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Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

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Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#311

Post by Clubber »

larkost wrote: post #309
Clubber wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Blame the Second Amendment as currently interpreted. It's been largely interpreted this way throughout most of our history, until around the 1960s when civil rights activists started carrying them. All the modern gun regulation started then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act Of course 1934 gun control came about due to people like Al Capone and the like.

No, you have history on its head. It was not seen as an absolute until the , and 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, then strengthened in 2010 in McDonald v. City of Chicago. Prior to that reasonable regulations were allowed (and what is reasonable was hotly debated) were permitted, so long as there were legitimate government interests. The main point of the Second Amendment from the framers perspective was to p…

You could have fully automatic Thompson sub machine guns mailed to your house before 1934. You could have any other type of gun shipped to your house before 1968. All this is (relatively) recent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Control_Act_of_1968

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#312

Post by indymike »

GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #134
rgmerk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be ever so slightly sympathetic to American cops, unlike just about anywhere else in the developed world, it is plausible that the person behind the door is armed with anything up to an automatic rifle, and any random person they stop may be carrying a concealed firearm. Given that, if I was busting down doors in the US, I’d want to be armed to the teeth, equipped with the best body armour money can buy, and would…

Simple solution: only allow weapons that existed during the creation of the Second Amendment.

Old problem: AR-15 behind door. New (old) problem: 18 pounder loaded with grapeshot behind the door.

I'd take the AR.

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#313

Post by buffington »

5h56nb5 wrote: post #272
hereforcomments wrote: post #96

In Europe this would have been a completely different story. It's highly unlikely (compared to the US) that a SWAT team equivalent would kill anyone. The guy could have got away with 5-7 years max. I know it's a museum, but I prefer to live here.

I have been following swatting incidents of content creators for years and I have learned that police jurisdictions where this happens frequently in are becoming wiser and spreading information around, so the threat of getting killed from a swatting incident has gone down. Places with pockets of content creators like Austin Texas have become very aware of these types of things. If you are a content creator, or someon…

I'd recommend that if you receive threats of a swatting, whether you're a content creator or not, it's a good idea to talk to your local police department about it the moment it happens.

Unfortunately, I speak from experience. I received a credible threat, called my local PD, and they began to investigate immediately. They also put notes in their dispatch system (which is shared by the local SWAT team) indicating that this had happened before, and to proceed with extreme caution.

The "swatter" never did follow through on the first attempt, but did follow through about 6 months later. I didn't get any threats from the swatter that time, but did get a call from my local PD while I was at work, and they let me know they'd driven by my place and called it off after being confident it was a false alarm.

Anticipating questions: no, there's no sort of protocol I setup with the PD. They have to investigate every threat, and even if we setup some sort of "shared secret" ahead of time, if a swatter says I'm cutting up my family in the basement, the PD can't know with certainty that I'm not. About the best I can do is make sure to answer the door when/if the PD shows up so they can more quickly establish things are safe.

Also: the attackers were after some OG Twitter accounts I used to use, and they thought they could intimidate me into giving the accounts to them.

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#314

Post by Aloisius »

piltdownman wrote: post #259
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having semiautomatic rifles or armored vehicles isn’t militarization. Private citizens can get those too. Police forces don’t have M1 Abrams tanks or F35s or nuclear carriers. This claim that the police are problematic is an entirely emotional activist response to a few incidents. That sentiment then led to hyperbolic claims like militarization.

They have Bazookas, Grenade Launchers, Predator drones, and mine resistant vehicles up to and including Armored Personnel Carriers. None of these are available to private citizens. Obama went so far as to say the following when trying to reign in the 1033 program in 2015 "We've seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like it's an occupying force as opposed to a force that's part of the community…

> None of these are available to private citizens.

Private citizens can actually buy mine resistant vehicles. We can even buy main battle tanks - though the turret needs to be disabled without a Destructive Device permit.

With a Destructive Device permit, you can also buy a grenade launcher.

We don't sell predator drones to local police departments. Police use the same commercial drones any other private citizen can buy - though cities often restrict whether non-police can fly them.

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#315

Post by graemep »

dowager_dan99 wrote: post #298
graemep wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Do you mean for the US, rather than the human race? Some of us live in countries where the only weapons most cops carry are truncheons and tasers.

This is at best naive, and reads pretty smug and self-satisfied. You likely still have a military, and policing isn't really about the weapons a cop carries. Ironically less deadly weapons can encourage more liberal use, so maybe you can be proud of your higher rate of non-lethal beatings?

