There's a new "game" that on-line gamers are playing, using the mindless trigger-reflexes of police organizations which respond to calls with swat teams. On the face, it seems mostly harmless, though a major abuse of the system. But maybe swatting lifts a corner off the veil of a possibly far darker possibility, that swatting is used for murder by police, or could be.
"Swatting is the act of tricking an emergency service (via such means as hoaxing a 9-1-1 dispatcher) into dispatching an emergency response based on the false report of an ongoing critical incident. Episodes range from large to small -- from the deployment of bomb squads, SWAT units and other police units and the concurrent evacuations of schools and businesses, to a single fabricated police report meant to discredit an individual as a prank or personal vendetta. While it is a misdemeanor or a felony in the U.S. in and of itself to report any untruth to law enforcement, swatting can cause massive disruption to the civil order and the public peace by the hoaxed deployment of police and other civic resources such as ambulances and fire departments. The term derives from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), a highly specialized type of police unit.
""With the live-streaming platforms, it amplifies the entire situation," said James Clayton Eubanks, 22, who says he has been swatted about a half-dozen times while he streamed his Call of Duty sessions. "Not only do they get to do this and cause this misery, they get to watch it unfold in front of thousands of people."
Mr. Eubanks was terrified the first time police officers showed up at his front door in West Virginia pointing assault rifles at his face. It was late 2013, and the officers were responding to an anonymous 911 call. The caller said someone at Mr. Eubanks's home in Morgantown had a bomb and was holding hostages. But the call -- like the ones that occurred over the next few months -- was a prank.
The only violence, Mr. Eubanks told officers when they arrived, was taking place in the Call of Duty video game he was playing online."
The wikipedia article reports:
"In 2009, phreaker Matthew Weigman pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy including "involvement in a swatting conspiracy" and attempting to retaliate against a witness.[2] He was sentenced to over 11 years in federal prison.In 2013, a number of U.S. celebrities became the victims of swatting pranks, including Sean Combs. In the past, there have been swatting incidents at the homes of Ashton Kutcher, Tom Cruise, Chris Brown, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and Clint Eastwood. A law in the state of California will make it possible for authorities to require pranksters to bear the "full cost" of the response which can range up to $10,000; the author of the bill, state senator Ted Lieu, was himself a swatting victim in April 2011
2
1
1
