Hrmf, in a society where police doesn't shoot innocent unarmed people swatting as a concept doesn't really exist - it's called "prank call" and while it's still a rather serious crime, it's something that's solved by a fine and a strong talking to.
Policemen killing unarmed innocent people is the problem that really needs solving - how the hell can innocent people be killed by policemen and not a single person in police chain of commands gets jailed? Why wasn't a single head of police removed from post and why aren't training approaches being reevaluated?!
You are correct in everything you wrote, except for one thing.
> Policemen killing unarmed innocent people is the problem that really needs solving
No, policemen killing unarmed innocent people is a problem that really needs solving. But it isn't solved yet. Until it is, swatting someone should be considered an act of violence. The person calling in the swat is doing so specifically because of the potential for violence, and they should be punished accordingly.
Stopping the police from shooting unarmed and innocent people is the long term solution. Until that is in place, there needs to be consequences for those who would exploit police violence for their own ends. These are issues that can be worked on in parallel.
I would honestly say (although I'm not from US) that preventing the police from murdering any innocent person is of paramount priority over pretty much anything. Stopping the police violence shouldn't ever be a "long-term solution".
Punishing the caller after all won't do anything to save more people - police killings are happening at alarming rate with swatters or without. It'll just satisfy your lust for revenge which doesn't really do anything. Just consider the rising amount of jailed people in US and comparatively low change in crime rate. Use brain to solve problems, not your first emotional response.
And not being from the US, I think you're ignoring the reality of how large a problem "preventing the police from murdering any innocent person" actually is here. It shouldn't be, but it is, and we have to work in the world we live in, not the one we wish for.
In the current reality in the US, calling the police about a violent crime underway will provoke a violent response. The caller certainly knows this. We should absolutely be working very hard to change that, but until it changes, trying to hand wave it away by saying, "it shouldn't be that way," ignores reality.
I would like to add to your statement that in the criminal justice system, intent plays a big role in determining the punishment for the crime.
Given the public knowledge of police violence in the US, especially in responses to potentially violent situations, the intent of swatter in the US is very different from the intent of a prank-caller elsewhere, and should be seen differently.
To paraphrase, if you approach a gate, and I open it for you with a remote, that act doesn't make me a bad person (living in a gated community, I often do that without thinking).
The same act would be quite different if I knew there's an angry alligator on the loose inside, and I opened the gate to see how fast you'd run from the said alligator (moreso if you didn't even intend to enter).
The problem of the free-roaming alligator is not to be neglected, but it will take time and effort to solve. In the meantime, people who open the gate won't be treated too kindly.
A counterpoint would be that, as sad as the consequences are, at least more people are aware of the gator as a result - and not just the ones who have to live next to it while the landlord keeps doing nothing for decades.
I would even go as far as saying policemen killing people, armed or not should be solvable. Why don't we have nonlethal incapacitant weapons by now? Something that would immediately make you pass out or something. Is there even any R&D put into this?
A reasonable, mature, and just society will pay very little attention to this person, but pay very much attention to the vulnerability that this person has irresponsibly disclosed.
In principle, I certainly agree. But in the reality of contemporary American politics, I think that sometimes we need to make decisions about which path to take.
Is it a problem that anybody that knows an address can summon a heavily armed, often poorly trained, sometimes mentally ill group of people to break into a home at that address?
Or is it a problem that, given the above, people are actually doing it?
I want to suggest that we do actually need to choose one or the other in this situation, and that the answer is flatly the former.
Swatting is an abhorrent practice but if a society does execute people (and I don't think that they ever should) you absolutely do not execute them for swatting.
A prank call is asking someone if their refrigerator is running, then telling them they better go catch it. Swatting involves having people with guns break into someone’s house and possibly kill them. Swatting isn’t a prank; it’s attempted murder.
The difference isn't in the attack, for which we normally hold the attacker responsible, but in the vulnerability and volatility of the attack surface, for which society is responsible in this case.
I think that the maximal culpability for the caller's crime is in the realm of irresponsible disclosure.
