Did anyone ask Adam how he likes being a "target" of "fake news" or conspiracy theories.....sounds like he is getting what all the rest of the people on FB get.
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Tip of the iceberg if these companies don't clean up their act
10
What would be useful is a backgrounder on SWAT teams in general: Where did they come from? How often are they used? What % of SWAT teams are false alarms?
I agree with the commenters below that US police seem to love force over talking and thinking.
12
The people calling likely use every code word imaginable: child at risk, convicted sex felon in home, heavily armed, collects weapons, easily angered, screams heard, shots heard, suicidal. Any police force in the planet would come heavily armed. They won’t take action without corroborated evidence, but they will fill streets with flashing lights and officers.
8
How does anyone ever call a government agency and it doesn’t know the source of the call? Here’s a tip: calls that don’t have real IDs are not legitimate. If you are using a burner phone or an IP address without a name to get help for your buddy, he may want to have someone else make the call.
4
Because spoofing a caller ID is trivially easy for anyone with a mind to. Witness the huge escalation. of fraudulent calls in recent years, all of those numbers are spoofed
13
The internet has tapped and amplified every possible human sickness. Even the comments on this thread - and most threads - are cynical and hurtful, somehow justifying unethical and illegal behaviour towards human beings. Social media, Facebook as much as any, is a thought-free network that now defines and dominates social discourse. This isn't awesome, it isn't cool, it's destructive to human community.
54
"Facebook, Google and Twitter....have asked those employees to take added precautions, such as not publicly giving their whereabouts or listing information about their family" The irony of this should not be lost on readers. To ensure privacy and safety: don't share your personal information, activities or current location on social media. Of yourself or your family. Ok!
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@Niche
That is standard advice given to everyone online - there's no irony. Yes, if you want to preserve your privacy, you don't share private information publicly.
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@SusanStoHelit way to miss the humour. the irony is that the companies whose business is social media are telling their execs not to use their very products.
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"And despite numerous attempts to create federal legislation banning the practice, there is no specific statute that allows swatting to be investigated and prosecuted as a federal crime."
That's the most outrageous part. Should be a mandatory 20 year sentence without parole regardless of outcome of the swat. There are a multitude of ways to address the instances when the swat is called in from a foreign land.
And when exactly are AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, et. al. going to implement anti-spoofing on their networks?
46
I'm gonna guess this is one of those problems that mysteriously never occurs anywhere other than America.
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@SeattleGuy
Actually - most swatting calls originate overseas. So it's not America only.
People are people - Americans aren't some different species, not for good, not for bad. We are not better - but also not worse than people anywhere else.
9
While making a fake police report is certainly reprehensible, the real problem here is the militarization of and overreaction by police departments.
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@Camille
Lol - yeah that's definitely the "real problem" here.
If only the police would turn off their 911 switchboards and disregard emergency calls. Everyone would be much safer.
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@Camille: No, the real problem is people like you who defend these criminal "Swatters." I despise people who blame the victim or the police who properly respond to a crime claim. report? It sounded to me that your criticism based solely on the status of the victims. So, would you be OK with the police not responding to your house if you claimed rape because they assumed you were lying?
22
@Camille And, let's talk about the fact that tech executives subjected to these pranks have had their lives disrupted, but no blood was shed, whereas a random guy in Kansas was killed before being given a chance to ask "hey, what's going on here?" The chances that a person of color will survive one of these incidents is surely even smaller.
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Swatters use "cheap, online technology that can spoof a phone number and make the police believe a 911 call is coming from a target’s home." In other words, the same technology that allows telemarketers to spoof an endless series of phone numbers to avoid blocks and make you think a friend or neighbor is calling.
Will someone please explain (hopefully, in not-too-technical language) why the mobile phone industry can't make spoofing physically impossible? Or, if they can, why don't they?
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@FJP : This would be an excellent article for the NYT to write -- and perhaps it would create some momentum for action.
From swatting to incessant telemarketing and phone scams, so much could be prevented by making it impossible to "spoof" a number.
