I believe you were downvoted because your comment was both grammatically incorrect ("I know some people who are a similar list") and didn't provide any source/substance. Additionally, talking about downvoting is a quick way to get downvoted.
She's creating a database of people labeled in that category. She's playing the "well I didn't say to go harass these people.. but here's a database of them"
The same obligation that those "neo-nazis" have to maintain the anonymity of the journalists they dox on that doxbin, more or less. (I'm not condoning swatting.)
You post their home address. Their private phone number. And the same of their spouses. And their parents. And the address of the school their children visit. And the route they usually take to work. etc.
Then the bad person hacks their icloud and dropbox and releases their private pictures and videos, the naughtier the better.
And yes, all of that happened recently in Germany mostly to some prominent politicians, who also use their own names in public really often.
No, that's my response to your question about how you could dox a journalist.
Now, Krebs doxed people in the past who didn't want their true identities revealed. Often because those people were up to no good, but sometimes Krebs went a bit overboard in my opinion.
More in general, and I am not saying Krebs ever did this, there are valid reasons why people might not want their true identities widely revealed. Think whistleblowers, some critical journalists, etc.
A more general definition of doxing would be "publish personal information that the people to whom this information belongs did not give consent to publish". As such, I don't see doxing as generally evil, it depends on the kind of information and context. Out a criminal? OK. Out a journalist? Probably not OK.
I'm sorry, but you're confusing two different concepts. In one instance, Brian Krebs uses public, open sources to discover the true names behind pseudonymous Twitter users; in another, people post home addresses and phone numbers.
I'm not asking why it would violate a norm to post home addresses or phone numbers; it's clear to me why that's problematic.
I'm asking what obligation Krebs has to pretend he doesn't know who a Twitter user is, when that information is available to anyone who knows how to consult public sources to find it. Why is Krebs obligated to help someone remain pseudonymous? It seems clear to me that he is not.
Most doxers use public, open sources to discover the true names behind pseudonymous users. And their addresses. People make mistakes, sometimes even about other people's data. Sometimes people have no choice because a lot of the information is public record.
That isn't an excuse for compiling this information and publishing it as wide a possible. You still have to consider the implications if you want to act morally and in good faith.
Think of the stupid pseudonymous twitter user who made a really abhorrent, ill-considered joke and the people used "public information from public sources" to first get to their real identity and then crawl further until they find their employer and get the person fired. The person who did the research and then started the witchburning by publishing the information so that every other bored twitter user could write easily write a mean email to the employer should have considered what compiling and publicizing that dox could do.
Also, I think Krebs does take this into consideration, and is generally acting in good faith and with consideration, it's just that I disagree with his conclusion sometimes.
I'm still lost. What obligation does Brian Krebs have to pretend that the real identity of a pseudonymous Twitter user isn't discoverable from open sources, or to help conceal that identity? I submit that he has no such obligation, but that message board people like to pretend that he does, and that contravening that norm constitutes the real-world offense of "doxxing". Baloney, I say. Am I wrong? Educate me.
If he's posting home phone numbers or addresses, I'm clear on what the problem is. But if you have a public LinkedIn profile and don't have the OPSEC to keep public sources from linking your secret Twitter handle to that profile, I don't see any problem at all.
So what? Doxing isn't inherently evil or inherently good. It has to be seen in context, and it is your and my and the journalist's moral obligation to look at the context first and weigh the likely harm to the person you dox against the possible good it can do. And it doesn't matter if the information was kinda public in some obscure corner of the internet or some public record or commercial database before. Once you publicize their information, you create publicity and draw a target on that persons back.
Dox some criminal? OK, but you have to be sure your allegations have merit and you've done your due diligence[0]. This is mostly what Krebs does.
Dox some politician who had an extramarital affair? Maybe OK. Dox their extramarital partner? Probably not OK.
Dox the latest terrorist? Generally OK. Dox every person that ever came into contact with the terrorist? Not OK. Publish personal information about the victims of the terrorist without their (next of kin's) consent? Not OK, even if you only report information you got from their facebook.
Dox some kid who misbehaved once on the internet, thereby directing an army of assholes on twitter to take notice, dox the kid further and bully them? Not OK.
When I was young (pre-facebook era), one of my teachers got murdered; her husband was later convicted. Some (tabloid) journalists showed up like locusts camping around our school, offering money for our pictures and other private information about the victim, her husband and their kids. Not OK. The same journalists also found "public information from open sources" about e.g. the kids' memberships in youth groups and such, and published that and also went to those youth groups for more information like they did at our school. Not OK.
[0] There was more than one case where "helpful" people on the internet and sometimes journalists published the names of alleged criminals who turned out to be entirely innocent, which didn't stop people from bullying them or even neighbors from forming mobs to "visit" them at home.
When you say "doxing isn't inherently evil or good", you're putting us on the same page.
