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Comment by ZoidCTF | Hacker News Reader

I was a victim of a swatting in July 2019. Someone called 911 and said a man was threatening a woman with a gun at my address. Police showed up, told me to put my hands up at gunpoint, cuffed me, searched my house and then left like nothing happened.

There needs to be a better process for handling these calls. Just call the person at the address, or approach and use a loudspeaker or something. Walking out my front door to a bunch of guns pointed at me was the worst experience of my life.

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I had the same thing happen to me in September 2020 and once again March 2021. This was a full SWAT response the first time and significant police response both times. We had little kids walking out of the house with hands up and many guns trained on them. It was a harrowing experience. This is far more common to have the police just shrug and say that nothing can be done.

I wonder if they get paid extra for raids and false alarms are a nice way to earn extra cash while not risking your life.

> Just call the person at the address

"Yep it's the police here, we'll be at your house in 5 minutes, just giving you a heads up in case you want to ambush us, xoxo"

Wow, where I live, if someone phones the cops, they don't show up for like 2 days, and even then, they are so chilled I don't think they can spot a criminal next to a normal person, never mind pulling guns on people. My country is not perfect but at least we don't deal with these kinds of interactions, sadly due to incompetence.

Why is it that we rely on a phone system that so easily allows the true source of a call to be masked? In this case it sounds like they located the caller, but the article does not say how.

Because the phone system is based on very old protocols with duct tape and patch work applied over the years. Not sure how you want VOIP calls to be de-anonymized. Are you arguing for state surveillance?

I used to work for a phone company. While this was not in the US I don't see a reason why it shouldn't be possible to implement this there as well.

Each call had two source number: One user provided and one network provided. The user provided number could be set by the caller (within limits). The network provided number was always set by the provider.

A normal callee would see the callers user provided number. The emergency services, however, would see the network provided number.

This worked for PSTN calls as well as for VoIP (via the P-Asserted-Identity header)

Due to historical reasons phone tapping in the US requires warrants, a protection not extended to the internet unfortunately.

This can tell you the network that sent the call (with a lot of effort and subpoenas to every network along the way), but there are so many ways to get VOIP access these days, VOIP companies don't necessarily have KYC.

Damn man, that's terrible. Sorry you had to go through that. I can't imagine how that must have affected you, especially for quite some time going forward. Super rough :\

On the other hand, if someone actually is threatening another with a gun and extradites them inside, giving them a heads up in such a manner could initiate a hostage situation. Surprise forced entry minimizes the chance of human death in such a situation since it's likely that the person doesn't have a gun constantly pointed at the victim while they're in the house.

> Surprise forced entry minimizes the chance of human death

Literally every bit of research on the topic says the exact opposite.

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