No, actually it's exactly the same thing - or should be in a civilized country. Where policemen (the actual murderers in this case) don't execute unarmed innocent people.
"The bug" is the fact that American police kills innocent people that have done nothing wrong. Of course the caller should be fined for abusing a critical service, but the root cause of this murder isn't in the phone call - it's US police killing innocent people in alarming number of cases. Blaming it on the caller completely ignores all other police killings that have happened without a swatter.
Unless you're trying to say that being able to call up men that murder someone is a feature desired in your country?
Calling up men that murder someone is not a feature desired in any country, however once someone figures out that by doing a prank call in a particular way they will be calling up men who murder people to hopefully murder the people they don't like the prank call has changed its nature.
Certainly the U.S needs to stop the police killing people, but it also should treat people harshly for exploiting the 'people-killing' bug in their system.
If I figure out your internet of things refrigerator has a setting to add salmonella to chicken 25% of the time, and I then use an exploit to run the salmonella adding routine, the manufacturer should be sued for a lot of money for their stupid salmonella adding routine, and remove that routine. But I think you would agree that while my activity was similar to that time someone made your internet of things lights blink on and off, it was also more serious and I should suffer more for it.
> but the root cause of this murder isn't in the phone call
If you know there's a strong possibility (and in the US, this is the case) that your phone call could result in someone's death - and calling in a fake hostage/murder to trigger a SWAT response certainly qualifies - you are part of the root cause, definitely.
> Blaming it on the caller completely ignores all other police killings that have happened without a swatter.
I too find this reaction very, very difficult to understand. There is an incredible urge to lower the standard for behavior for agents of the state to that of idiot kids using racial slurs on CoD.
Even if the swatting results in the death of an innocent person? That's the point with Barriss, as this incident resulted in the death of an innocent man. Cretins might enjoy calling in fake reports of hostage situations and watching the police reaction.; but, when people die, the situation and penalty are different. The penalties for driving drunk and killing someone are harsher than a simple DUI.
> The penalties for driving drunk and killing someone are harsher than a simple DUI.
Even in this example, drunk drivers who kill aren't executed. I definitely agree the punishment on this particular individual should be stronger but executing him? That's taking it a bit far.
A long jail stint (and some growing up) would likely stop this particular individual from ever repeating their actions again. Executions should be reserved for those who are truly beyond rehabilitation IMO.
You can't have major police tactics reform without a reform of gun laws to go around with it. Police have to assume that there is a possibility that anyone that they interact with is armed to the teeth. I'm not sure you can reasonably ask police to unilaterally disarm and still expect them to be able to handle mass shootings when they do occur.
> You can't have major police tactics reform without a reform of gun laws to go around with it. Police have to assume that there is a possibility that anyone that they interact with is armed to the teeth.
Alternatively, you can treat extraordinary claims with some level of skepticism.
I've had the joy of being swatted. I got a knock on the door, a few M4's in my face, cuffed and pinned against a wall, and then later an apology from the officers. All told, it was handled reasonably well in that I wasn't shot...
Still, you'd think having a few cops knock on the door and go "Hey, so funny story..." and assessing the situation from there, hell even with a few storm troopers behind 'em, would be a reasonable enough approach. Unfortunately the officers were fully keyed up and ready for a fight, so I had to deal with a bunch of adrenaline junkies playing Operator for an evening. It kills me how many combat vets I know who had to work under stricter ROEs than street cops in a country that supposedly has a distrust of government and a hatred of tyranny.
>> Police have to assume that there is a possibility that anyone that they interact with is armed to the teeth.
They should be trained to interact professionally and as calmly as possible with people who are armed to the teeth. If it's such a regular occurrence, why are they dealing with it with the same panicked exaggerated responses as an untrained civilian would?
I think we need a discussion as a society around how much risk we expect police to take on. Similar to how astronauts or military personnel take on calculated risks.
Human spaceflight is REALLY expensive if you want only 1 death per 10,000 launches.