We do not agree about the particulars. For instance: the extramarital partners of politicians? To me, fair game. Kids who commit crimes on the Internet? To me, fair game.
Counterexamples? Sure. Undocumented immigrants who could be forcibly deported. I have a special obligation not to help ICE find those people. Iranian democracy activists. I have a special obligation not to subvert advocacy for democracy in authoritarian regimes.
But I don't have a general obligation to help maintain someone's pseudonymity, nor does anyone have the general right to restrain my own speech to protect their pseudonymity.
I understand that the rule exists on Reddit, and, to a lesser extent, here. And I respect the rule... on Reddit. And here. But in real life? I have a problem with message board norms leaking into the real world.
>the extramarital partners of politicians? To me, fair game.
I knew somebody, part of our gang of friends, who had a one night stand with a local "personality", was then revealed by some "journalist" only giving a the first name and printing a picture with a black bar across the eyes (which is still more than enough for people who knew him to identify him, of course), outed as gay in the process, didn't even know the other dude was married or a "personality", and after being shunned and bullied by a lot of people including his parents and grandparents ended up hanging himself in a tree near the place in the woods where our gang used to barbecue in the summers. At least his parents showed up for his funeral.
I have no doubt the journalist who doxed him had no intention of causing that amount of harm. And yet, the journalist could have considered the situation a little more thoroughly, considering that the the identity of my friend had no bearing on the story whatsoever. I can only hope it was a mistake that this journalist learned from, and not general disregard for other human beings' welfare.
And I am telling you that story in the hopes you and others agreeing with your "fair game" will keep it in mind if they ever are in the position where they have to make a moral decision whether to dox or not dox somebody.
I would generally have a problem with deliberately outing an LGBT person (or an undocumented immigrant, or any of a number of at-risk groups of people). And performatively revealing sensitive information about anyone for no reason at all is at least unneighborly (I can't go so far as to call it immoral). But none of that is what Krebs did. He violated the code of a subculture he does not belong to, in a manner that journalists do all the time. I think this particular subculture is entitled and unrealistic and that their weird expectations deserve to be challenged.
Krebs doxed a few people who didn't want to be doxed, for reasons I do not consider good enough, and doxed a lot of people who didn't want to be doxed for reasons I consider good enough. That's all I said. YMMV
I have no idea why you keep trying to frame what I said differently.
Krebs does indeed habitually doxx alleged criminals. There's a perfect example just a ways down from TFA: "Meet the World’s Biggest ‘Bulletproof’ Hoster".[0]
And he doesn't just rely on public sources:
> KrebsOnSecurity uncovered strong evidence to support a similar conclusion. In 2010, this author received a massive data dump from a source that had hacked into or otherwise absconded with more than four years of email records from ChronoPay — at the time a major Russian online payment provider whose CEO and co-founders were the chief subjects of my 2014 book, Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime.
> Querying those records on Yalishanda’s primary email address — stas_vl@mail.ru — reveal that this individual in 2010 sought payment processing services from ChronoPay for a business he was running which sold counterfeit designer watches.
Where by "habitually doxx", you mean "reports", which is what reporters do. When it's Fortune 500 executives or politicians, we seem to have no problem with this behavior; in fact, we get mad when it doesn't happen. But when it's someone in our "tribe" getting reported on, there's this whole new set of rules that supposedly applies. It seems like special pleading to me.
Sure, that's what some journalists do. But Krebs' thing is being a grey-hat vigilante. He does social engineering on forums. He trades data with other vigilantes.
> ... you mean "reports", which is what reporters do ...
So this doxx site just reports on people, no?
The distinction between him and the doxx site he writes about is subtle.
It was dumb of me to get into this thread. Arguing about the morality of Krebs' blog in a discussion about neofascist (and arguably, ironic neofascist) doxxing and SWATing was off-topic whataboutism. So sorry.
But for what it's worth, I'll briefly clarify my position. I'm rather anarchistic, but not very collectivist or communitarian. I believe that we're all free to do what we like, consistent with our principals and values. Notwithstanding whatever laws exist. And that includes self defense, and weeding out troublemakers.
So in that sense, I agree that Krebs has the right to doxx supposed criminals. But I also believe that others arguably have the right to act against those who attack them. And of course, everyone else has the right to act against those who attack them, recursively.
So it's fair to root for Krebs, and to attack neofascist doxxers. But, in my opinion, it's deceptive to argue that one is moral, and the other is evil.
Exposing the real names of anonymous/pseudoanonymous people, regardless of whether it's hard to find out (given that many people suck at opsec), is probably the most common scenario people refer to when using the word "doxing".
"researching and broadcasting private or identifying information (especially personally identifying information) about an individual or organization"
I don't care what you call it. If that's what "doxing" means, then I don't know why Krebs would ever be obligated not to "dox". What I see here is a motte and bailey argument where the argument people seem to want to make is that everyone in the world is obliged to honor message board norms that say the real identities of pseudonymous people can't ever be revealed, but when that's challenged, they retreat to the banal argument that the personal addresses and phone numbers of journalists shouldn't be circulated on sites that encourage SWATting.
