsequently charge him for any of those calls - they would need to find evidence of some separate calls.
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/federal-crimes/is-it-doubl...
"It's hardly my fault the police doused pluc with gasoline, all I did was throw a match"
The kid needs to be punished, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have a glaring hole in our law enforcement procedures so large that even children can exploit them. That’s insane. Children are always going to do dumb shit, we need to have policies and procedures to guard against that.
He's not facing 20 years; he's facing a small fraction of that.
It'll happen when pigs fly.
I wonder if this was supposed to be Nine Angels. Copy editing on the web is so sloppy that I'm going to assume so because it makes more sense (to me).
Wow, neo-nazis are a fun bunch. Their ideas about accelerationism and trying to induce race riots have got to be our biggest semi-organized domestic threat. It's encouraging to see authorities seemingly beginning to catch on to this, as well as widespread recognition of what swatting is. Five years ago was a very different story, especially on the latter.
I'm going to assume that wired got it right and it's the neo-nazis that misspelled it; it's much funnier that way.
Aside from that, people who do so are despicable. 20 years is a light sentence. Taking money to put people in situations that could easily become deadly.
Cops kill people on the basis of ludicrous anonymous phone call because they know they'll get away with it when it turns out to be false.
And they like it that way.
There needs to be a few very public cases of entire SWAT teams getting 20 year sentences.
ACAB
If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.
The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time. Training only goes so far. After that, you're investigating mistakes versus violent intent.
I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
> If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.
To be clear, your 2nd statement is why ACAB. The police are the people fighting against the open & honest accountability you are asking for. When accountability comes up, they refuse to do their jobs[1], inflate crime numbers & incident severity[2], harass the few cops trying to improve accountability until they quit[3], and actively campaign against accountability[4].
If some cops are bastards, and people who shield those bastards from accountability are also bastards, then all cops are bastards. ACAB is not rough, it exactly describes the situation.
[1] https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/10/20/mpd-cop-says-office...
[2] https://minnesotareformer.com/2020/12/15/the-bad-cops-how-mi...
[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/only-minneapolis-...
[4] https://apnews.com/article/elections-police-minneapolis-a1ce...
In the US, police officer does not even rise to top 10 most dangerous jobs. Groundskeeper is a more dangerous job than being a cop.
The lack of training and toxic culture of policing is far more dangerous to cops than criminals are. The average US citizen simply does not, and should not, trust the average cop.
Which is really impressive for how much time cops spend standing on the side of highways.
For instance, several officers have been treated for severe symptoms after coming into contact with fentanyl. Except that there is no way, biochemically speaking, the kind of contact they had with fentanyl could have produced anything resembling those symptoms. It was an entirely psychosomatic reaction, brought on by the police's own utterly false propaganda about how terrifyingly dangerous fentanyl is.
Similarly, so much of their "high stress" is because they expect to be attacked/shot/killed at any given moment even when, by any reasonable analysis, they are 100% safe. Furthermore, a lot of the actual danger to them is manufactured by this exact phenomenon: they expect a physical confrontation, so, in order to ensure they "win" it, they create it, striking preemptively in one fashion or another.
This is conjecture with no measurable basis.
I'll grant I didn't cite sources, because this is HN, not a scientific journal, and if you're interested enough you can Google it (or DDG it, or Kagi it) for yourself, but the basis really is right there in my post.
At least try to be persuasive. There are a myriad of ways that jobs can be stressful without endangering your life, that should not be difficult for you to imagine. Shift work, demands for quotas and metrics (sales people can tell you this), dealing with violent and erratic individuals in the public with sometimes insufficient support, etc.
Correctional Officers face similar circumstances and have a life expectancy of 58-59 years old. High divorce rate too, but people want to content themselves with the truism that "only bad people work these jobs", with no consideration for environmental effects. The divorce rate is higher among medical assistants and some skilled trades, for reasons that can just as easily apply: long hours, on-call, fatigue, etc.
> it would be mitigated by better training and careful psychological filtering.
Only on the conceit that any and all stress is imposed by lack of training and bad psychology.
Compared to other countries American cops aren't really trained at all.
In Germany the training period for a police officer is 2 to 3 years, in the US it's usually less then 6 months.
That US 6 month number excludes field training (typically 1 year) whereas the 2-3 year German number includes it (6 months I believe).
This largely stems from a difference in how academies work. In many countries, field training is required to graduate. In the US, field training is required after you graduate in order to get a permanent job. This skews the total training time numbers.
That said, American police are still undertrained by comparison.
Police mostly act as professional witnesses taking reports and engage in revenue generating law enforcement.
The most high pressure situations they deal with with any regularity involve mediating domestic disputes or wrestling angry drunks.