Having police is REALLY expensive in terms of innocent civilian casualties if you want 1 death per 10,000 interactions with "believed to be armed" (but maybe not actually armed) civilians. How many deaths of innocent people equal the death of one police officer? What is the proper ratio? 10 to 1? 100 to 1?
It should be less than 1:1. The police officer should be asked to take on more risk than the general public if they are to claim that they are "brave."
In some ways the problem is just the opposite. SWAT teams adopt tactics of rushing in without recon or attempts to negotiate because they spend their days serving no-knock warrants for suspected drug dealers. If they had experience dealing with violent people they'd behave a lot more like, e.g., the US army in Iraq and knock down a lot less doors.
> Police have to assume that there is a possibility that anyone that they interact with is armed to the teeth.
I've never understood this argument. I assume that some 10-30% (depending on where I am in the country) of people around me are carrying a concealed weapon, and yet I don't react with such recklessness.
We are all surrounded by guns all the time; in what way are police disproportionately vulnerable as a result?
The police are -- more or less by definition -- interacting with people in an adversarial way. Add on top of that the fact that if the police are being called to intercede then the situation is one in which social mores have broken down.
If we put police in the circumstances you describe, the number of people randomly walking down the street who were shot by a police officer also randomly walking down the street was 0 last year.
I don't. I think that execution should be the default punishment for murder and other forms of intentional homicide, barring exceptional circumstances which I don't see here.
I don't see how this was "intentional homicide". Who can say what his intent was? At the high end he was hoping for a homicide, but at the low end where cops don't shoot unarmed people for touching their pants, maybe a bit of inconvenience.
Shooting someone yourself is intentional homicide.
Really it's ridiculous to me that some people are blaming someone else for an incompetent trigger-happy cop.
Throwing out my own analogy, it's like someone prank calling a hospital to tell them they have cancer, then a doctor killing them with chemo without doing any tests to verify they actually have it.
At some point you have to hold trusted professionals responsible for actually doing their jobs properly.
To rephrase... I don't think that the comparison between capital punishment and murder is worth the calories it takes to type, just like a comparison between a speeding ticket and armed robbery.
I'm just pointing clarifying that, in your moral system, capital punishment must be one of the exceptions - it's obviously a form of intentional homicide, so you make an exception, right?
Are you speaking purely with regard to the swatting, and not to the scores of bomb threats?
Regardless of the issues around policing, surely we can agree that this individual has caused tremendous societal cost, not just due to the disruption of valuable services or the resources wasted investigating his claims but also due to the fear he's created and the doubt he's cast over such claims in the future, which could lead to slower and less effective responses to true threats.
He's also been to jail for this before, and appears to have gone right back to work when he got out. He's a serial offender, without much apparent motive besides pure misanthropy.
Again, regardless of what you think about policing in America, can we please agree that this is the kind of person who belongs in prison? Perhaps you do, in which case apologies for the long response -- just thought it was worth clarifying given the thread's focus on the police reaction.
Would you say the same thing if the murderer had merely shot his victim from a car, or set fire to the victim's house in the middle of the night, or poisoned his coffee?
From a legal perspective, making a false police report could only be considered murder if the caller reasonably expects that the police would kill an innocent person based on their false report.
By calling the swatter a murderer, you're only bringing into sharper focus the grotesque failure of American police to respond to allegations in a lawful and proportionate way. If a swatter is a murderer, then by definition the swat team has ceased to be part of a police department and has become an extrajudicial death squad. A functioning police department is not expected to kill law-abiding citizens on a regular basis.
The law says "innocent until proven guilty", not "innocent until proven guilty, unless the police get nervous, in which case we'll kill you on sight".
Charles Kinsey, a mental health therapist from Miami, was shot by police in 2016. He was lying on his back with his hands raised, begging the police not to shoot the autistic man he was caring for. After he was shot, he was handcuffed and given no first aid until an ambulance arrived 20 minutes later. There is clear evidence that the swat team knew that neither Kinsey nor his patient were armed prior to the shooting. Through pure luck, Kinsey survived the incident.
