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Comment by soco | Hacker News Reader

The question is, out of those trillion ways, how many actually happened? This Swedish info is actually public since quite a while, and I have yet to hear of lives destroyed. I'm not saying it cannot be, just that I didn't hear.

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> public since quite a while...

I think this is an interesting point. If you were to suddenly flip a switch and have all US data exposed the same way, I think there would be chaos and maybe even violence.

But I think that speaks more negatively to the current state of America than it does the idea of having information be public.

Can you describe why it will create violence? I could maybe understand that it could makes employment harder for some group or something, but how does it lead to violence.

Violence because some Americans just cannot be trusted with public data.

My biggest complaint about living in the US, being a natural born citizen, is that most people seem to make everything about themselves and this is partially the problem. All of this information being publicly available isn't the problem, it's that most people don't know how to leave well enough alone and think that just because they have this information that they need to act on it and use it to their advantage.

Likewise, you have the people who simply have no self-control and will fly off the handle and do something without knowing all the pieces and just assume they have heard enough to make up their mind. They would use that information to hurt their perceived enemies because in their messed up echo chamber if you're not Male, White, Christian, and Heterosexual then you're the wrong kind of American. The current issues surrounding abortion and women's rights only reinforce that mindset. These people label those differences as an "illness" and all that virtue signalling to make you feel like you're wrong if you believe otherwise.

Response to a deleted comment:

> Extralegal punishments like "cancelling", doxxing, and indirectly inciting violence on your political adversaries is becoming more common.

> And when that happens, it's understandable why the target above would want to get the person back with their own (possibly kinetic) extralegal punishment, if they can't take it through the court system, which is what already happens for people like drug dealers (they can't go through court system to fix bad deals).

> You also just have crazy people. "Talk shit, get hit" etc.

You're absolutely right. Vigilantism is a serious problem, and dressing it up as political activism is becoming increasingly common. You can't even avoid this by simply believing and saying the "correct" things because half the country is going to disagree with you regardless. In such an environment, anonymity is the best defense. Either you blend in with the crowd and never say anything interesting, hope that nobody ever singles you out for retaliation, or you cloak yourself in anonymity and speak your mind. The latter is something of an American tradition, born in a time of revolutionary strife when being on the wrong side could get you dead, imprisoned, or chased out of the country.

Aside: don't take downvotes so seriously. Sometimes good comments get hit with a lot of downvotes at first but get upvoted again later. Also they don't matter, the 'karma' is imaginary internet points and you can't buy anything with them. Ignore downvotes and speak your mind.

This makes me wonder why ordinary people are not swatted, police called on them, deliveries made in their name, etc. in Sweden when a country that doesn't have such public records like USA has this so regularly several people have died.

Swatting works in USA because of how the police handle it. In Sweden, and in most of the world, you would get a knock on the door and some questions from two policemen. US police going in blind no-knock raids with weapons hot on the basis of a single anonymous phone call is the issue, not public addresses.

Does Sweden have something like CPS? In America, if someone discovers you have a child they can make repeated allegation to CPS. CPS is required to investigate and they're also required by law to not disclose who reported it. So having your name in a book with any evidence you have children allows anyone to harrass you endlessly, each time you'll be under investigation for weeks to months and you can never find out who's causing it.

Sweden has an its version of CPS. The first time they will do an investigation but without any proof, nothing will happen. After a few of these without any indication of harm being done to the child they will just ignore them as it has been investigated.

You can’t really cause problems for people this way.

And blaming swatting on swatters is an obvious trick. To prevent swatting, we have a choice of changing our expectations about how police should react to anonymous snitching, or we can detect and isolate or eliminate every single extremely maladjusted young man that has existed or will exist.

Choosing the first means that you end swatting as a danger. You're only ever pretending to choose the second (the impossible one); but instead you're actually saying that the status quo is fine and in addition you're going to use maladjusted young males as a pretense to take even more liberties with the amount of force and restriction that you're going to apply to the general public.

Swatting doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America, the police won't immediately murder someone based on a phone call.

Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does. It's largely an effective harrassment, terrorization (fear) tactic. Congressperson Marjorie Greene (yes she's terrible, not the point) being an on-going example of that.

> Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does.

I don't think this is as much of a counter-argument as you seem to think.

> Swatting doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America

A Twitch streamer was swatted in the UK [1].

[1] https://www.shacknews.com/article/131816/twitch-streamer-kef...

That's London in Canada.

> A Twitch streamer was swatted in the UK

It says "Canadian" in the headline and throughout the article. Still a country other than America, but not the UK.

But also the most similar country there is to the USA.

I’m sure there is at least one 4channer or serious cybercriminal reading this page and learning something they didn’t know before.

Then again, am I the crazy one for shredding my mail? Maybe I should scan it and put it all on my GitHub.

Stalking is ridiculously common everywhere and there's no reason to think it isn't in sweden as well. If no one you know has experienced it, or felt safe enough to confide in you, that still means nothing to everyone else. "What has soco heard about" is not a meaningful metric of anything.

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