I'm not talking about personal addresses and phone numbers. I'm talking about names and public LinkedIn profiles.
You're asking what one form of doxing has to do with another? Well... they're both forms of doxing. You seem to arbitrarily consider one form a problem, but not the other.
That is correct. Just because you apply some name with negative message board valence to a set of conduct, that doesn't by itself make it reasonable to condemn every behavior in that set. This seems pretty obvious to me. What am I missing?
They can report on people using pseudonyms by referring to the pseudonym. This is done all the time when referring to tweets, etc. And, yes, people certainly exist who get offended and decide to harass/threaten others as a result. There's no real downside to making it harder for people to do so.
That's ridiculous. When reporters discover the people behind pseudonymous lobbying fronts, they don't report only the pseudonyms to protect the real identities involved. Why do participants in Internet culture get special dispensation? Isn't this just Reddit's weird norms leaking into the real world?
Or is it just the case that, as one friend said on Slack, "doxxing is when someone you don't like posts information about someone you do like"?
>When reporters discover the people behind pseudonymous lobbying fronts, they don't report only the pseudonyms to protect the real identities involved
Apples and oranges are different, yes. A private individual communicating independently is a much different thing than a lobbying front.
>Isn't this just Reddit's weird norms leaking into the real world?
It could be that online culture might know a thing or two about the downsides of exposing people's identities, especially when done by journalists with large audiences.
>Or is it just the case that, as one friend said on Slack, "doxxing is when someone you don't like posts information about someone you do like"?
Do some people have double standards about doxing? Sure. Double standards are pretty common in general.
At issue is a site called the “Doxbin,” which hosts the names, addresses, phone number and often known IP addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and other sensitive information on hundreds of people — and in some cases the personal information of the target’s friends and family.
2. Linked article is poorly written and unclear as to what actually happened and the context. If I'm reading it correctly it looks like everyone was using a real name associated with their online work anyway.
3. In any case mentioning someone's name and town in a Twitter fight is a world away from systematically organizing armed SWAT police calls to journalist's homes, physically threatening them or have them falsely arrested because they write about white supremacists and terrorism.
I'm going to interpret this as charitably as possible: Are you attempting to bring attention to the fact that doxxing is rarely prosecuted, even though it's illegal and there's boatloads of evidence that it is in fact a form of violence? This is the only way I can imagine this question being raised that doesn't assume you're trolling.
No. I am confused by the conviction Twitter and message board people have that pseudonymous people are entitled to the protection of their true identities from strangers, who learn those identities from open sources.
Fair enough. But doxxers should be subject to the same level of prosecution as people who scope out marks for robbery for example. I'm not familiar with laws in that case, but if there is some level of "conspiracy to commit crime" you can get for telling thieves about that mark, then doxxers should be also getting that.
I don't expect strangers to protect information about just how much cash I have in my wallet that they found out by standing behind me in checkout line. But I surely want them nailed if they purposefully broadcast that and a mugger overhears and robs me.
>Are you attempting to bring attention to the fact that doxxing is rarely prosecuted, even though it's illegal and there's boatloads of evidence that it is in fact a form of violence?
We should really stop with the scope creep attempts around "violence".
Why? Technically speaking, it would be nice if there was another single word with the appropriate gravity and specificity that described the indirect destruction of people's lives and/or wellbeing, but practically speaking, there isn't, mostly because this particular kind of attack didn't exist in such a form in the past. Language evolves as society gets new stuff added to it.
> mostly because this particular kind of attack didn't exist in such a form in the past
This makes no sense. The "attack" of letting people know who a particular person is has always existed, but applied as an attack only in the very rare case where an exile came to your town and was later exposed. The norm was that everyone already knew exactly who everyone was -- in other words, that everyone was always and automatically subject to exactly the "attack" you claim didn't exist.
The attack of shaming has always existed and has generally been much more serious than it is now.
The linked-to hacked.wtf page has a screenshot of a tweet from Krebs that is purportedly an example of how he doxxed someone. But the relevant part is blacked out so I can’t tell what level of detail was exposed, e.g. whether it’s real name, dob, address, etc.
Putting aside the debate over what level of doxxing is acceptable, I think we can at least assert that there no level of SWATting is acceptable in any context.
> I'm going to interpret this as charitably as possible: Are you attempting to bring attention to the fact that doxxing is rarely prosecuted, even though it's illegal and there's boatloads of evidence that it is in fact a form of violence? This is the only way I can imagine this question being raised that doesn't assume you're trolling.
This is a genuine question, but is doxxing really illegal? I recently read that posting someone's social security number is not illegal, so I'm finding it hard to reconcile the two notions.