We are beyond the point of rationalization, we are beyond excuses. Whether by accident or design, we have created a system where police officers can kill with impunity, where law-abiding citizens live in real fear of killed by the police simply because they live in the wrong neighbourhood, have the wrong skin color or stream video games online. The only humane and rational response is root-and-branch reform of police training, supervision and accountability.
"Force Science Institute" makes lots of money giving police agencies cover for trigger happy cops shooting people arbitrarily. We like to talk a lot about training, well these guys got training in exactly how to use excessive force that legally protects the state. Training isn't a scalar, it is vector and definitely isn't fungible.
You say that we have created a system where police officers can kill with impunity and law-abiding citizens have real fear of being killed by police. I agree with you. I'd say that this is pretty much common knowledge at this point. Which means that everyone should know that if you get the police to respond to what they think is a life-or-death situation, a killing by the police is a likely outcome. I.e. given what you describe, the caller should reasonably expect that the police would kill an innocent person based on their false report.
The correct response here is to prosecute the SWATter for murder, and carry out the police reforms you mention. I don't object to the second in any way, I merely object to the diminishment of responsibility for the guy who made the call.
The swatter is a malicious or crazy individual. The police failures are systematic. We can (and should) punish or treat the former, but it's overwhelmingly more important to fix the latter. Castigating the swatter carries the risk of overlooking the systemic failure; I have no doubt that there are PR people across the country who are working to shape the public discourse in that direction.
I've lost track of what we're talking about here. This article isn't about a murder.
Are you talking about Andrew Finch?
In that case, sure, the police officer who shot him is very much in the wrong. Is that what you're wanting hear?
I also think in a such militarized environment, that police officers who might never have imagined themselves murdering anyone are now, yes, murderers. And that's a shame.
We don't really need SWAT teams in the USA at all, and certainly not thousands of deployments of them every year.
Sure it's about a murder. When I say "the murderer," I'm referring to the person who made the false emergency call, thought to be Tyler Raj Barriss. I.e. the "this person" you said we should pay very little attention to.
The officer who actually fired the weapon probably deserves the label too.
Involuntary manslaughter doesn't look fitting to me at all. That would mean there was no intent to kill, which I strongly doubt here. It seems that the distinction between manslaughter and murder is the presence of "malice aforethought" which Wikipedia says is one of:
1. Intent to kill,
2. Intent to inflict grievous bodily harm short of death,
3. Reckless indifference to an unjustifiably high risk to human life (sometimes described as an "abandoned and malignant heart"), or
4. Intent to commit a dangerous felony (the "felony murder" doctrine).
It looks to me like at least #3 would be the case here, and likely #2 or #1.
I have no problem saying that the SWATter killed this person. Convincing the police to go and kill someone for you is little different from convincing a gun to send a bullet into their heart. The difference, of course, is that the police are living creatures with their own thoughts and culpability, but that just means their responsibility is added, not that the SWATter's responsibility is somehow diminished.
People who perform assisted suicides are sometimes charged with involuntary manslaughter.
While I don't view assisted suicide as any sort of crime, I think that the relationship of the caller to the death is pretty much the same: they set up some conditions, but the police officer is the one who caused the death.
As I said from the beginning, I don't really see the societal benefit to even talking about this person.
The police need to stop killing people so that we can move on with the important matter of having a free society. That's the only story here.
From the perspective of the state, I believe that you are absolutely right.
However, the divergence of the interests of the state from those of the planet and its people are quickly becoming more visible.
My sense is that, in order to do away with warfare generally (and SWAT teams specifically), we'll need to deprecate the state in favor of more compassionate approaches to, inter alia, emergency response.
I think the GP's point might be that the problem is not so much that someone called SWAT on people, leading to their deaths, but rather that the response infrastructure of our current police sytems leads them to enter a residence with what turns out to be excessive force.
SWAT was originally intended to be used for "special" situations, and increasingly (over the past few decades) has been the go-to tool for many police-citizen interactions.
