Authorities brought 20 police cars, five SWAT officers, and drones to her house
https://www.twitch.tv/grammacrackers/clip/CharmingSolidNoodleKevinTurtle-CCpMMy7EX_W4v7_S
update: Found this video from local news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGeb3cuqLxE
There are a lot of things that can be pointed at as to why this happens so much in the US. But I think most people forget that this is a problem that can literally be fixed using laws and technology.
Swatting can only happen because the US telecom system is so full of holes and because the US legal system isn’t doing its job.
The primary thing you have to do is fix it so that the emergency operators can know where a call actually originated. And all we need to do to make that happen is to change the law so that telecom companies are held criminally and civilly liable when a person uses their infrastructure to fake where an emergency call is coming from.
Calls that come from foreign sources or from internet sources would harbor great suspicion. Imagine that the operator gets a big flashing notice that the call is suspicious right from the start.
I’m not saying that police and gun nuts and police gun nuts and incompetent police and nazi assholes don’t have a lot of culpability, or that we shouldn’t have severe penalties for people who do the swatting but the core fault lies in our elected representatives being too corrupt to hold telecom companies to account.
I don’t think giving the police more surveillance options is the best option. The main problem is the extreme militarisation of the US police. This amount of force is a ridiculous response to almost any likely scenario they would have encountered.
That’s not surveillance. That’s basic service, allowing the recipient of a call to know who is actually calling them. The same thing would also stop a lot of scammers.
they also get alot of surplus equipment from the military that is outdated, which makes it even worst.
Your argument is almost exactly the same as the ones being used to rationalize things like age-verification, surveillance, deanonymizing platforms, etc.
The people supporting these measures are going after operating systems, VPNs, web browsers, everything but targeting the actual people committing the crimes that they’re pretending to be trying to prevent.
Holding telecom companies primarily responsible for how their platforms are misused is a very large step towards the dystopian future that we’re already sliding towards.
When you call emergency services, they need to know your location. You know, because you’ve got an emergency, which is almost always where you are, and you might not know exactly where you are.
And, this is information that the telecom companies should already know. And it’s information that the caller might not know.
This isn’t a “very large step towards [a] dystopian future.” It’s your vision that is dystopian here. In your vision, people can have emergencies and die because the emergency services don’t know where to go. In your vision, people can easily fake emergencies and swat innocent people. You have a choice between a good thing and a bad thing, and you’re actually choosing the bad thing. It’s hard to fathom.
You gotta love people who would create a dysfunctional government just because they don’t realize that similar things can be good or bad depending on context, and that emergencies are exceptional circumstances.
Except you didn’t say “Emergency services need to know the location of the caller, so telecom services should provide this information automatically.”
You said this:
So everything in your most recent comment is a strawman because it completely misrepresents that discussion that came before. You’re placing words in my mouth as if I was responding to something other than what you actually said, when in fact I was responding to the thing that you did say.
No, holding telecom companies criminally liable for how their customers use their infrastructure is the path towards a dystopia, because it forces them to implement mass surveillance, censorship, predictive policing, and anticipating the will of the authorities (which often leads to even stricter enforcement).
If people are blocking geolocation on their device, and it’s that important to you that the emergency services know where they’re calling from, then give them a pop-up banner that says “to complete this call, please enable location services” with a button to do it in one click.
If someone makes fake emergency calls and swats people, identify the person who did the thing and hold them criminally liable. What you’re proposing is to basically let that person off the hook while punishing the company, and forcing the company to comply with an order to treat all of their customers as potential abusers of their services. That’s dystopian.
That thing “I didn’t say” is basically the first thing I said:
You misread my comment and then blamed me for your mistake. You downvoted my comment and called a common-sense obvious solution “dystopian,” when a decent person would have reread the first comment they responded to, and considered whether they might have actually misunderstood something.
I don’t have the time to have a discussion with you if I also have to explain my comments to you multiple times because you don’t read them properly. Since I’m not going to spend the time necessary to communicate with you, I am blocking you directly after posting this comment, and won’t see any future comments from you.
I didn’t misread shit. Your full paragraph went like this:
Literally everything you’re saying is projection. Go ahead and block me, it saves me the fucking trouble.