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@FJP
It isn't possible to make spoofing completely impossible. Only ways to try and mitigate it. Imagine spoofing like this: The spoofer wants to send a letter from his house, so the letter has his return address in the upper left corner that identifies where he is when he sends it. Before sending the letter, he whites out his address, and enters the address of someone else. Except in the case of a digital call or email, there is no way to trace that he made that change any more than you could trace that a type-written letter wasn't written by a certain person.
How is this mitigated?
- Some calls can be marked as spoofed if the call system notices that a huge number of calls happen simultaneously with the same spoofed number. These are relatively easy to flag.
- An account based ID system - Ever notice that you don't get constant spam calls in FB messenger or What's App? It's because the system is not bare to the open network of the internet. It would be a gargantuan task to convince ISPs and Phone companies to buy into a national account system, but it might be a way to mitigate these kinds of calls.
20
@Crim (1) would there be any cost, or service disruption, gong to a "national account system" like you describe? (2) why is it necessary to allow the user to have access to , and the ability to change. the "return address" of a call? Why can't that be a hidden feature automatically generated by the software involved, and not modifiable? Set it up so the call doesn't go through if someone tries to hack it. Yes, every lock can be picked, but you can make it hard enough that not every teenager in a game forum can do it in seconds.
18
How much does anonymity, especially online, contribute to destructive communication that might culminate in violence like SWATing?
(BTW, at this moment, 11 of 13 comments posted here are obviously pseudonyms.)
9
If you allow a citizenry to go armed, you are going to have a militarized law enforcement. It’s a two-for-one. Cops are justly afraid of being shot dead by citizens, and vice versa.
Blame the 2nd Amendment. Cops in other first world countries don’t even routinely go armed. They don’t need to.
And it’s pathetic that the telecoms industry still allows call spoofing. A disgrace.
51
i will never understand why the ingenuity behind creating, plotting, and carrying out new crimes isn't directed toward something more useful. and legal.
8
There are BIG downsides to having fame and money, especially with the internet doing its best to erase privacy/anonymity. I still think its better than being broke.
8
I think it's salient to note the following: No tech billionaires have been killed, while persons in poverty, like the sad situation in Wichitaw, have lost their lives.
Could this be clear insight into the way that Police are not merely racist (they are), but also clearly classist as well? I think there is an obvious answer. While we assume the worst of the working poor, we assume the best of tech execs. Tech execs who have empowered and emboldened some of the worst (and loudest) voices among us.
We would've seen the same thing after the '08 recession if the Internet existed back then as it does today. Vigilantes seek to punish those who have exploited the lower class for their gain.
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@Alex To a man with a hammer , everything looks like a nail. This applies your "All rich people are evil" political view.
9
@Jeff - Wow.... how did you get from there to here?
3
@Mike. Yes, Going in hard and heavy is an American tactic probably not found anywhere else in the world. But then so are millions and millions of military grade weapons in the hands of the populace not to mention heavily armed drug gangs.
I don't want our cops to risk their lives because we should be more like Sweden. Get rid of the assault weapons (unlikely) then I can see merits in changing the tactics. Meanwhile like other connebterss mentioneed, work on phone number spoofing.
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@Mark Stone
I've got no problem with the police being capable of meeting violence with violence.
You're discussing the _potential_ for violence that exists.
The job of police is to meet the situation with an appropriate level of force.
The vast majority of SWAT deployments do not result in the discovery (and even less, the use of) assault weapons.
Sure, the potential exists and care must be taken. One big area that need more contemplation than action is the fact that when you go breaking down doors in America, people are capable of defending themselves. Maybe a little less of that and fewer deaths, including of the police, would occur.
7
@Mike
But in these calls, police are told that there is a situation that requires meeting violence with violence, where there are heavily armed people that must be stopped. So going in heavily armed is what the police are appropriately doing.
The problem isn't the police responding appropriately to a defined threat, it's that it is so easy to fake a phone call and thus fake a threat.
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@Mark Stone
Stockholm police have been confiscating AK-47s from street criminals for a while now.
4
"[T]he Police Department...has also begun educating officers on the importance of responding to questionable calls with a limited amount of force."