Someone subjected to a non-lethal beating can complain, and be a witness to what happened. They can be medically examined to determine what happened. Its far harder to cover up.

I am pretty happy with the police hardly ever killing anyone, and that almost always someone who is a real danger to others. I am happy fewer people being killed by police so far this decade (and that includes road accidents involving police!), than have been killed by police in the US so far this month.

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#316

Post by jakelazaroff »

harshreality wrote: post #280
jakelazaroff wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, “armed” isn’t a proxy for anything. It means they were found to be carrying a gun. It doesn’t matter whether they were committing a crime or doing something inadvisable — the point is that if merely being armed justifies your extrajudicial murder by police, then the Second Amendment doesn’t actually exist.

It is, because cops never shoot someone just for being armed. They just don't. It's a combination of being armed plus (believed) criminal status, or behavior during the encounter. (And it's exceedingly rare that cops will believe an upstanding citizen who's legally armed and behaving civilly is a criminal. It happens, for instance in the two cases I cited, but it's rare. They're a rounding error in the police killing…

Why do you believe that? We routinely see police break the law, harass people and otherwise abuse their power, but when it comes to encounters with armed civilians they become upstanding professionals with perfect judgment?

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#317

Post by sirspacey »

bigiain wrote: post #43
plagiarist wrote: post #22

It should really not be possible for a single anonymous phone call to dispatch a heavily armed response team to break down someone's door. Aside from that, people who do so are despicable. 20 years is a light sentence. Taking money to put people in situations that could easily become deadly.

It wouldn't be a problem, if the "heavily armed response team" was properly held to account when they killed innocent people. Cops kill people on the basis of ludicrous anonymous phone call because they know they'll get away with it when it turns out to be false. And they like it that way. There needs to be a few very public cases of entire SWAT teams getting 20 year sentences. ACAB

You are asserting quite a lot here.

Have you spoken with SWAT team members?

The few I know would find this attitude of “killing is fine because we won’t be sued” abhorrent

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#318

Post by danaris »

slothtrop wrote: post #267
danaris wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a very large percentage of the "high stress/pressure" of being a police officer in the US is literally manufactured by the police themselves. For instance, several officers have been treated for severe symptoms after coming into contact with fentanyl. Except that there is no way, biochemically speaking, the kind of contact they had with fentanyl could have produced anything resembling those symptoms. It was an en…

> But a very large percentage of the "high stress/pressure" of being a police officer in the US is literally manufactured by the police themselves. This is conjecture with no measurable basis.

....It is supported by specific facts in the rest of my post.

I'll grant I didn't cite sources, because this is HN, not a scientific journal, and if you're interested enough you can Google it (or DDG it, or Kagi it) for yourself, but the basis really is right there in my post.

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#319

Post by adolph »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #230
adolph wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> That concept is from the mid 1800s. They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols. >> This is not accurate. > I do not claim that's in the history of all depts, but across the south there are many cases of patrols becoming formalized into police departments. What percentage of current police departments were conversions from slave patrols? What is the source of this data?

>> And slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US. > What is the source of this data? https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=police+departments+were+conv...

Ok, first link in results contradicts "slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US":

While it is true that slave patrols were a form of American law enforcement that existed alongside other forms of law enforcement, the claim that American policing “traces back” to, “started out” as, or “evolved directly from,” slave patrols, or that slave patrols “morphed directly into” policing, is false. This widespread pernicious myth falsely asserts a causal relationship between slave patrols and policing and intimates that modern policing carries on a legacy of gross injustice. There is no evidence for either postulate.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...

Re: Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

#320

Post by growse »

bko wrote: post #299
graemep wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Do you mean for the US, rather than the human race? Some of us live in countries where the only weapons most cops carry are truncheons and tasers.

Its not just the weapons. In parts of Europe you can get arrested for posting the wrong kind of meme online. As a side note, when trying to research this you'll see weird double speak fact checks like below: > Fact Check: 11-year-old arrested on suspicion of violent disorder after riots, not ‘mean tweets’ > Sending grossly offensive, obscene, indecent, or menacing messages on public electronic communication networks…

> But then the authors don't write what 'violent disorder' is.

"Violent Disorder" is a specific offence listed in the Public Order Act.

> Then they try to further confuse the matter by talking about a completely unrealted 11 year old boy that was arrested for suspicion of arson

The way it reads doesn't seem like it's "completely unrelated" at all.

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