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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

#331

Post by tzs »

soraminazuki wrote: post #140
drexlspivey wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well he is facing 20 years

That's more than a decade less than what Chelsea Manning or John Kiriakou was sentenced to. It's absurd that the punishment is much harsher for unspecified theoretical harm caused by whistleblowing than the very real harm caused by literal murder attempts.

Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months not 30 years.

As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people who cooperated with the US or the Afghanistan government against the Taliban. When the Taliban found out about such people they would go after them.

We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks because there is no way to know if the Taliban found them out through the leaks or through some other source. The odds are pretty good that it was more than one, probably a lot more.

The swatting teen on the other hand is known to have not actually gotten anyone killed.

A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you. They were there to do something that sometimes goes wrong and does kill, but most of the time that doesn't happen.

Someone coming to your house because the Manning leaks identified you as cooperating against the Taliban was there to kill you.

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

#332

Post by mrguyorama »

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…

>It is, because cops never shoot someone just for being armed. They just don't.

So you don't know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile

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

#333

Post by illiac786 »

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…

If you insist on the original article being very precise and very exhaustive, you should too: “wrong kind of meme” is very vague. A meme of a swastika will indeed land you in trouble in multiple countries, to pick a lightweight example. What kind of meme do you mean?

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

#335

Post by lupusreal »

pluc wrote: post #178
lupusreal wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's his fault if he knows his actions may result in the targets death and does it anyway. "It's hardly my fault the police doused pluc with gasoline, all I did was throw a match"

If you have smart police officers who do smart police work this is a mild annoyance at best. Not trying to defend him, but SWAT is just as guilty as he is.

AFAIK the swat teams involved in the OP incidents didn't kill anybody, so they more or less did their jobs properly. Nonetheless, the intent was there; this guy committed hundreds of attempted murders.

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

#336

Post by TeMPOraL »

michaelt wrote: post #261
andrewla wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols. This is not accurate. The timeframe is not wrong; it is true that the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in the 1820s. But saying it evolved from "warehouse guards and slave patrols" is ahistorical. Most modern police forces modeled after London's Metropolitan Police replaced night watch s…

> the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in the 1820s. There are some pretty big differences between the UK policing model and the one used in the US. The UK model was set up against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars (the French police's role included monitoring dissent, suppressing political opposition [1] and even censoring books) and the Pet…

> If the American police are based on Peelian principles, then an awful lot of the principles have gotten lost in translation.

"Peelian police, but with guns!" isn't that far off, I believe.

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

#337

Post by elzbardico »

graemep wrote: post #239
elzbardico wrote: post #174

The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

> 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.

It would obviously fuck with the cultural reference replacing US for the world in the phrase.

But if you believe that only the US has this problem, I am sad to inform you that Taylor Swift and Hollywood Movies are not the only American cultural exports eagerly consumed around the world.

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

#338

Post by TeMPOraL »

bcdtttt wrote: post #179
elzbardico wrote: post #174

The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

[flagged]

> slave patrols

Yeah, right. Those were distinctly US-ian things; somehow, the rest of the world managed to develop a similar form of police force at similar time, too.

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

#339

Post by elzbardico »

anonu wrote: post #293
elzbardico wrote: post #174

The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Your comment is a bit off topic IMO. Swatting can occur regardless of how "militarized" a police force actually is.

Can it?

Do you really think that dressing in military special ops tactical clothing, with advanced and powerful weaponry, balaclavas, helmets and responding to a call in a armoured vehicle doesn't create any weird expectations on the mind of police officer of how they should behave in a call?

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

#340

Post by TeMPOraL »

gruez wrote: post #289
bcdtttt wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>That concept is from the mid 1800s. They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols. Isn't this just guilt by association? Whether police are bad or not should be judged on its merits, not what its history is. The Autobahn and VW was built by Nazi Germany, but it'd be absurd to bring that factoid up when discussing road transport or the German car industry.

It's guilt by association and that narrow nationalistic perspective that the US is the entirety of the world. Turns out, most of the planet managed to form similarly-operating police forces without first having slave patrols.
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