The Serial Swatter

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/the-serial-swatter.html

by danso • 11 years ago

146 69 11 years ago

tomtoise• 11 years ago

I feel like this will always be an issue, due to the heavy militarization of local police. When any swatting could be a real incident, I suppose they have no choice but to go in with guns drawn and ready for anything.

tehwebguy• 11 years ago

This kid DDoSed our site last year (League of Legends fan convention, http://www.summonerscon.com). I wondered what had happened to him.

TaylorSwift• 11 years ago

According to the article, he is serving juvenile.

"In July, a judge sentenced him to 16 months in youth jail, with credit for time served while awaiting trial. He is scheduled to be released in March, at age 18."

DanBC2• 11 years ago

and from a police point of view, it’s better to ‘‘respond high and then downgrade’’

They're saying increased risk of killing innocent people = ok, which is a sub-optimal approach when you look at the thousand or so people shot and killed by US police each year.

golergka• 11 years ago

To be fair, there are innocent lives on both sides of the equation. This article only describes one side of it. A week later someone will post a story about how 911 never responds to calls in Detroit, and the comments will have the opposite message.

It's easy to say what should and should not be done in each individual case. It's hard to build a bureaucratic system that intelligently evaluates each case with all information available and consistently makes high-quality decisions.

detaro• 11 years ago

It would be really interesting to see the data supporting this: how often has a high response turned out to be the likely correct approach, how often has to "low" response gotten people killed?

Sadly I don't think this kind of stuff is tracked on a larger scale.

onewaystreet4• 11 years ago

The argument for the "show of force" tactic is that a show of force can prevent the use of force because the suspect is too stunned to act.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

Where "stunned" means "shot and killed within 6 seconds of the officer arriving"?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34918231

dibujante2• 11 years ago

Well, flip the response around - respond low and then upgrade. It's possible that this would lead to less death overall. But it would also mean that any situation requiring escalation would probably indicate such through the death of a police officer. Would you want to be the sacrificial officer who knocks on the door to find out if the situation is worth escalating? The overall numbers might work out better in that case, but the whole "someone will definitely die" factor is a big psychological hurdle.

mikeash2• 11 years ago

I don't want to be a police officer at all, but for those who are, "put your life on the line for others" is pretty much the job description.

By all means, we should minimize their risk as much as is reasonable. But when you get to the end of what's reasonable, you have to accept that they're still going to be at risk, because that's what the job is.

Zigurd• 11 years ago

The US has unusually aggressive police, with tactics and doctrine that result in far too much shooting and killing compared to other advanced nations. Yet those other places don't get lots of dead police. Maybe there is a way to do this without "responding high?"

fenomas2• 11 years ago

The whole thing smells like a system that can't deal with bogus inputs. It's understandable that police want to prepare for the worst, but surely it's a "trust but verify" kind of situation. A swat team that charges in, guns drawn, even without any sign of a threat seems like a fire department that turns on the hoses before they've seen smoke or flame.

Then of course, after the police work out a response plan that can cope with bad inputs, step 2 is they need to tell everyone about it. The expectation that cops will point ten guns at anyone you ask them to is the reason swatting is a thing at all.

peter303• 11 years ago

I guess the kid was a sociopath- the one one in twenty or so who dont give an eff about anyone else. Some anonymous posters are sociopaths.

caseysoftware2• 11 years ago

Around 6:30 a.m., her father jostled her awake and said she needed to come downstairs. When she got to the top of the steps, she saw her family’s living room ‘‘covered in cops.’’ There were at least five officers in riot gear, guns drawn. They had bulletproof vests and pads and helmets with visors.

This line doesn't make sense.

If officers showed up in SWAT/riot gear, they wouldn't let anyone leave their presence unsupervised, especially if someone else was in the house. SWAT only goes in for situations where they believe violence is imminent. Therefore they go room to room to clear/gather everyone, make sure potential victims are secured, and that no one is armed.

If her/NYT's description is accurate, they broke procedure and put themselves and any possible victims at extreme risk.

Are there any third party or police reports of this event?

tacojuan• 11 years ago

If you watch enough swattings (most are streamed via twitch.tv and wind up on youtube) you'll see they typically have a sheriff follow the obviously unarmed, unharmed, and generally confused victims around the house.

caseysoftware2• 11 years ago

No, most are not streamed via Twitch. A tiny percentage are. In fact, we will never hear of most of them unless someone is killed.

Further, read the paragraph and my quoted portion again. She says her father woke her up and she didn't see cops until she saw into the living room.

Therefore, there was no sheriff with him.

onewaystreet4• 11 years ago

The SWAT team likely rushed in, saw that there was no threat and then let the father go upstairs. And her account doesn't say if her father came up alone or not.

jgrahamc• 11 years ago

Many of the comments here about about the SWAT teams and militarization of the US police force, but the story I read is that this guy (and others) went after women gamers because of their gender.