Police absolutely are not dealing with violent criminals on the daily. And when they do go out of their way to deal with people who many become violent they show up with the kind numerical advantage that would make Stalin proud.
Your average beat cop probably un-holsters their handgun once a month to once a year depending on where and when they patrol. These high stress high stakes split second judgement call situations are not a daily or weekly thing.
>I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
They do accept this and did for decades. The only reason it's no longer being blanked accepted is because the modern media landscape makes it much harder to hide the fact that a huge fraction of these "honest mistakes" were in fact not so honest and not so mistaken.
Basically nobody has a problem with honest mistakes by themselves. What people have a problem with is thug behavior. Spending decades classifying various degrees of thug behavior as honest mistakes is why nobody wants to tolerate honest mistakes.
You’re right, but it is a problem and people who choose to abuse that fact deserve to have the book thrown at them.
The kid should be punished, yes, but a quarter of his lifespan is not exactly a light sentence.
Both issues need to be addressed and addressing one doesn’t relate to the other.
This kid shouldn’t get off easy just because his crime shouldn’t be possible. It is possible, and he chose to do it. Most people are good and choose not to do it.
Here is a reference for 3 events in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...).
Have you spoken with SWAT team members?
The few I know would find this attitude of “killing is fine because we won’t be sued” abhorrent
Not only do I have zero interest in speaking with SWAT team members, I have very real reasons why I choose wherever possible to not talk to any cops at all.
The fact that you "know a few" SWAT team members immediately makes me strongly suspicious that you are part of the problem, perhaps not directly corrupt yourself, but very likely to be complicit in hiding the misbehaviour of police you know who are corrupt.
ACAB
Swatting victimizes the police as well, they’re responding to a potential hostage situation and do not have the benefit of hindsight. I guarantee these officers are horrified that the man was innocent and frustrated that they were put in this situation.
I encourage everyone who is adamantly “ACAB” to go on a ride along- contact your local department. At best, you get first hand experience to justify your beliefs and can virtue signal even more to your friends. Or you may be able to humanize the police.
How many cops do you know? They might say they're horrified to the media, but that's not how they operate when no one's watching. There's a reason these SWATting events keep happening: cops enjoy them just as much as the SWATters do. They get to bust out their fun military surplus toys and do their SEAL Team 6 cosplay. If they wanted to stop these SWATting events, they would have found a solution by now.
Check out these highlights (lowlights?) from the Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department:
https://racketmn.com/human-rights-report-mpd-needs-major-ove...
These are not people known for nuance or remorse.
Link to the full investigation report:
https://mn.gov/mdhr/assets/Investigation%20into%20the%20City...
They have to enforce unjust laws and unjust outcomes, and statistically do so more heavily across minority populations.
The institution requires them to be bastards, ACAB is a statement about the institution of police and the people who elect to join that institution.
The problems with American policing aren't merely that the cops have to enforce the law.
It's the qualified immunity, the get-out-of-jail-free cards for their buddies, and the dog shootings.
If the police never shot the wrong guy, always replaced your door after breaking it down, and were polite and apologetic when a mistake was made - people in this thread wouldn't be equating swatting with attempted murder.
Given that, if I was busting down doors in the US, I’d want to be armed to the teeth, equipped with the best body armour money can buy, and wouldn’t waste a lot of time on niceties until I was sure that nobody was going to attempt to kill me.
Blame the Second Amendment as currently interpreted.
And be careful about brining the First Amendment into that... the First Amendment as it was understood by its creators was not about your write to say anything you wanted without government response, it was about your right to publish your own newspaper (or broadsheet/advertisement) without the government issuing you a license or collecting a tax (both of which the colonial government did).
The second amendment was ratified in 1791, and just 7 years later (1978) the Alien and Sedition Acts were ratified by congress, in large part other silence critics of the federal government by making it illegal to say "false, scandalous, and malicious" about it (with the exception of about the Vice-President). And it was absolutely used as a political tool, and this was approved of by the Supreme Court at the time.
So I don't think that anyone really wants this horrible president that the modern Supreme Court has yoked us with. Unfortunately, given the election results, it appears we are going to be subject to these horrible ideas for a whole generation.
I'd take the AR.
It's been largely interpreted this way throughout most of our history, until around the 1960s when civil rights activists started carrying them. All the modern gun regulation started then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
Of course 1934 gun control came about due to people like Al Capone and the like.
The main point of the Second Amendment from the framers perspective was to prevent the need (or even the existence) of a standing army. Of course from a modern perspective this is near-ridiculous.
But they seem to have decided this is the least bad option. They have a duty to respond to serious phone calls about armed situations.
The main issue is the insecurity of the old telecom system where spoofing is so easy. But we're heavily invested in it as a society.
