Couple swatted 55 times over a Norm Macdonald tweet wins $575K from Milwaukee

This has a side story from some years ago of Patrick trying to act against the forums organising the swatting... and Cloudflare sending lawyers to explain how they can't help with anything, even though it's their customers. Cloudflare spent actual money on lawyers to ensure someone continues to be swatted. Something to keep in mind next time you choose a vendor. It's not only the police and the individual swatters that are a problem here.

At some point, the responding local police should be held criminally liable. A tiny brass badge should not shield you from having to comply with society's laws.

This is primarily a failure of the police, but second place goes to data brokers and anyone who collects unnecessary data and doesn't secure it. A flood of personal information already leaks illegally through cybercrime and companies not protecting data, and we haven't even stopped the huge legal industry of public-info data brokers. You shouldn't be able to look up an email or phone number and get someone's family and address.

The powers that be like phone numbers because they're like a medium-level KYC. In many countries getting a phone number requires ID, and there was a recent proposal to do that in the US. Of course swatting and spam are used as excuses to introduce KYC requirements, but those problems are endemic to phone numbers, and more identity verification just causes more leaks, which gives them excuses to require more KYC.

My idea for replacing phone numbers and email: SimpleX for calls and texts (no accounts and therefore the least PII possible), and Monero micropayments for spam prevention. Most people spend way more on their wireless plan then they'd need to spend in Monero to make the initial connection, for publicly posted SimpleX links.

We've really got to rein in qualified immunity in this country. That and civil asset forfeiture.

So many replies here are blaming the police but despite how screwed up the situation is there isn’t much they can do. Not responding to a swat call is not really an option with the way the system is setup.

We can all say “well, if you get many calls about one location, maybe you should stop showing up” but wtf are you supposed to do if a real crime is being committed? The same couple getting swatted one day could get criminals breaking in another, possibly for the same reason even. How can you make the call not to show up if your entire existence and role in society is to show up?

What real solutions are there?

Edit: a bunch of identical responses to this comment with "just don't show up". I know it's easy to sit and judge from the comfort of your keyboard, but do a little bit of thinking. What should the rule be? When is it okay for police to receive a distress call and not show up in actual reality with actual lives at stake? Who's responsible for the consequences of not showing up?

Edit2: now people switched to "show up, but softer, knock on the door". Now we can agree, because this comment is about showing up, not about specifics. Yeah, more considerate approach is warranted. To be clear, I agree that police should be punished for violating laws and conduct policies. Yet there is the other side of it, there's still an alert and it could still be real. Police still have to be mind-f'ed into figuring out every time if there's real danger or not.

Edit3: People who say "polic […]

Do police in the US has any unified system for dispatchers to track the history of incidents/resolutions? Just wondering if they could start making notes there for future calls, I guess it would be useful in general but not sure if they have/allowed to have something like that.

This is one of those things where someday people will not believe this was common enough that there was a word for it.