If I were playing video games, and my front door exploded and the entryway were flashbanged, my first response would probably be relatively instinctive (get up, maybe to see WTF is happening in my house), and it's _very probable_ that such responses would make the breaching officers fearful enough that they'd shoot me. I don't have any weapons in my house, have no intention of resisting any police action, but the fact that I might stand up out of my chair, or move, or who-knows-what could easily be misconstrued.
In the article, they said that the man had "reached for his waist" -- I literally do that every time I get up from my computer chair.
I'd much rather that the police did some kind of surveillance first ("oh, hey, looks like a dude playing video games ..."), and verified that the situation matched the emergency described in their dispatch.
This isn't intended to detract from the badness of the SWAT-ter's actions: I hope that (if he indeed caused this) there's some serious consequences. However, it would have been a lot more difficult to cause such mayhem if the police were less trigger-happy.
SWAT teams don't seem to take into account that this situation is highly confusing, especially for innocent people. Following orders may be difficult for most people. A while ago I got T-boned at an intersection. I wasn't injured but clearly very confused. When a cop asked for my driver's license I gave him my credit card several times and simply couldn't process what he was saying. I can imagine if guys with guns broke into my house at night screaming I would also not be able to behave correctly.
> I'd much rather that the police did some kind of surveillance first ("oh, hey, looks like a dude playing video games ..."), and verified that the situation matched the emergency described in their dispatch.
Every jurisdiction is different with their procedure but in many, this is exactly what they do. They generally want to know where in the house the supposed gunman is, where the hostages are, where the best points of entry/escape are, etc.
I get the impression that in this case, the victim saw police assembling outside his house and tried to investigate as they arrived on-scene, which caught them off guard.
Every little opportunity to murder someone that isn't patrolled by armed guards isn't a "vulnerability", for most sane people this is not something that would cross their minds. The solution for the few outliers isn't to live in underground concrete bunkers.
Although few of the changes made to airport security since 9/11 would have hindered those terrorists. Theoretically the box cutters should have already been stopped by the X-Ray and that hasn't significantly changed. The only substantial difference is that now we lock the door to the cockpit, something we should have been doing since the 80s when airline hijackings were common.
I certainly don't encourage it, but an organized group calling in a huge amount of swattings, so much so that it becomes a regular occurrence, might actually be a way of reducing the danger in swattings and reduce police aggressiveness.
If each police force responds several times to this kind of prank call, it would hopefully demonstrate to them the need to change their operating procedures.
Unfortunately several dozen or more innocent people might be killed or wounded before they realize their rules of engagement etc. need updating.
> an organized group calling in a huge amount of swattings, so much so that it becomes a regular occurrence
> I certainly don't encourage it
Why not? This seems like a very reasonable, sober approach to testing this problem. If SWAT teams can't pass this test, they need to be put on pause until they can be repaired.
I mean, we do this sort of pentesting for things as trivial (at least by comparison) as bank accounts and health records. We're talking about people being murdered in cold blood here. I damn well think that a SWAT team needs to be able to demonstrate that it can survive a falsified report without murdering somebody.
I would really like to see a discussion how different police forces in different countries would handle this. My guess is that German police would first stay outside and look at the situation. I doubt they would go straight in. The American attitude of going straight in seems in line with high speed chases. I think in most countries these would be viewed as too dangerous.
Does anybody anything about strategies of different police forces?
That's just nuts. Can't they hide behind their cars or something and watch? Why shoot from such a distance just based on movement? I don't know what I would do if I got woken up at night, a flashlight in my face. With them being so trigger happy you are almost guaranteed to be shot. Imagine your dog or child ran out in this situation. How are you supposed to behave? Stand still and watch them get shot?
It is the strategy of the swatter, not the police to focus on here. In Germany they might be more cautious however there will be situations where they have to proceed immediately. So you could be swatted for drinking a beer in some Arab state (notionally) but not in Germany. Therefore the swatter has to up his game to 'they have lots of cocaine that could be flushed down the loo' or, if that does not work, the threat could be a nuclear bomb dropped on baby's head or something else that takes it up to 'swat level'.