I disagree.
The main issue is qualified immunity.
The phone companies never killed anybody in a SWAT raid. The phone companies never claimed to be building a "secure telecom system", nobody ever offered to pay for them to ensure high grade authentication and integrity checking of phone calls.
And the cops know that. And don't care. They are the people showing uo with military weapons to people's homes. It's their responsibility to know and understand the reliability of the information they're acting on, and the ease with which the phone system can be made to show them misleading information.
Cops with guns and police unions and qualified immunity who now they're never going to be held accountable for killing people based on false information are the problem, not the phone system.
One must not result in, or be able to cause, the other.
Let's say we have to deal with the fact that they do co-exist and interact. Maybe there should be additional protection and safeguards, and if there are some (which there probably are), don't stop there until the percentage of illegitimate calls is below a certain threshold.
And maybe it is already below a certain threshold, and I'm getting all hot under the collar about an incredibly rare scenario. Maybe it's better than it was. 20-year sentences should go part-way to reducing the frequency.
I'm mostly on the side of "letting a guilty person walk free is better than imprisoning (or arresting or shooting to death or even just violating the freedoms of) an innocent person".
If I had to guess, he'll do a couple years.
Also, HN seems to have a bad echo chamber on both policing and gun control.
No amount of opsec can save you from corrupt employees making below minimum wage.
Receiving an anonymous call claiming some not-particularly-plausible threat at a particular location probably DOES deserve a police investigation. I see no reason why it impels police to drag people from their house in chains, threaten to shoot them, or actually shoot them.
If police responses were reasonable and proportionate to the plausibility of the threat then swatters would not be able to use them as a weapon.
"Swatting" isn't really a thing in Germany, but we've always had other disproportionate responses to single phone calls. One call (or even an email) that threatens to blow up the air port, or some particular air plane, and it's shut down for hours until they've looked in all the places you could hide a serious bomb (presumably, I have no idea what their "okay, I guess it was a hoax" signal is).
But what's the alternative when somebody plausibly describes a situation that indicates someone is in extreme danger? Send out a single cruiser the next day to check out what was up?
I've heard of reports of domestic violence, child molestation, things like that, and it's always the same. They rush to the place, knock on the door, look around, and arrest the people they need to arrest. What they don't do is start shooting.
Same way as the US is the only nation in the world where it's impossible to prevent weekly school mass shootings.
If there's a 1% chance that the house contains a deranged gunman threatening to shoot his family and then himself, that probably shouldn't be met with the same response as a 30% chance of the same... There are probably a lot of situations where it's a tough call though.
Future headline: Police ignore mass shooting because they thought it was a prank
source: the onion [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
> Prosecutors say the ... teenager advertised his services under the pseudonym Torswats on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, charging as little as $40 to get someone’s gas shut off, $50 for a “major police response”, and $75 for a “bomb threat/mass shooting threat”.
I don't think this is pranks. I had an antisocial stint in my late teens also and it was more about gaining some power over a world that wants to treat you like a cog. I bet it wasn't even about the money (at least it wasn't for me) it's just that having a "hussle" is a persona that you can wear if you want to focus somewhere besides the consequences of your actions.
When Caller ID became the norm, it completely ruined phone pranks like this.
He is very sweet and sheltered, so it's a good outlet. He literally tried the Prince Albert in a can one. That hasn't been relevant for like what, 50 years?
Also, *67 also caused a lot of people to simply not answer calls that were blocked this way.
I legit do not remember seeing anything on the evening national news about that in the past, like from before 2000.
I don’t think we could have intentionally created an incentive structure for swatting more if we had tried.
And it’s going to continue because guess what was one of the major issues in this election? Domestic security!
Even conservatives know the only hope is stacking the supreme court.
I suspect you are probably right about the timeline for swatting as shady VoIP providers started getting popular in the early 2000's and started being used for more than just spoofing text advertisements.
(There was never a bomb.)
Whatever is wrong with kids these days is nothing new.
I think they're really fucking stupid. I think they think that since they are making up claims that everything will be alright. Like the cops are going to bust in, see that there's no drugs/hostages/satanic rituals/whatever, say "My bad", and fuck off.
But there's always the chance that things go horribly wrong. And that chance is actually pretty high.
That level of asynchrony is not how the system should work.
(Admittedly "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence).
> "According to court records, Filion was also part of a high-profile international swatting group that targeted several prominent figures"
...or was I right?
