I hope that at some point swatting becomes a felony akin to attempted murder.
Why is it always boys and men who do swatting?
Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says
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Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says
#12I hope that at some point swatting becomes a felony akin to attempted murder.
Stopping the swatter doesn't do much, and still allows for people to be swatted. The thing that needs an overhaul is the decision making on when to actually send out the swat team. It's lazy, expensive, and dangerous to send them out for every opportunity without any investigation
It doesn't mean a literal SWAT team any more. Many departments have truly gone overkill with their everyday gear and tactics, and many of those that don't still seem SWAT-like. I would argue that the SFPD are usually relatively low key, but they now carry around night sticks which seem pretty bad ass, but are really meant to be an alternative to deadlier force.
Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says
#13I hope that at some point swatting becomes a felony akin to attempted murder.
Why is it always boys and men who do swatting?
Here in Australia the incarceration rate of men vs women is about 12.5 : 1
So I'd guess the answer to your question is something like: for the same reasons that men commit the overwhelming majority of violent crime, which probably has something to do with evolution and testosterone and culture.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/648093/australia-impriso...
Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stopping the swatter doesn't do much, and still allows for people to be swatted. The thing that needs an overhaul is the decision making on when to actually send out the swat team. It's lazy, expensive, and dangerous to send them out for every opportunity without any investigation
If the authorities are too slow to respond they get crucified (extreme case: Uvalde, Texas school shooting earlier this year where the cops sat paralyzed while children were actively being murdered by a gunman). I don't like the five-oh but going the route you're proposing will make some instances much worse with avoidable loss of life.
I don't think that's a good comparison. That was 100+ cops standing around while kids were being shot. How often do swat type all out assaults from cops into buildings save people? They are rare. The cops add risk more than they save risk from attackers.
In this case, there is a demonstrated and repeated danger from these swatting attacks. They don't have proper risk management in the police forces of the us, as demonstrated by swatting killing people. The authorities being too slow is not a demonstrated problem, it's the opposite.
Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says
#15I hope that at some point swatting becomes a felony akin to attempted murder.
That seems excessive. I would consider swatting lesser than attempted voluntary manslaughter which carries a maximum 10 year federal sentence. It’s also typically prosecuted at the state level, which kinda messes things up for the Feds. Reckless endangerment feels more appropriate, perhaps a bit too soft at 2 years maximum, though it is rarely prosecuted at the federal level. So 5 years maximum for the federal conspiracy charges seems basically in-line with any reasonable expectation.
Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stopping the swatter doesn't do much, and still allows for people to be swatted. The thing that needs an overhaul is the decision making on when to actually send out the swat team. It's lazy, expensive, and dangerous to send them out for every opportunity without any investigation
If the authorities are too slow to respond they get crucified (extreme case: Uvalde, Texas school shooting earlier this year where the cops sat paralyzed while children were actively being murdered by a gunman). I don't like the five-oh but going the route you're proposing will make some instances much worse with avoidable loss of life.
This is an extremely poor example that further illustrates the murderous recklessness of swat teams. The fact that there was a shooter at Uvalde was obvious upon arriving at the scene. Meanwhile, a traditional swat involves a completely innocuous house with no apparent hostiles, because there aren't any hostiles, and yet deaths still occur because of the recklessness of the swat teams. Imagine if you had a school with no shooter and a false report; would the swat teams burst through the windows and start mowing down students at random? Unthinkable, yes?
Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says
#17I hope that at some point swatting becomes a felony akin to attempted murder.
Why is it always boys and men who do swatting?
I think it’s some kind of subculture, not sure whether women ever do it though but I suspect gaming to be somewhat involved, mainly shooting/war games where boys/men are in larger numbers
Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says
#18>prompted the FBI to issue a public service announcement in late 2020 urging users of smarthome security cameras to use unique passwords
From a tech point of view, first in the medium term I first look forward to the long, long, loooonnnng awaited day when this entire class of attacks finally vanishes along with the madness of shared symmetric authentication in favor of proper public key systems. A solid decade and a half or more after smartcards and browser certs might have made it possible if things had taken a different path, the Passkey/Webauthn/FIDO2 ecosystem finally seems to be hitting the tipping point and accelerating towards critical mass. It shouldn't be necessary for anyone to remember more than one or two decent passwords/PINs, and all the actual unique random key generation should get taken care of automatically and with zero concerns about far side security. All other issues aside, it'll be great when this is just, there, and the entire concept of "default passwords" doesn't exist because to setup an account at all requires initialization with a proper key.
Second though stories like this also to me at least have helped a bit in terms of motivation/justification for taking IOT security seriously and advocating for that to colleagues and family. Like a lot of humantech interface stuff sometimes it feels really hard, because the deliverable is mostly "nothing happens". It's hard to prove a negative, and since for now some security efforts require extra money, time, and/or convenience tradeoffs, "is this all really worth it" does come up (and probably always will). And it can also be hard to be sure if what you've done is enough before it gets put to the test. It takes some level of stochastic belief, of "faith" even that yes, security, redundancy, decentralization and backups etc really does matter in the modern world, like it or not.
A certain degree of paranoia isn't unreasonable because a certain percentage of humanity really is out to get us. And the internet means that a tiny percentage can reach out and affect other humans far away.
Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says
#19I hope that at some point swatting becomes a felony akin to attempted murder.
Stopping the swatter doesn't do much, and still allows for people to be swatted. The thing that needs an overhaul is the decision making on when to actually send out the swat team. It's lazy, expensive, and dangerous to send them out for every opportunity without any investigation
We can do both: hold false reporters accountable while also demanding investigations into police recklessness.
Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says
#20I hope that at some point swatting becomes a felony akin to attempted murder.
Stopping the swatter doesn't do much, and still allows for people to be swatted. The thing that needs an overhaul is the decision making on when to actually send out the swat team. It's lazy, expensive, and dangerous to send them out for every opportunity without any investigation
That won't happen because cops love any excuse they can get to dress up, play with their shiny toys/weapons and crack some skulls while accruing overtime pay. We can't trust them to regulate themselves.
The overhaul we need is community oversight, community decision making and community policing.