This would not be possible if the police were to turn up unarmed, as would be the case in the UK where they would have tasers and body armour.
The UK police do make big mistakes with firearms - sometimes politically motivated mistakes to give a bigger impression of terror than there actually is. The Brazilian guy that got shot on the underground was a notorious incident, plus there were the London Riots in 2011, sparked off by a police and guns problem that went wrong.
In the UK there are firearms officers only a few minutes away in places like London, most of the police force know as much about guns as they know about Scandinavian poetry. Which is good. If the police need to get the guns out they can, there is no need for every officer to be armed. In many ways it is better, not least because only a small amount of officers have to use guns and they can dedicate the time required to be good at what they do, or the best they can be. Meanwhile, in America where every policeman, woman and dog is armed to the teeth, there is not the same level of specialisation, the whole force have to be trained to some standard that is not likely to be as good as the sharp shooters of London's police.
This also applies to equipment, in America the police force needs more guns that Europe's armies need. So are those millions of guns going to be as good as the small handful of guns owned by London's police? Say you wanted to add video recording to every gun, so it recorded black box style, to not miss anything. You could update a few hundred guns with that capability a lot easier than you could if updating a few million guns. It is not hard.
In the UK when Tony Blair was around then if you swatted someone as 'al-qaeda' then - if they had the beards right to be stereotyped - then the police would go in guns blazing. The credible threat would be bomb making, but even then it would rely on the fear of those times to be taken credibly. Plus the dark politics of the time.
The police in the UK do drugs raids at dawn - or other times of day - where there is no polite entry. You could get someone swatted for that but only if they were known to the police and actually dealing drugs on the premises could you get the full raid. Here there are no guns, they cover the exits to the premises and then use the 'big key' to break down the front door. The goal is to then make sure they can get the drugs before they are hidden/disposed. Guns are not needed for this even though guns definitely exist in the world of class 'A' drugs. The police do have their riot gear on and this is partially bulletproof. Also very heavy so not operationally that convenient.
Would an American police officer have the 'bravery' to burst down a house and go in unarmed, i.e. not gun first? There is a thought.
The mentality is that you will die if you let your guard down for even an instant. They have to assume they're facing an armed madman intent on killing the first cop he sees because otherwise that one time they are facing that guy they will die. This is reinforced when the report says that the suspect is an armed madman who just murdered an entire family.
What I would like to see is one of the cops running over to a neighbor's house and asking if they heard any gunshots, especially if people are peeking their heads out of their windows and looking confused.
* From what I understand, the call was ongoing with the caller continuing to make threats. It wasn't a report and hangup (they called him back at the number he left on the non emergency line.)
* The cop put himself into a position where the innocent man's actions on the doorstep could be perceived as a threat and hypothetically actually be a threat. Why? Why is the cop in a vulnerable position at that time?
Maybe the cop was walking up to the door to knock and see if the report was accurate and thought it was an ambush when the door suddenly opened?
Also, maybe the cops thought the report was more credible because the caller identified himself? What kind of idiot swatter would make himself so easy to arrest?
"He feared the male just pulled a weapon from his waistband, retrieved a gun and was in the process of pointing it at the officers to the east," Deputy Chief Troy Livingston of the Wichita Police Department said at a press conference Friday.
Isn't there supposed to be someone in charge of the situation? What you are describing is a large # of cops showed up and each one took matters in their own hands. What I would expect in a situation like this is some kind of senior officer who directs the operation (whose first responsibility is accessing the situation before even putting his officers in a potentially dangerous situation).
There is, but waiting for the commander to shout "he's got a gun!" is one of those situations where you would be dead before you heard it. So when something unexpected happens everybody has to make a judgement call, and it only takes one panicky or trigger happy policeman to make a tragedy.