“Sharing someone’s private information online without their permission, sometimes called doxxing, is a breach of their privacy and of the Twitter Rules. Sharing private information can pose serious safety and security risks for those affected and can lead to physical, emotional, and financial hardship.”
No, it's not: Twitter is explicit about the types of information that cannot be shared, and Krebs didn't share those things. Twitter also explicitly exempts information available from public sources. A public LinkedIn profile certainly fits that exemption.
“How’s the weather in <blank>?” is not sharing a name and is most certainly covered (“we consider information like physical location to be a higher risk than other types of information.”) Even if the information is public, the policy also calls out intent as a factor and he was obviously sharing it in an attempt to intimidate them. Not to mention, according to his tweet it took him 6 hours to uncover; I think it’s debatable how “public” that makes it.
If he can point to a public source, it doesn't matter how long it took him to identify that source. If the city someone lives in is on their public LinkedIn profile, it's not secret. If you ask me how the weather is in Chicago, or even in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, you're not violating Twitter's rules.
People are regularly banned for posting journalists’ home addresses under the doxxing policy even if it’s available other places online (for good reason.) Again, even if it’s public information the intent also matters.
But he does appear to have posted personal information in an attempt to intimidate them. Even if you don’t want to call that doxxing, can we at least agree that’s not a very nice thing to do?
And Krebs still hasn't apologised for his childish behaviour, or even so much as commented in it - he's just sticking his head in the sand, hoping it's eventually forgotten about.
I've stopped reading his blog and tweets, and he went way, way, way down in estimation after this.
What obligation did Krebs have to be nice to these people? Were they sources of his? Did he have a prior relationship with them? We can stipulate a bunch of scenarios in which Krebs would have been obligated not to publish Canfield's name, but it is not a general principle that he is enjoined from doing so; you have to identify the specific relationship that creates the obligation.
Sometimes those relationships are quite broad! For instance: on HN, it is generally verboten to out people. That's a rule we've adopted to maintain civil discourse on the site, and something we agree to when we decide to participate here. But HN has lots of rules that are not in fact rules in the real world; for instance, 'pvg regularly chides 'dang for enforcing the HN's idiosyncratic (but good) rule about not putting quotation marks around paraphrases of other people's comments.
Does any such circumstance apply here? The professional ethics rules of journalism have more the opposite directionality, cautioning journalists against maintaining anonymity of sources to the detriment of the readership.
> What obligation did Krebs have to be nice to these people?
I’ll take that as an agreement that it wasn’t nice then?
Regardless, I don’t think I said anywhere that he had an obligation to be nice, only that his comments were a violation of Twitter’s TOS. Which presumably he does have an obligation to follow since he’s using their platform.
> The professional ethics rules of journalism have more the opposite directionality, cautioning journalists against maintaining anonymity of sources to the detriment of the readership.
Krebs is not posting their names and location as a journalistic act, he’s posting them to serve as retribution for speaking badly about something he has a personal involvement in. I don’t know what the professional ethics rules of journalism say about that, but I think it’s something most people would agree is pretty shitty.
The only evidence I see up thread is your assertion “Twitter also explicitly exempts information available from public sources“ which is a stronger statement than Twitter’s own privacy page (“If the reported information was shared somewhere else before it was shared on Twitter [...] we may not treat this information as private”.) Twitter uses multiple factors to determine if a post is a violation, not all of which have to be satisfied, and of which being available through other sources is only one. Twitter also has a history of taking action against users who share otherwise publicly available information if the intent is malicious.
While it’s a debatable point, it’s most certainly not “plainly false” that he violated the TOS; Twitter would be well within bounds to take action against his account.
Speaking of Krebs doxing people, I really like the snarky but still kinda benevolent response (sans the threats, ofc) when he doxed the pr0gramm/coinhive admins:
The pr0gramm (a kinda image board) members were upset and since "Krebs" is German for "cancer", they started donating to a German cancer charity, more than EUR 200k in total, to "cure Krebs".
And a left wing extremist problem, given the recent Antifa beating of journalist Andy Ngo and, fortunately unsuccessful, attempt by Antifa to ignite a large propane tank next to a migrant center.
This is true, though for awhile in the past few years, the Far Left was catching up, though the Far Right surged ahead in this year. However, in terms of numbers of events of violence, intimidation, and minor assault, the Far Left has been quite busy. The left leaning media just shows an extreme bias in discussing these events.
> Specifically, tables 1 and 2 show a description, date, location and number of victim fatalities for each far right [106] and radical Islamist [119] attack between September 12, 2001 and December 31, 2016. During this period, no persons in the United States were killed in attacks carried out by persons believed to be motivated by extremist environmental beliefs, extremist “animal liberation”beliefs, or extremist far left beliefs.
> During this period, no persons in the United States were killed in attacks carried out by persons believed to be motivated by ... extremist far left beliefs.
