Patch Lady – 31 days of Paranoia – Day 21

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Ever heard of swatting?  It’s when someone calls the police and tells them that something is happening that isn’t just to harass the person.   The pol
[See the full post at: Patch Lady – 31 days of Paranoia – Day 21]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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SueW

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I think sionething has been accidentally omitted:

“The police arrive at the door with sirens going and guns pulled thinking they are walking into It can often lead”

Windows 10 Home 22H2, Acer Aspire TC-1660 desktop + LibreOffice, non-techie

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I didn’t finish the sentences.  Thanks, went back and edited it!

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Many years ago, two friends of mine were the victims of phone swatting attacks. It wasn’t pretty and an innocent person so could have been easily been killed by the SWAT teams which arrived at their residences and stormed through their front doors with full automatic weapons, thinking that a family member was on a murderous rampage within the residences, thinking that another family member was hiding and was about to be killed, and since the desperate phone calls appeared to be coming from within the residences. One of my friends, who was a victim of a phone swatting attack, was a retired sheriff deputy. I won’t discuss how these people and their families were traumatized by these phone swatting attacks. Yet years later, it did result in a suicide as a result of a long chain of subsequent events.

I will say this…

— Never ever use your real name online. This is straight from the FBI agent who was involved in this case.

— Never antagonize others online since you have no idea about whom you are dealing with.

 

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SueW, Grond

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Ah, the Right to Privacy. One of my personal hot buttons.

Any person convicted, beyond any shadow of doubt, of swatting or doxxing, should, in my opinion, be penalized to the maximum extent of the law. Then add ten years.

For this right, in this age of information, is constantly being chipped away at and eroded on a daily basis, to the point where it’s becoming not just a slippery slope but more of a cliff. Yes, there are grey areas, but one extremely wise man said, 200-something years ago:

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin

Windows 10 Pro x64 v1909 Desktop PC

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The privacy issue is a thorny one when online. We want for ourselves all the anonymity and privacy we can salvage, and yet when someone abuses their online anonymity to launch nefarious attacks, all of a sudden we want the ISPs and hosting services to divulge every detail about their clients and subscribers.

How is it possible to maintain an Internet where we can have privacy when we need it, yet we can also track down criminals when they abuse their online anonymity?  That is a delicate balance.

We have seen what happens when social media sites like Facebook abuse their access to personal details about us. We have seen families used without their consent in murder investigations which ransack online DNA databases in obvious unwarranted fishing expeditions. Yet, as soon as anonymity allows those organizing DDoS attacks and Swatting incidents, or those literally harassing people to death to get away without a trace, we demand some way of tracing people through our online activities.

There needs to be accountability, but those watching us when we are online also need to be held accountable. Who’s watching the watchers? Whom do we trust?

-- rc primak

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Younger people today seem OK with these actions when just a generation ago it was unheard of. We rarely read of school attacks, work place violence, or this swatting that apparently stems from petty stuff and someone decides to get even. People are getting meaner, more evil, and justify their actions much more easily. Human’s are regressing into a more violent society instead of more calmer, tolerant society. I hope this remains more a blip speed bump rather then a long term transitional behavior.

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Maybe this is a too naive a question (odd: I just have a big fight here over the umlaut on the ‘i’, because after I applied it the editing software here started underscoring everything else I typed after that, so right now I’m going all-umlautless with this).

But, back on topic: if one is being harassed on line, why call the police? Would it not be better to go to a police station and make a denounce there? I somewhat doubt that if I did that I would be received with drawn guns and told to assume the position against a wall. And even encouraged to do so forcibly. Or else, perhaps make the denounce online, instead, on some government (federal, state or local) Web site set up for that purpose, if one such site already existed (which I do not know right now).

 

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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On topic, calling the police while fraudulently representing a critically hazardous situation while spoofing your victim’s phone number is the harassment. The visit from the Special Weapons and Tactics unit to the victim’s address revealed (inaccurately) by the spoofed number is what gives the name swatting. The very dark humor of the name lies in the understated violence of swatting a fly.

Off topic on accent marks, I find using the extended ASCII set via ALTcodes more consistent than attempting Unicode. Keystroke ALT+0239 gives the glyph ï. Diaereses and umlaut look identical, the distinction is probably important to someone more educated than I.

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calling the police while fraudulently representing a critically hazardous situation while spoofing your victim’s phone number is the harassment.

Filing a false police report of making a false emergency call is not harassment. It is a felony crime, punishable by fines and imprisonment. First responders and “swatting” victims themselves have their lives endangered, all for some idiot’s amusement or self-venting of imagined grudges.

All of this misbehavior is made palatable (to some people) by the assumption that this crime is low-risk. Back-tracing to the offender is rarely successful. However, if anyone does get caught, they are charged not with online harassment, but with felony making a false emergency call.

-- rc primak

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You are absolutely correct about the severity of this act. I was attempting to show that the phone call was the beginning of the process, not the innocent reaction to harassment. I moderated my tone downward in order to ease the correction to OscarCP. If this lead you to believe I am permissive in my attitude towards criminals that need to rot in a dank cell for the remainder of their time among us, then I apologize for failing to address all audiences with my words.

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rc primak

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