There is also a mismatch between tactics designed to deal with a gang controlled house full of methed out hoods being used on a quiet suburban family that was maliciously targeted. In the former there is a reasonable argument that if you give them warning they will attempt to ambush your officers, so the best course of action is to disable them all simultaneously to reduce loss of life. Using it in other situations however leads to cases where infants have their lungs burned out by flashbangs. This is why I suggested maybe asking the neighbors first, especially in areas where criminal activity is unusual.
Why don't we employ the NSA to provide value here, by tracing back the few swatters that are responsible for the majority of these events? We know they have the capability.
Sure, but that only works so far. Even a european-style police force would eventually snap if they had to do 100 break-ins to combat ongoing crime if 99/100 calls were fake.
Surely if 99/100 calls were fake, that should reinforce the idea that a fake call is a possibility, and ensure that police are less likely to react with deadly force unless a threat is proven.
The same way telemarketers fake phone numbers. More surprising to me is that the deeper routing data (as in, the real source of the call, which the phone company necessarily has) is not available. I understand that you want to allow anonymous tips, but it would make sense that if the caller ID data is faked (i.e. the purported number's exchange doesn't match the source), then the data should be made immediately available.
Seems like a lot of people here really want VOIP to be anonymous/unregistered. You know, so that the nazis can't get you if they seize power. But they also seem loath to acknowledge this desire, particularly in this context.
You can specify the number you want to appear to be coming from when terminating a SIP connection, depending on where you're connecting to the network.
Edit: Ah, after reading more from that link you provided; the issue is stuck in your dysfunctional government.
I'm so confused right now.
Does the US not have a central agency that allocates phone numbers and operators? Does that agency not have the ability to shutdown operators who don't follow the rules?
You've broken the HN guidelines an extraordinary number of times in the past, and we cut you an extraordinary amount of slack. But the flamewars you've propagated over the last few days are serious vandalism on HN. I'm frankly shocked that you would continue to do that much damage here after we discussed this so many times.
Since giving you many benefits of the doubt has failed to persuade you to use this site as intended, I've banned your account.
Ah, well, Jingoism is an american word. I guess I just thougt the crowd here could agree that it's retarded to not have a political policy against fake VOIP numbers.
Thanks, but I somehow get the feeling that it's more about not wanting outsiders telling them how to solve problems they know they should have solved a long time ago by themselves.
I suspect that your feeling is incorrect - your word choice has significantly fallen out of favor for use in civilized discourse, at least in the United States. Beyond that it added very little to the discussion, which is often a reason for a down vote around these parts.
The level of overarching government control popular in Europe leads to people being killed by millions, rather than in ones and twos.
"not wanting outsiders telling them how to solve problems they know they should have solved a long time ago by themselves."
Perhaps we don't believe that people who were still running fascist slave states until the 1970s and communist slave states until the 1990s are in any kind of moral position to be lecturing us on our "problems".
Long story that I’m not fully familiar with short: the phone system suffers from the same trust issues that the internet does. That is, it wasn’t designed with things like adversarial users in mind.
EDIT: Am I incorrect in this statement? I'd love more feedback.
Right but in this case it was unproxied VoIP, right? It should be easy (in the sense of not requiring a forced universal protocol upgrade, I mean) to at least protect against this kind of attack — a caller from an LA IP claiming to be in Kansas.
There is another story happening in parallel to this where the Police arrested the wrong person based off the IP in use. IPs are just too ephemeral to trust for any form of location data.
Not to mention the caller chose to call a line which would normally not have a lot of need for those protections, in comparison to 911.
"IPs are just too ephemeral to trust for any form of location data"
That is just policy decision. It would, for example, be possible to declare that no single IP should be used for more than two customers during a single X hour block.
A policy decision by whom? Specifically, how do you do this when IP spaces are controlled by various unfriendly countries around the world? Politics aside, the required technical coordination would be a nightmare. We can barely handle BGP without conflicts as-is.
IPv4 space is also quite limited, and new devices are popping onto networks all the time. I'm not even sure a IP time window is feasible without a full move to IPv6 - something that policy makers have been trying to push on for years without success.
