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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

Are the reactions extreme? You're effectively weighing convenience against fatalities. It would seem to me that the reaction is rather reasonable.

Neither judgement changes the fact that the reaction itself definitely makes DOS possible, of course.

I imagine the reason it isn't more common is that the punishment for making terroristic threats tends to be quite high (especially against airports), so you need to be very certain you won't get caught doing it.

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Bomb threat reactions are normally justified, but swatting reactions (and police reactions in general) are still too violent and ineffective. Not to mention that technology is making spoofing of threats easier and easier.

Do you have a source for that, or is this opinion?

I’m also not so worried about SWATting being possible - I want a ratio of times where the extreme response was warranted versus unwarranted.

I don't have a ratio, but certainly was an increasing problem pre pandemic.

> By 2019, there were an estimated 1,000 swatting incidents domestically each yeay

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-formed-national-dat...

It seems to me that that would be very difficult to determine in retrospect.

In any case, I think we can agree that militarized police breaching through a door and going in with guns drawn like they're going to assassinate Bin Laden all due to a phone call is dumb and shouldn't happen

They should send a drone to look into the window, or turn one of the dozen devices in each room into a microphone, or perform any kind of other investigation first before they do that.

Sources don’t change what is/isn’t opinion, and you can want that ratio but that information isn’t currently available. It is however a fact that it’s on the rise and enough of an issue that the FBI has started a database of fake SWAT calls, as linked by another reply. It is also fact that between text-to-voice MLMs, phone spoofing, and IP-masking services that it’s becoming increasingly harder to ID wrongdoers. One could say my distain of a violent pseudo-militarized force who asymmetrically apply the law depending on who’s a “blueblood” is an opinion, but I feel that is both obvious as an opinion and a well-supported stance given the rise in police-on-innocent violence.

This is case showing us they are not.

Cool! This is only obvious after the fact, and I would much rather have my flight delayed than explode midair :)

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