Just the other day a woman programmer told me of some of the threats and abuse she'd suffered essentially because she's a programmer, a woman and has a public profile.

I find this so depressing.

karmacondon• 11 years ago

My first thought in response to your comment was "Well, most jerks are men". But I was reading about Berkson's Paradox [1] earlier and I think it might apply here. There's probably an even distribution of bad behavior between both men and women, but the selection bias in programming and technology limits the sample so that it skews towards males who behave badly.

This doesn't add much to your comment, other than offering a potential explanation as to why women in technology can have a hard time. Unfortunately I don't see a solution to the problem either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

maroonblazer• 11 years ago

Perhaps I'm misreading Berkson's Paradox but I'm not sure that explains all of it.

We know men engage in risk-seeking behaviors more-so than women, in aggregate. Couple that with teenage men/boys being more likely to be socially isolated and all the other factors associated with the adolescent/pubescent lifestage (hormones raging, identity issues, etc) - again, in aggregate - it's easy to see why you'd get more males than females engaging in this kind of behavior.

dahart• 11 years ago

There's probably an even distribution of bad behavior between both men and women...

We're talking about sexual harassment, not just jerks or any old "bad behavior". There is not an even distribution of sexual harassment.

http://news.msu.edu/media/documents/2011/03/1205ff7b-5b6c-40...

http://www.aware.org.sg/training/wsh-site/14-statistics/

diego_moita• 11 years ago

This is also what I read.

What I found most disturbing there is the pattern of a fragile and weak person being abused and returning all that abuse into others that are weaker than him.

It reminds me an Israeli writer (Amos Oz, if I remember correctly) saying that many times the mind of the opressed is an mirrored inverted version of the mind of opressor.

api• 11 years ago

Thanks for that reference. This is also very close to the true non-westernized definition of karma: evil is essentially a virus that spreads from perpetrator/teacher to victim/student. If the victim does not consciously decide to stop the disease, they go on to reenact it in the perpetrator role. Karma isn't a penalty for evil but a description of the cycle and how it is perpetuated; there is no penalty except continued eternal entrapment in the cycle.

iSnow• 11 years ago

I am going out on a limb, I don't think the behavior in the article is "simply" misogyny like with the programmer you mention, i.e. attacking women in techy jobs, it's more like sexual harassment by guys who don't have a girlfriend but some technical skills (and no moral compass).

I believe it starts with 4Chan's "tits or GTFO" whenever a woman identifies as such. In the end, guys like this one try to extort as much nudes, porn or ultimately sex as they possibly can.

gotchange• 11 years ago

I don't think that sexual gratification has anything to do with his behavior. He's a sadist psychopath who enjoys torturing his victims and inflicting as much pain as he could on them but he picks women due to their natural response "tend and be friend" in these situations unlike men with their "fight or flight" response in confrontations. He knew very well he would face a violent reaction if he tried any of these sick mind games on any grown up male.

cstross• 11 years ago

I'm kind of startled that this type of crime isn't prosecuted as attempted murder.

(If I go out and try to hire a hit-man to kill someone, that's how the prosecuting authorities would deal with me. If I try and trick someone else who is armed into killing someone for me? That's a very short step from paying an assassin -- there's just less money involved. That the armed someone in question is a SWAT team doesn't clearly change the nature of the interaction. QED: attempted murder.)

cmdkeen• 11 years ago

The problem is that would involve the state conceding that SWAT teams don't exercise sufficient restraint in choosing when to utilise deadly force. It very much should be heavily prosecuted but that is why it can't be attempted murder. Much like why the police can't "shoot to disable" it's to do with the legal implications of what you are admitting.

MaxfordAndSons• 11 years ago

Well, consider the percentage of police killings that are classified as murder... .1%? .01%? If someone is killed in a SWAT raid (swatting or otherwise) it's almost always written off as a police officer "justifiably fearing for their life". The officer that shot a sleeping 7 year old girl? Not murder (tried for manslaughter twice, two for two mistrials and then prosecutors dropped it). The officer that threw a flash-bang in a 1 year old boy's crib? Not attempted murder, no charges at all.

But to be less negative about it, the vast majority of swatting don't result in accidental police killings, probably for a variety of reasons including the higher concentration of well-trained, veteran officers as SWAT team members than in the police population at large, and the fact that the SWAT team almost certainly outnumbers their targets and all the cognitive effects that can have on the participants.

rhaps0dy• 11 years ago

QED: attempted murder

What?

Quod erat demonstrandum: attempted murder?

Thus it is proven: attempted murder?