> Specifically, how do you do this when IP spaces are controlled by various unfriendly countries around the world
You begin a "911-certified program" that requires your local ISPs to register their IP ranges with some central authority. The rest is a bunch of detailed but solvable details.
Your idealism when it comes to making this seem more complicatated that it really is seems misplaced.
Your suggestion just isn't realistic when you look at how VoIP systems work in practice. What you usually have are SIP clients talking to SIP servers which then involve a bunch more servers and proxies and a slew of other protocols. SIP traffic from the endpoint and the associated RTP stream could be tunneled, often for very good reason. You can't prevent that with any kind of IP registration scheme because then the client can't roam which defeats the best reason to deploy VoIP in the first place. Providers are routing calls dynamically for reliability and cost reasons. Sometimes when you ask a server to terminate a call it just redirects it elsewhere. Even endpoints can arbitrarily redirect calls.
Ultimately none of the providers involved can know where either end of the call is. We can't even know their IP address for certain, let alone their physical location. What we have for 911 is a form where the customer declares their physical address and a disclaimer warning the customer that should they move then emergency calls will not be routed to the most appropriate call center and the operator will get the wrong address.
There's absolutely nothing we can do to prevent malicious people from abusing it. Any attempt to do so would result in honest users being unable to call for help in emergencies causing far more harm than the abuse we're trying to prevent.
You are not going to convince me, or anyone else who understand the tech, that this is a fundamentally unsolvable technical problem, I promise. It all boils down to compromises between regulation vs freedom, etc.
So, I do take issue when you say things like:
> There's absolutely nothing we can do to prevent malicious people from abusing it.
WRT "just get the government to do it" US federal legislation, specifically not that driven by "terrorism" or "protect the children" (and we don't want any legislation under either label) tends to take years to go from initial idea to law. That doesn't count the years which would be added for compliance. Or the charter and formation of the "central authority".
If we started today, we might get such a law in action sometime in the mid-2020's, at which point ISPs would have switched to IPv6 just to avoid the legislation. You know, maybe it would be a good idea after all /s
My "idealism" is probably better called "pessimism", and is based off a couple of decades watching well-meaning legislation be mangled beyond repair by politicians and corporations, at the city level.
People are complicated and irrational. People in politics are even more complicated and seemingly irrational, since even the best politicians have to balance the wants and needs of thousands of people and the businesses who employ those people. Politicians at the federal level are even more complicated, since they have 50 states, a number of territories, and gigantic corporations to consider.
Even influencing a completely honest political group to do what everyone agrees is the right thing takes a significant amount of time, money, and effort. And if we're honest, they aren't all completely devoted to their constituents, and won't agree that it's the right thing to do.
But then the question shifts to: maybe your country is too large to govern effectively - if you can't make changes like this quickly, something is wrong, I think.
Take any smart phone. No SIM card. Connect it to someone's wifi network, like a coffee shop. Now you can abuse 911 world wide in a completely untraceable manner.
What can possibly be done to prevent this that won't screw people desperately in need of help? It doesn't matter if your government is responsible for a town of 100 people or a country of 1.2 billion. It can't put an owner to each of the billions of smart phones floating around and that's not going to change any time soon.
I agree; it should be technically trival to implement this. All of my comments along the lines of this are wildly downvoted though; I'm not quite sure why. Maybe privacy cowboys?
Sure thing. Let me switch industries, learn a completely new skillset, and rise to a point of power where I can affect such widespread (cross-state and company) changes. Shouldn't take more than a few months.
Well, I do agree. I shouldn't take more than a few months to fix this. I don't live in the US, but I get the feeling something is terribly wrong with the way you're handling such a basic thing as a phone call, be it VOIP or not.
Policemen killing unarmed innocent people is the problem that really needs solving - how the hell can innocent people be killed by policemen and not a single person in police chain of commands gets jailed? Why wasn't a single head of police removed from post and why aren't training approaches being reevaluated?!