Depends on what is counted as far-left extremism. There were anti-white / anti-police attacks associated with BLM:
> he needed to bring destruction 'upon bad cops as well as good cops' because of what he saw as the justice system's failure to prosecute bad police officers who commit crimes
wanting society to hold criminal police officers accountable is a "extremist far left belief", regardless of this individual's deranged methodology.
Neither associated with leftist groups. The first was at most in anti-govt groups, which were clearly not left. The second was anti white. This info is easily found online from many places.
What makes you think these were from far-left extremism? What groups or ideology did they profess to be a part of?
> The first was at most in anti-govt groups, which were clearly not left.
You don't need to be associated with a group to be an individual extremist deciding to advance a movement. The shooter's photographed doing a black power salute. The black power movement isn't right wing.
While there may certainly be more extremists on the right the idea that someone on the left can't be an extremist, or that there are no leftist extremists, doesn't make much sense.
> the idea that someone on the left can't be an extremist
Well of course it doesn't, which is why nobody was saying that. There's been plenty of horrific deadly left wing violence historically, both in the US and other countries. It's just that in the last few decades and limited to the US, there has been little to no deadly left wing violence, a time period which has seen quite a lot of deadly right wing violence.
I'm afraid I can't answer for 'many people'. But complaining that nebulous groups of people don't condemn things you don't like vociferously enough is rarely a productive direction to take a conversation. It's better to deal with people individually where possible, and easier to find out what people think about concrete examples.
But also, yes, I think it's not unreasonable to expect that people might show more outrage for murders than for property damage, even if they disagree with both.
>But also, yes, I think it's not unreasonable to expect that people might show more outrage for murders than for property damage, even if they disagree with both.
I never mentioned property damage. Antifa's violence isn't "property damage". This is the kind of thing I'm talking about: bad faith straw manning to justify ignoring violence by leftists.
The last conversation I was in on this topic was highlighting that the data shows very high numbers of events from some ecological and animal rights groups and considering them as left wing violence, and from that arguing that there was much more left wing violence than right wing violence. Almost all of those events were property damage. This is all in the https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/ dataset.
The dataset that I mention above doesn't contain any references to antifa. This is probably because 'antifa' isn't a specific group, but an umbrella term for a number of groups, some of which are entirely nonviolent or target only property.
> This is the kind of thing I'm talking about: bad faith straw manning to justify ignoring violence by leftists.
This is pretty unfair. I'm not in a position to do anything about any particular act of violence, but there's a strong chance that if you suggest a concrete example to me I'll state that I disagree with it. For example, I don't believe that you should punch people you disagree with in the face, regardless of whether they are fascists or not.
You should not be surprised however, that people are more aware of violence resulting in fatalities and more vocal in their condemnation of it than other violence (even other violence that they also disagree with).
The amount of hate crimes, and remember, the fbi has said white supremacy is now the majority of terrorism arrests it does, have also surged, so it's more a case of the issue on the right being greater in magnitude than there being a left wing bias.
Does the data show that left wing extremism should be ignored because there's not as much or it's lower intensity? Why do many people seem to have a hard time condemning political violence in all forms and by all parties?
The US has a developing extremist problem, period. Having two sides with radicals willing to continuously ramp up the levels of violence, outrage, and intimidation is a recipe for bad things to happen. Another example, more recent than the period between world wars:
In The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis talks about how opposing sides exploit the mutual vicious cycle of outrage. The common interest between extreme groups who otherwise demonize and hate each other, is that they both benefit from the cycle of outrage and the breakdown of society. Both fringes want to let things break down and roll the dice, for the chance they might come out on top.
> There is no equivalent on the left that inflamed the left like Trump does to the right. Period.
The old white man who firebombed the ICE facility in Washington a few weeks ago was repeating things that AOC recently said about "ICE concentration camps."
> You don’t see antifa hooligans wearing Clinton garb. You did see MAGA hats at Charlottesville.
> The US has a developing extremist problem, period. Having two sides with radicals willing to continuously ramp up the levels of violence,
We don't; domestic extremist violence for many years in the US has consistently been very one-sided, with the Right being the absolutely dominant source, especially for deadly violence against persons.
There are two major terrorist threats in the US at the moment: one is far-right white supremacists; the other is radical islamists. Another comment linked to this GAO report with more data: https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/683984.pdf
Are those the two "sides" you are referring to? If so, I fail to see how they are engaging in a "mutual vicious cycle of outrage".
Or maybe the police can still go check, but just not do it guns blazing? They can ring the door bell and ask to check around. If they're afraid of being fired upon they could even use a police robot or something.
Or even stand some distance from the door and shout "THIS IS THE POLICE, EVERYONE GET OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP" through a bullhorn; it's going to be much less disruptive to everyone than a flashbang through the window, and the officers can still be hidden behind cover in case of actual criminals wielding guns being present.
Hostage taker: “Nope, there’s no hostages here, and no you can’t come in”
Police: “Well, thanks for that. Have a nice day”...