You probably meant "Summarizing", "In summary", "All in all", or a similar expression.

fencepost• 11 years ago

Probably not attempted murder, but conspiracy to commit murder, though even that would be a stretch. I'm not sure what charges there might be one step down from that - "conspiracy to engineer a situation where a death is possible?"

Though I still think proven prosecutorial misconduct in capital cases should be charged as conspiracy to commit murder (since I'm pretty sure that all states actually classify executions as homicides for cause of death).

PretzelFisch• 11 years ago

At the very least assault with a deadly weapon seems appropriate.

jMyles3• 11 years ago

It seems to me that the fault lies entirely with the state. If it is violently intruding people's homes on the basis of this sort of report - which ends up being false - then obviously it needs to change the nature of what evidence can be regarded as sufficient cause to do this.

After all, say-so alone isn't supposed to be sufficient evidence to conduct a search. From the 4th amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

(emphasis mine)

onewaystreet4• 11 years ago

SWAT is only called in when there is an imminent threat. The problem is that the swatters can make up whatever story they need to. There's no good way for the SWAT team to actually confirm the story without going in.

jMyles3• 11 years ago

There's no good way for the SWAT team to actually confirm the story without going in.

I don't think I agree, especially as communications technology matures.

On its face, this "hostage with gun to the head" story needs to be regarded with enormous skepticism, just because of how rare it actually is.

awalton• 11 years ago

When someone says they're robbing a bank, they send in the SWAT team, but the first thing they do is set a perimeter and try to make contact with the people inside.

Zero of these incidents that I've read about have tried to make any contact with people inside. They just break down the door and invade the house, guns drawn, smoke grenades in cribs, whatever it takes to make entry.

I have no idea why it isn't protocol to have a hostage negotiator ring the house, given that's how they'd respond to several other classes of incident, but my guess is that's what happens when you pay for BearCats and bullet-resist vests instead of councilors and negotiators.

fenomas2• 11 years ago

There's no reason SWAT teams couldn't follow one set of procedures until there's secondary confirmation of a threat, and a different set of procedures from then on. Come to that, it seems crazy not to.

joshuaheard• 11 years ago

Exigency is considered an exception to the 4th Amendment requirement of a warrant. So, for instance, someone calls in a hostage situation, or someone shooting with a gun.

jMyles3• 11 years ago

My point is: if it's so easy to create fake exigency via a phone call, then we can't really consider a phone call, in the absence of any other evidence, sufficiently exigent to warrant such an exception.

sdoering• 11 years ago

Sorry to say that, but WTF?

Having read this account, I can hardly believe such people (creatures? idiots? Lost for words right now.) exist. Even knowing, this is a one in a million/billion case, I really do not understand how someone could do things like this. I totally understand how a system can be exploited. I even can acknowledge on an intellectual level the "hack" of the system. But playing with lives destroying innocent (mostly girls in this case, but the gender/age do not matter if people are terrorized imho) people, is clearly something I will never be able to understand.

And then only serving what - some 16 month in juvenile. Sorry, but that should not be right as well. This is no punishment, this does not deter others, imho.

And this does also not help the guy in any way. Why can't he be made tu at least also undergo therapy:

His description of the pleasure he gets from causing humiliation and harm ... is suggestive of quite significant emerging psychopathic traits.

No, he will run free, nine month after his sentence.

Having written that much on him, I am still shaking my head in disbelieve.

GFischer• 11 years ago

I really wish he'd get some psychological or psychatric treatment, or even psychiatric internment. Much more suitable and helpful than more incarceration.

masklinn3• 11 years ago

Even knowing, this is a one in a million/billion case, I really do not understand how someone could do things like this.

Definitely not billion, there have been tons of cases in the US alone[0]. See http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/teen-pleads-guilt... for an other fine case earlier this year.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Notable_cases note that the section is called "notable cases" it is not an exhaustive list by any stretch of imagination

jackgavigan2• 11 years ago

The F.B.I. doesn’t keep statistics on swatting incidents; a bureau spokeswoman says it is still working out which part of the F.B.I. should handle swatting investigations, because the crime ‘‘crosses so many of our delineated thresholds for who handles what.’’

This is pretty shocking. Speaks to an unreasonable level of bureaucracy and/or a lack of internal cooperation (not to mention common sense) at the FBI.

dragontamer• 11 years ago

Cross-state crimes have always been a major issue for law enforcement.

You would think that the local SWAT team would investigate, except most SWAT teams are only county based. All of the calls for "small local government" come to bite us in the ass when a punk from California calls a SWAT team in Ohio. Lets presume a simple VPN setup here: California Punk buys VPN in Switzerland, creates a Google Voice Account for Ohio, makes a phone call to 911 through Google Voice in Ohio.

