The Serial Swatter

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

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.

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.

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.)

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

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

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

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."

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.

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

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.

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.

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.