SteamPoweredKleenex  - 2014-09-04
I think I'm okay with making Swatting have charges up to and including attempted murder. Mostly that's due to the trigger-happy nature of cops and the twitchy caffeinated status of many gamers who might not greet them with the calm and cooperative attitude one might need to placate a bunch of heavily armed wanna-be Colonial Marines.
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Waugh - 2014-09-04 or, you know, actually just charge people with the crime they're alleged to have committed.
dipshit.
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Oscar Wildcat - 2014-09-04
I don't know about innocent civilians, but "hackers" have been doing it to each other for a long time. This got popular in the 80's, then as now, the police were on a hair trigger and all wired up from the war on drugs. There was little actual hacking involved, just an anonymous connection and a good acting ability. Fucking evil stuff, that. But a fairly predictable consequence of this style of policing.
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EvilHomer - 2014-09-04 Yeah, phreakers pulled pranks all the time. A lot of the stories were apocryphal, but they sounded really fun, like the guy calling the White House's Nuclear Crisis line and telling the President they were out of toilet paper.
I don't know if any phreakers tried to get each other arrested, though. I'm pretty sure that would be a breach of hacker ethics.
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oddeye - 2014-09-04 Gentlemen, let us invent a new term to distinguish TRUE Hackers from these "Life-Hacker" scrubs.
I propose Braking, pronounced BRA-King.
Good day.
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infinite zest - 2014-09-04 I remember a couple people threatening to call authorities on IRC and BBS, but that was only if the user really pissed off the channel, with threats legitimate enough to be used in court. Most of what I remember was harmless. Now it's over a fucking video game? We used to have a way of dealing with cheaters or people who played unfairly. It was called punching the person in the arm, AKA the Monkey Bump.
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Raggamuffin - 2014-09-04
Two of the worst cultures, finally together in such a wonderful way!
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misterbuns - 2014-09-05 turns out making death threats is actually a crime.
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EvilHomer - 2014-09-04
Three things:
One, I still don't get how Columbine qualifies as a "national tragedy". A community tragedy, sure. But a *national* tragedy?! With flawed, hyperbolic rhetoric like that, it's no wonder our national security apparatus has become so bloated and ridiculous.
Two, haha, celebrity homes. I love how society didn't care until it happened to Tom Cruise and Kim Kardashian.
Three, I also love how the "problems" identified by Senator Lieu are all related to the inconvenience swatting poses for law enforcement, and the increased financial cost for the state. The logic of militarizing our civilian police force and sending them off to fight a "war" on crime is never questioned; rather, they just want to bemoan how hard it is to fight their war, even though, by their own admission, it's so easy to throw a wrench in the system that bored tweens can do it, and there's absolutely no conceivable way for the so-called "security" apparatus to stop kids from doing so. The obvious, sensible solution, to roll back the 9/11 bullshit and stop being so goddamn trigger happy, never occurs to Senator Lieu and his ilk.
But hey, at least we've got a fun new way to both authorize warrantless home searches (the swatees), and arrest and possibly even imprison minors (the swaters)! Real SWAT teams rarely ever justify their expense; hopefully, giving SWAT teams fake missions will increase our number of non-violent incarcerations, and thereby get our SWAT teams to finally justify their own existence and pay for themselves.
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SolRo - 2014-09-04
VICE fluff
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