Police don’t bust in and start opening fire, so your description of how this works is simply false, and removing their ability to respond to emergencies is absurd.
Then what do you propose, people give their names? But then they'll give fake names. So ask for proof of identity? Is that even possible, let alone expedient in an emergency?
The solution is to take these reports seriously, but with a grain of salt. i.e. don't just shoot a guy that walks out of his house while confused.
How about a phone system that does not allow random people to spoof numbers with little to no effort. That would be a nice start. Would also curb all those friggin spam calls I get from random numbers.
Anonymous phone calls have positive uses too, it would be nice to not install more surveillance infrastructure and have less trigger-happy police instead. In other countries cops ring the door and ask if everything is ok after they have received a call.
The police can see through basic spoofing like what happens with your spam calls. SWATting is done using throwaway voip connections where you can see the number but it’s worthless.
Here in Germany you can anonymously call the police (using a pay phone or whatever), but it's not an issue because the police use the door bell and politely take a look instead of busting the door open and storming the place with drawn guns.
I understand police in the US has to adapt to the assumption that everyone has a gun, but even when you suspect a hostage situation what's the problem with politely knocking and waiting if you get a friendly response?
This week an armed man was shot by police in Switzerland. One detail in the newspaper reports that stood out for me was that the investigation of the shooting was immediately transferred to an out of state police department, and that this is apparently standard practice for police use of weapons.
A man was shot dead this week in my city in Australia, after charging at officers with a samurai sword at the conclusion of a siege. The incident was immediately handed to an Ethics investigation; I have major issues with how the QPS and AFP are run, but this isn't one of them.
The United States has had a high level of gun ownership for several hundred years. The police response of "respond to anonymous tip by kicking down the door and opening fire" seems to be a mostly post-9/11 thing.
I suspect that the root causes are multifold:
(1) No-knock warrants became legal in 1995 to prevent the "destruction of evidence" during drug busts.
(2) Americans got really paranoid after 9/11, and more tolerant of this sort of police activity.
(3) Increasingly harsh prison conditions and unfair sentencing encourages suspects to fight back, rather than comply with law enforcement.
(4) We have a number of well-funded and well-trained paramilitary criminal organizations in the United States, thanks largely to the War on Drugs and decades of poorly-thought-out immigration policy.
High powered semi-automatic long and hand guns with high capacity magazines loaded with hollow-point or armor piercing rounds have not been common in the US for several hundred years.
Winchester repearting rifles were popular as of 1870. As they held 16 rounds, could be rapidly fired, and were easily reloaded, there is a strong argument that these were, in fact, the first assault rifles.
Modern semi-automatic (double-action) revolvers were commonplace as of 1900.
Both of the above fired highly lethal ammunition, with rates of fire and reload not that far from modern semi-automatics, which were themselves common by the 1920s.
At which time you could mail-order a machine gun to your front door, which is So Not Even Remotely Close To Legal today.
Body armor suitable for police wouldn't become commonplace until the 2000s.
Ergo, for 130+ years, the police faced a populace armed with high-capacity assault weapons. And for most of that time, they did so with six-shot .38 revolvers and no bulletproof vests.
And only in the past twenty-odd years has kicking in doors with guns blazing become, somehow, necessary.
So, no, gun ownership, even of high-powered, high-capacity assault weapons, doesn't correlate at all to police violence.
even when you suspect a hostage situation what's the problem with politely knocking and waiting if you get a friendly response?
I once pulled over a few blocks from a friend's house, so I could call her and get a few final directions. A man from the house I had parked in front of instantly started talking ominously and yelling at me. I think that guy was a meth head crazed out of his mind. In the back of my mind was the possibility that he'd bring out a shotgun and start blazing away at me. (Yes, my friend didn't live in a great neighborhood.) The police here have to be prepared to deal with people like that.
I think friendly looking police androids are going to be quite helpful.
In this case, they smelled smoke coming from the unit, which is why the fire department broke down the door, and the officers didn't go in expecting to get shot at.
It's easy to fault the police when they respond with guns drawn, but at the same time it's often impossible for them to know what they're about to walk into.
> It's easy to fault the police when they respond with guns drawn, but at the same time it's often impossible for them to know what they're about to walk into.
I'm not saying being a police officer is an easy job, but isn't that what they signed up for? "To protect and serve" (despite being legally challenged and rejected when actually taken to court where an officer refused to engage with shooters) seems to be their mantra, and they talk about putting their lives on the line for the public safety.
I fear the problem is the police are more interested in protecting themselves than protecting the public, at least in the United States.
Finding people who are willing to police some of the areas in US(it really is only certain places) without resorting to what they do now is VERY hard.
Being a cop in an area like Japan, where you mostly drink tea and stand watch outside of the police box trying to fight boredom’s is one thing. Responding to a call in Baltimore is another.
Cops are cops they are not Seal team, they collect paycheck and want to come back home alive and undamaged, expecting anything else from them is unrealistic.