Ah, and that is the root of the problem. American police relish use of over the top violence as the optimal response to the potential violence reported in 911 calls.
It might be worth contemplating reconfiguring SWAT tactics to instead rely on deescalation as the primary mode of employment. The paramilitary methods of SWAT, born out of seeing American civilians as much like US forces tended to see Vietnamese civilians as nearly as threatening as the Viet Cong, must be reconsidered.
The practice of SWATting depends on easily setting this overwhelming, violent response in action via a phone call to 911. While police do need the capability to respond to violence effectively, that can be done with considerably more contemplation in most cases, barring unambiguous evidence of the need for a SWAT response.
Also consider that it often takes hours to get a SWAT team on site. While they are gearing up and getting the armored cars loaded to attack, preparing for such contingencies should include equal emphasis on confirming the need and situation at the physical location they are being dispatched to.
With police in most other nations, their emphasis is on deescalation and patience, rather than an opportunity to bring events swiftly to a close through the application of violence. Waiting things out is often the first, best strategy.
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@Mike
The presentation of the overwhelming force of SWAT teams in hostage, terrorist and school shooting incidents paradoxically allows for deescalation and patience when appropriate. When all avenues of escape are covered and police have a modicum of protection against an unknown gunman or group of them who realize they can't shoot their way out of the situation, it provides an opportunity for the police to safely negotiate a surrender without violence. That is often what occurs.
Think about how you would react if you were one of a pair of cops armed with a service revolver and maybe a bullet proof vest who had to walk in on such a dangerous situation by yourselves. You might shoot at the first thing that moved. If you didn't get shot yourself, you would be lucky if what you hit wasn't a hostage or a child with a toy. While you may think it would be a more proportionate police response, sending a couple of patrolmen to confront active shooters actually increases the prospect of violence, especially violence against the innocent.
10
@PWR
I'm with you on confronting evildoers with the potential to quickly end their violence.
The problem is that is often escalation follows when a subject(s) refuses to immediately comply, because there is too often a reluctance to back off, assess, and wait. The priority is quick resolution pursued at least in part to cultivate the public's mistaken belief in the omnipotence of police power.
Unless there are good reasons to immediately move in - active shooter situations, hostages under immediate threat, a tie-in to a terrorist threat, etc - the preference should be for sit and wait. Wait for lack of food, drink, and sleep to have their natural calming effects. Instead, we seem to have a mentality that no incident should extend past the next scheduled coffee break.
5
@PWR There's a line between controlling the situation and being trigger happy. In concept the threat of being able to respond with overwhelming force is useful, but in practice US Police are still extremely keen to shoot even when they control the situation. As long as police view every potential threat as one that needs to be swiftly neutralized, it doesn't matter if it's Sheriff John Brown with his revolver or the entire force and fury of the LAPD, deescalation will be a crapshoot depending entirely on how twitchy any given officer is feeling at any given moment.
3
A SWAT team should be a last resort- not the first response. Yes - the online ‘pranksters’ are a problem. But what gives them fuel is publicly funded Swat teams and crazy, disproportionate reactions from police.
68
This is all the fault of our so called law enforcement. They demanded these "tools" to give them power over all of us and now it is beginning to backfire. The other problem is with SWAT itself they are called for the most minor of problems creating much bigger and more expensive problems for us all.
47
@joe Hall: What? Spoofed phone calls alleging a serious crime involving deadly force are the fault of the Police? What next? Speed limit signs are the cause of reckless driving? Who do you automatically blame for your own actions?
7
The people most responsible for doing damage to our society and our environment have always been shielded from being personally identified and located. I don't think this immunity from personable accountability is a good thing.
10
@scrumble immunity from accountability, no, but immunity from attacks by people who want to "get back at you" from the internet, surely yes
5
@scrumble
And they still are. A random Facebook exec or engineer didn't decide to ban George - but in the swatting forums, George is mad, and wants to attack anyone at the company - could even be the person who tries to make banning less common or has no voice at all in it.
Would you like to be attacked because some person didn't like an action of your company, and found you the first person they could vent their anger on?
4