Swatting wouldn't even be a thing if <any number of logical things>
- Anonymous calls should be treated with high levels of suspicion as to their legitimacy
- First response training that's even moderately appropriate
- Situational awareness beyond what one's been informed by third parties
- Empathy for all humans
- Any kind of notion of that a scenario may not actually be as described by a single anonymous voice
A very (un)funny irony is that there are numerous stories I've read about domestic violence victims being arrested, as opposed to the attacker, which implies there's some level of suspicion in some circumstances about the information the police are being fed. Swatting, as a thing, indicates there's some kind of hero-pressure build-up that overrules any kind of <all the things I listed above> whereby that pressure has the possibility of impending release.
https://www.google.com/search?q=lv+killed+for+calling+the+po...
(Google link for choice of news sources...)
Yes, the police response in this country is often absurd. Using that to harass and harm people is equally awful.
The SWATer kids call into 911/e-911 centers using a spoofed number of the victims.
If it's that easy to spoof a phone number then that system is completely fucked and not fit for purpose.
And the efforts that a private investigator needed to go to, to track down the perpetrator, indicates that there is no way to track the source of the phone calls - that's ludicrous (but probably the norm).
Open telephone system security holes seem as much a malpractice as the militarization of police.
When you try and point this out, you're called various names, because apparently you either support the police 100%, or you're a criminal.
There's no fixing the system when there is no onus on the police to act like they care. They enter a home that was a victim of swatting and kill everyone? Tough luck, "it's part of the job", "we told them to stand down and they didn't", "we couldn't risk the life of the first responders".
There's always a reason as to why police violence is fine. Its almost as if the police isn't really there to protect normal people.
Well, it's not. Even here, the function of the police is to enforce the will of the state, not to protect people. The protection is a side-effect of the enforcement, but enforcement can also be things like terrorizing minorities.
It's like sweeping categorizations of an entire country are usually not accurate or something.
I don’t think it’s too far fetched to think that song was colored by their experiences with the notoriously corrupt LAPD of the 1980s.
Yes, this is so trivially true of any place that it's not worth mentioning, as generalizations are meant as just that: Something that a majority (or at least a large minority) are like. For example, people do say "people in the US speak English", even though there's a number of people that don't. This doesn't make the generalization any less useful than "Americans like baseball" or "Americans wear shoes around the house".
And, for anyone who isn't reading between the lines here, without a doubt I'm only so lucky as to avoid their attention today because I made it and have spent the last 2 decades living in nice neighborhoods and driving nice cars.
https://www.kxan.com/investigations/everything-we-know-about...
I saw countless similar videos of cops violently attacking -- often with permanent, life-altering results -- people who were exercising their constitutional rights or simply minding their own business.
Treat calls that don't have the hallmarks of an emergency as "maybe not an emergency" - I admit that sounds simplistic and requires heavy training, however.
But my commentary was more about the gung-ho-ness of the follow-up. Don't houses have windows that aren't always blocked by drawn curtains? Don't binoulars exist and are relatively portable? Aren't there relatively quick and painless methods to adjudicate a situation prior to knocking impolitely? Even if time may be of the essence. One day maybe the heavy knock on the door is a trigger that blows up an entire Police / SWAT response team - then there might be some new policies around situatonal awareness instituted. (not that I would in any way promote such a grotesque act of violence).
The police are putting themselves in danger by their own behaviour.
Re: Trump assassination attempt, wouldn't that have been averted if someone just "went and had a look"?
Someone else pointed out that the whole phone system is a dog's breakfast, which also needs to be fixed for various easy-scam-exploitation reasons as well. The only reason not to do it is that the corps that run the networks don't want to have to pay to make their shit fit for society's purpose rather than their own.
Agreed on telephone infra in general
Spoofable local number: slightly less trustworthy
Non-local number: less trustworthy
International number: barely trustworthy
VoIP: maybe slightly more trustworthy than international.
Said infra probably limits the ability to distinguish between these, however, so that becomes the primary issue.
Do you tell emergency responders not to turn their lights on en route? To put it at the bottom of the queue after helping the old lady cross the street? To politely knock on the alleged hostage-taker's door instead of kicking it in?
And if "kick the door in" is Standard Operating Procedure, then change the SOP, or have some more conditionals prior to "kick the door in".
The guy in the article obviously belongs in jail. The question is how far up the scale he went in terms of actual damage and injury caused. It's just like if I read an article about Joe pleading guilty to shooting Fred, and facing 20 years in jail, but the article doesn't say whether Fred survived the shooting. I'm not out to make a big moral judgment either way, and I have no stake in it, but it's a natural question for a reader to ask.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting_of_American_politicia...
It feels like between this and the prevalence of scam calls, the FCC has been asleep at the wheel for 20 years. There's some signs of the "sleeping dragon" waking up, but I fear all that will get walked back under the next administration.
Bonus good read on the topic:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/02/why-arent-police-doi...
"Love of the game", Jesus Christ.