Police are supposed to serve the public, not kill them indiscriminately without cause and without repercussions. If you can't handle getting shot at or any other risks involved, maybe you shouldn't be a cop with a loaded gun and power over others.
I propose that police must always respond to an emergency call in a way that will not result in tragedy if it’s fake. Innocent until proven guilty, you know?
The problem isn’t that the police respond to a false alarm. The problem is that they sometimes shoot people when they do.
To play devils advocate a little - If I'm a 911 operator and the person calling says "They have gun next door - there's shouting, I'm really scared WHAT DO I DO?!" What do we do? Turn them down? Ask for proof? From the police perspective - they're entering a potentially dangerous environment, which means gun drawn until the environment is cleared.
To your point though - the fact that the swatting has resulted in innocent deaths is evidence that law enforcement is too aggressive.
Drive by, see if there's any other evidence of any of this, leave if there isn't - because an unverified phone call alone really shouldn't count as probable cause?
> Drive by, see if there's any other evidence of any of this, leave if there isn't - because an unverified phone call alone really shouldn't count as probable cause?
Exactly! Especially since law enforcement has (successfully!) argued that they have no legal duty to serve and protect you.
> since law enforcement has (successfully!) argued that they have no legal duty to serve and protect you
IANAL. My understanding is police have a duty to the public at large, not to an individual person outside of a special relationship (i.e. witness protection). If the police did have a duty to individuals, the state would be unable to allocate police resources to best serve the public. Essentially, individual priorities would DDOS police resources. In the case you reference:
> a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen. [...] A publicly maintained police force constitutes a basic governmental service provided to benefit the community at large by promoting public peace, safety and good order. [...] Publicly furnished police protection may accrue to the personal benefit of individual citizens, but at all times the needs and interests of the community at large predominate.
For the moment, replace "swatting" with bona fide criminals behind the door. If the swat teams ended up killing some of those criminals that wouldn't be evidence of over-aggression on the part of law enforcement.
Since you posit that "gun drawn" is the reasonable response to swatting, then the same logic applies. You're obligated to continue wearing your devil mask for that sentence, so you have to explicitly argue why that isn't the case. :)
> For the moment, replace "swatting" with bona fide criminals behind the door. If the swat teams ended up killing some of those criminals that wouldn't be evidence of over-aggression on the part of law enforcement.
Yes, it would. Our police are not, as the saying goes, "judge, jury, and executioner." Those "bona fide criminals behind the door" are only accused of a crime and are entitled to a vigorous defense and day in court. They are definitely not to simply be gunned down in response to the arrival of the police.
Yes, if those people happen to do something threatening that requires lethal response--like shooting at the responding officers--then the officers are entitled to defend themselves. But police officers simply happening to show up where criminal activity is occurring does not give those officers license to "kill some of those criminals." That is over-aggression on the part of law enforcement and, sadly enough, is one of the major problems we're dealing with in Seattle in relation to our police, petty crime, the ways our police force have reacted in the past, and how to balance the competing needs.
I'd suggest... you know... following the rule of law.
Basically, the whole presumption of innocence thing.
A call is a great reason to respond... with inquiry.
Guns ready sure IN the event and inquiry leads to life and death situation... but that should be after the fact of an inquiry:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
It's not up to me to find solutions that don't violate peoples rights. It's up to the people wanting solutions. Just because you have a problem doesn't put you above the law.
Same goes for everyone under the concept of rule of law. As someone who is dealing with a US Naturalization, the rule of law as a concept is drilled in hard. Shame people born with the right don't understand it.
I know in my country, the police would probably knock on the door and verify that something's wrong, especially if the caller can't spin a convincing scenario that fits the location. Maybe pistols drawn, but pointed down. If someone answers and says "huh? I didn't call anyone? what's going on?" in a somewhat convincing way, ask them to step outside, hands up, and if he complies the situation is probably solved, right there. You can still have a look inside, confirm.
There's like so many steps along the way where you can make an assessment of the situation before going FULL SWAT-raid. Mother in a night gown opening the door, yawning? Probably not a threat.
I'm not saying I want the job handling these situations or that it's easy, but "well, someone called, let's send in the Wet Ops team!" can't be the only answer, either! There's even videos of cops handling this super calm and professionally, basically how I described it above. So it's not impossible.
> I know in my country, the police would probably knock on the door and verify that something's wrong, especially if the caller can't spin a convincing scenario that fits the location.
This is because in your country it is exceedingly unlikely the cops will receive a barrage of high powered assault rifle fire after knocking. The militarization of police in the US is a complicated problem that ultimately stems from our proliferation of guns which turn every interaction cops have into a potentially deadly one.
The US cops have talked about escalating risks for years but US cops haven't faced actual escalating dangers. One can track the actual danger faced by police and it has been declining.