SWAT Team eventually realizes they've been tricked, but then they have no authority in the next county over... let alone California. They call the FBI and hand the case over to them... but now what? The phone call was probably anonymized and tracing the caller id leads to a fake Google Voice account that was accessed from Switzerland. All of a sudden you need to pull an international team in to deal with the issue.

Remember, each step of the way is a set of laws that we, the people, have wrapped the FBI with Red Tape in. What powers do the FBI have to trace phone calls? Was it legal for them to look at the IP traffic? Each of these steps are double-checked by lawyers in the FBI.

An FBI Agent who specializes in domestic phone calls (and what he is legally allowed to do in the investigation) suddenly finds himself looking at VOIP traffic from Google, and no longer understands the legal landscape his is operating in. So he has to pass the job onto another department.

Eventually, the FBI will build teams of people who understand the legal landscape across a typical SWAT attack, and have agents who can maneuver through the sea of red tape.

Considering how much "Hacker News" posts about "OFMG, GOVMENT SPY ON US" like every damn day, is it surprising to see the red tape that the political opinion has caused?

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

Considering how much "Hacker News" posts about "OFMG, GOVMENT SPY ON US" like every damn day, is it surprising to see the red tape that the political opinion has caused?

Absolutely. This is all the fault of the anti-surveillance lobby, and nothing to do with the fact that separate political jurisdictions get to exercise their own autonomous decision making or anything stupid like that.

r00fus• 11 years ago

Why are 911 calls honored from Google voice or other VOIP numbers?

I've only had scam calls from numbers I could trace to GV or magic jack.

jackgavigan2• 11 years ago

Cross-state crimes have always been a major issue for law enforcement.

Isn't that the whole point of the FBI, though?

masklinn3• 11 years ago

Especially since that's been happening for at least a decade:

Weigman’s first swatting incident occurred in 2004 when he was 14 years old. When a girl he met through an online chat room refused to have phone sex with him, he retaliated by swatting the girl and her father, convincing a 9-1-1 operator he was holding the two at gunpoint in their Colorado home, which prompted a SWAT response.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2013/september/the-crime-of...

skybrian2• 11 years ago

I'm wondering if a reliable caller ID that gives a rough geographical source of the call would prevent most swatting. A supposedly local emergency call that actually comes from a different country should be considered suspicious. Seems like there are some loopholes to be closed?

CaptSpify• 11 years ago

The problem, I think, is that there does need to be a way to "anonymously" report suspicious activity. Imagine a legit call, where the "callee" is known by the "suspicious person". I agree that there's room for improvement/checking, but not sure how to reconcile the two.

skybrian2• 11 years ago

Not sure what you mean since the emergency responders can keep the source of the call confidential.

In any case, exact location isn't necessary. It doesn't make sense to treat a local call and a call from somewhere in Canada the same. Most swatting attempts are from far away, so having some indication of location would make it harder to do damage.

Also, most calls to 911 are not anonymous - they automatically get caller id even for blocked numbers. It's just that there are some loopholes.

hooloovoo_zoo2• 11 years ago

They just need to treat the call differently. Don't go in guns blazing if your call came from a TOR exit node.

mikeash2• 11 years ago

I imagine that would help, but how do you actually implement such a thing?

VonGuard• 11 years ago

Caller ID is terrible. It was never meant to be a form of security, only to be a service the phone companies could sell access to. It's so incredibly easy to fake Caller ID that it's essentially useless at a macro level. To fix it would require a completely different system, something like the ANI systems phone companies offer. But they hate offering ANIs to the public, sooooo....

Anyone interested in spoofing Caller ID can do so with an Asterisk box. You can put in whatever number you want for the Caller ID.

vinceguidry• 11 years ago

Kid's lucky, there are big dogs out there he could have angered. Parts where I used to live, you don't rely on the cops to solve your problems for you. I could have easily seen a truckful of guys driving up to Canada to beat the God back into him. Some guys are really protective of their daughters.

Animats2• 11 years ago

We need more detailed caller ID info to help stop this. At the point where a VoIP system connects to the PSTN, the ID of the VoIP system should be passed forward along with the usual CLID info. When that info reaches a PSAP, it should be displayed with a warning that the CLID info may be bogus and comes from (name of VoIP system). This would make it much harder to spoof the calling location.

That info is usually available in logs at the PSTN gateway, but often not for long, because the logs aren't kept long.[1] But it's not passed forward to the PSAP. It should be.

[1] http://www.911.gov/pdf/PublicSafetyInfo-Swatting-may2015.pdf

ryanlol• 11 years ago

How does that stop a Tor user? Why should call metadata like this be controlled so heavily when IP packets aren't?

Animats2• 11 years ago

The phony call would come up at the PSAP as nnn-nnn-nnnn (MAY BE FORGED - source TOR via node xxxxx).

kawera• 11 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10625418

The Serial Swatter

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