Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how it is a police force could be talked into doing something likes this in the course of a prank. You would hope they would do at minimum a cursory amount of investigation before taking measures like this.

View on HN

Imagine you called up to report a genuine crime taking place, and the dispatcher's reaction was 'oh really, that doesn't sound very convincing.' You'd be furious, and rightly so. If the caller's location is spoofed, which is not hard to do, and the caller has minimal acting skills, then the police would be remiss not to act on it.

I really do not care for the prevalence of SWAT teams in the US, but then I don't care for the ease with which criminals can heavily arm themselves either.

And when the police show up to a scene where they see nothing is happening, they can stand down.

I'm willing to bet more people are harmed by SWAT teams than by heavily armed criminals using the same class of gear.

A patrolman would've been more than sufficient for this.

EDIT:

Just to make this painfully obvious...had he turned around quickly with a mouse in his hand, they quite possibly could have drilled him. Is that sort of risk really something we're okay with?

EDIT 2:

For the downvoters--notice that I said "same class of gear". How many criminals are actually busted carrying fully-automatic MP5s, assault rifles, shotguns, and body armor?

I'm not making an argument for SWAT teams, just about the difficulty of evaluating false reports of a serious crime.

A patrolman would've been more than sufficient for this.

That sort of depends on what report was made in the 911 call(s), doesn't it? I mean, we know now it was just one guy playing videogames at home, but you can't just call 911 and ask for them to send a SWAT team somewhere. Presumably the dispatchers were led to believe that something much more dangerous was taking place.

That's the whole thing really. 911 responders have to make decisions with out being able to know the outcome ahead of time.

> A patrolman would've been more than sufficient for this

In this case, according to the report at Ars, the 911 caller claimed to be a worker there who has shot two coworkers already and was holding the rest hostage.

That's a bit much for a patrolman to deal with.

I'm pretty strongly against how heavily armed and often used SWAT teams and general police forces have become (such as against barbershops for licensing checks [1]) but I pretty much agree.

In these cases you have someone trying to convince the cops that something dangerous is really happening, and I'm not sure I can think of a practical method for them to figure out are real and which aren't.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/09/us-florida-barbers...

Unfortunately they have to take every call seriously and act immediately. There is no way for them to distinguish between a fake and real call. Unless the place where the alleged threat is occurring is a regular target for swatting. In that case police still visit but they don't send a whole swat team.

They have the capability to knock on the door and see if there is a response before they throw people to the ground and point guns in their faces

it's supposed to be difficult to get "no knock" warrants but apparently they're being passed out like candy on halloween now.

Also, busting the door down and yelling "police" counts as "fair warning" :/

Why not just run a tank through the front door and demolish the building while they are at it.

The report they received was a shooter in the building who had shot two people and was holding the rest of the people there hostage.

If you were in charge of the police, what would your response be to such a report?

I'd call back the phone number the call supposedly came from and see who answered. I would Google the business if it was a business and if they had a contact number call that number as well. Go to the alleged scene and ask if anyone in neighboring businesses had herd gun shots.

Even just from the perspective of the safety of the SWAT team it is colossally stupid to send them into a building based on a single source unverified tip like that without doing a cursory investigation of the circumstances first.

It's not "unfortunately", they should take every call very seriously and act immediately. Anybody that calls 911 as a joke needs to be punished swiftly and severely.

I mean unfortunately because there's no solution to this where emergency services can perfectly determine if a call is genuine or not. So it is unfortunate that they have their time wasted, when they could be used elsewhere.

That is one of the reasons why can not call the police from a voip service in Germany. (These devices / services have to warn you about that fact before buy.)

Only traceable methods are allowed to call. That way it can be ensured that someone who can call the police safely but only without speaking can be rescued. ... Or "prankers" located.

I believe these reports are done using calls with a fake caller identification. A number of ways to do that is just one google search away and is only a tiny bit harder than sending an email with fake "From:" or a real envelope with a fake sender address.

I understand that part. I question why the police's first thought would be to send a SWAT team w/o first verifying the information they received was even a little bit true.

Well, if they receive a call about an active shooter, it's understandable that there isn't much time taken to investigate before going in.

Most of them these days appear to be accomplished by corrupting the call data going to the 911 center and then the caller tells the operator whatever fake address they want.

Spoofing caller id does not often work because 911 centers use a more powerful system for identifying calls that is like ANI.

There was a presentation at DEFCON this year on this very subject.

Haven't seen the talk, but that wasn't my experience after working for a VoIP provider. Being your own operator you publish whatever number you want and customers are in charge of putting their correct address for use by the emergency services. For services where you intend to keep all the right information, this call can be still tracked later on. But there are providers who don't care.

Basically at each hop they would have to rely on that hop playing nicely or you can't get more info.

SWATTING. Usually the phone call is spoofed so it seems like the call is coming from the building itself.

Yeah, running your own switch allows you to send whatever you want as caller ID. You get the subject's number, call 911 and claim there's a hostage crisis.

I miss the days when prank calls were about refrigerators running. Things are so mean on the Internet these days. Trolls play for keeps, not for luls.

Sounds to me as if that telco infrastructure could do with a bit more security.

Caller ID is not and never was intended to be secure.

What research should the police force do when someone calls in a bomb threat or a shooter in a school?

Maybe they shouldn't send the SWAT team, but rather, send a car around to see what's up before the team goes bashing through the windows?

Depending on the nature of the original (fake) report, that may not be a realistic option.

Well this doesn't look like it was a school and if it was a bomb threat why would you send a SWAT team into a building that you believe is going to blow up? It doesn't say what information the police were acting on but you would think they would have figured out before putting the guy in handcuffs that they were acting on false information.

In addition to what others are saying (location spoofing, etc) another factor to consider is this was in Littleton, CO. Specifically, about 5 miles away from Columbine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com