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Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

I suspect we'll be seeing a lot of articles that end with some form of "let's make the Internet safer by giving up our privacy and right to anonymity" while the government is trying to pass the anti-encryption bill. Unfortunately, this police officer spent a ridiculous amount of time tracking down someone with no real op-sec skills simply because he wasn't trained to track someone on the web.

Note that I agree we need to treat swatting as a serious and potentially dangerous crime ... But what do we do when all the perps are juveniles?

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Yes, that is the Guardian's current project.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/why-has-the-gua...

Its telling that the Guardian turn off comments on any of the hacked of stories or stories relating to bad behaviour by the press.

Afraid you will get called out by your readers for dounle standards maybe

the same "the Guardian" that called their audience "russian trolls"...

> Note that I agree we need to treat swatting as a serious and potentially dangerous crime ... Though perhaps less serious than the one done by the people actually doing said harm? (I.e., the militarized police)

>Unfortunately, this police officer spent a ridiculous amount of time tracking down someone with no real op-sec skills simply because he wasn't trained to track someone on the web.

No. This isn't about someone without OPSEC skills.

This guy was actively trying to get caught, livestreaming these swats and publicly taunting LE on twitter. And even then it took LE disproportionate amounts of time to get to him.

> But what do we do when all the perps are juveniles?

We put them through a restorative justice programme.

> But what do we do when all the perps are juveniles?

Hold the parents accountable, maybe?

(Not bloody likely, I know.)

Maybe, but I wonder if issuing fines to a low income household or taking a wage earner off to jail would actually result in worse outcomes in those cases. It is a difficult problem, perhaps we should address it culturally and discover if we truly have a need for so many swat teams like this in the first place. Mission creep may be a contributing factor here.

In Ohio I've seen Juvenile Life for serious offenders, which means your released at 21

"Note that I agree we need to treat swatting as a serious and potentially dangerous crime ... But what do we do when all the perps are juveniles?"

Try them as adults. You cannot tell me with a straight face that someone trying to pull this crap does not know exactly what they're doing.

You cannot tell me with a straight face that someone trying to pull this crap does not know exactly what they're doing.

At a basic level they understand exactly what they're doing. But their prefrontal cortex isn't yet completely developed. So they don't understand just how harmful their actions are.

I did some stupid stuff as a teenager that I certainly am not proud of right now. But, at the time, I didn't at all understand the broader ramifications of my stupid behavior and the harm it caused others.

I don't know. It sounds a bit too much like excuses. I was also a teenager and was not stupid enough to try anything stupid. My reptilian brain always managed to stop me. Like this time I was going to get into a fist fight (it was not my first), I was willing but my reptilian brain was not in agreement. It actually tried to freeze my legs.

The concept of a "reptilian brain" is a) no longer espoused by neuroscientists and b) if true would be the thing egging you on, not freezing your legs.

Think of it as a metaphor. There is definitely something there acting independently of me. I try to veto it but I'm not always successful.

> It sounds a bit too much like excuses.

Said with a dismissive wave to the body of research compiled by neuroscientists that says otherwise.

Recommend you listen to this [1] interview that I heard earlier today. It's by a Stanford neuroscientist, discussing why and how the teenage brain leads their owners to be impulsive, addiction-prone, and just generally idiotic.

The TLDR: they really don't know exactly what they're doing, because the physical substrate for their cognition can't yet support those functions.

[http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/archive]

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