The problem is the average citizen gets their information from TV dramas where cops indeed constantly face dangers.
headline: "Once again: police work is NOT getting more dangerous"
It's disingenuous to ask us to accept this data alone as a reason to disregard the risks that American police face in the course of their work. Whether their job is safer today than at the height of the so-called 'crack epidemic' is irrelevant to the reality of the day to day risks that they face.
For starters, this data doesn't include the numbers of police non-fatally harmed in the course of their work. Even still, their risk of being fatally shot is 5x higher on average than the general citizen.
True, but I think the general idea is not that police work isn't dangerous -- it is! -- but rather, that it has become less dangerous over the decades.
I don't have an opinion on that, having not looked at the data, but it is entirely plausible.
i mean cops do have a fairly dangerous job but they also by no means the most or even comparatively that dangerous a job. if you look at the stats being a roofer is 1.5x more dangerous. being a delivery driver is about the same danger as a cop. industrial machine installer/repair/maintenance workers have a slightly higher fatality rate per 100k compared to cops.
stoking the fears of the average citizen to be fearful of cops likely increases their risk of death on the job which is all this does.
Police work is less dangerous than many common occupations in the US but it is indeed still dangerous.
The question is whether this level of danger is a sufficient to justify police tactics that severely endanger civilians such as no-knock raids - factors that make "SWATing" so dangerous for the average person.
The further factor here is that the false belief that there's an armed camp ready to attack cops instantly with automatic rifles can give one the distorted impression that no-knock and related tactics will save lives.
However, the reality is there are few people ready to knowingly engage the cops (since even if you win, you lose against the authorities) but there citizens who have guns ready for persons known who might be breaking into their home and so SWAT tactics can be as likely to draw fire and casualties as to avoid them in the real world. And kill innocent of course.
I would never be an advocate for the kind of no-knock raids the article is describing. I'm not addressing that by contesting the use of those statistics. My point is more that _any_ risk of getting shot in the line of duty changes the entire playing field. Just because it's declining doesn't mean that it's insignificant.
That being said, as said before I'm not advocating for the kind of overwhelmingly violent responses that SWATting describes.
From the other side of the pond it looks like the US police dresses up like a military unit with supplies from past wars. SWAT teams that show up in war tanks.
I haven't seen many cop series lately but my impression is most police actors in hollywood don't dress up like John Rambo in fighting in the jungle.
In part, this is driven by programs (as mentioned in the USA today article) where the local police forces can get the equipment itself at no cost (they only pay the maintenance, cost of shipping the equipment, and cost of storing the equipment, or any other local accommodations; all of which are a bargain compared to its actual cost)
One factor is that the decline in police deaths has tracked the decline in murders overall. If you had successful risk mitigation, civilian deaths would be going up.
I own guns, as my father did before me and his father before him. All my brothers own guns. We're sportsmen, hunting is a popular recreation where we live.
Of all the guns in my family, not one has ever hurt a human being. Not a single incident, over many decades and who knows how many shots fired.
I have many friends with the same situation-- I don't know of anyone who has ever shot another human being. Not a single one.
The problem is the dramatic drop in respect for other people and their lives. Some people have lost respect, they are dangerous. It's not the gun's fault.
Even as a first responder (Fire/EMS), there's more that can be done even before then.
A fatal SWATing recently should have raised so many red flags - caller was from an overseas number, described the house as two story when it was one, gave the wrong house color, and said that they could see things through the window from the street (when there were no windows visible from the street).
The solution to send an officer who checks out things without immediately escalating. Breaking down doors and going in with guns blazing is an overreaction to an unreliable, untraceable report.
Yes^N. Police in the US have become insanely militarized. And there's the fundamental "escalate in response to resistance" approach. Which in part has bled over from the military. Shock and awe. Show of force.
Maybe it works in military conflicts, but in civilian policing, it gets too many ~innocents killed.
This could have just been an unfortunate escalation of the political tension which seems to be omnipresent, but once you drag the police into the game it becomes deadly. I suspect the idea of "counter-doxing" made sense at one time, when CNN was threatening to dox people over memes, or when someone is doxed, fired, and humiliated, because a twitter-ista thinks you've manspread too far (/s?), but none of that even remotely compares to swatting. Sending a (generally speaking) overzealous police force to a persons home after convincing the police a violent crime is underway, is on the scale between assault, and attempted murder in my opinion (and that's assuming no one actually gets hurt).
Edit: There seems to be some confusion below. I'm not excusing the police of their responsibility by any means. Its important to remember the vast majority of swatting incidents end without violence, thanks almost entirely to the professionalism of the men who have just kicked down a door (or chose not to kick down the door, but knock instead) and found out that the phone call they got about a guy in his living room butchering small children is actually just a dude playing video games or whatever.
Edit2: I'm a pretty libertarian fellow but if you are incapable of thinking of a scenario where you would want the police to kick in your door and storm your house with guns, then you either have no imagination, or you live in a magical fairy tale land and I'm super jealous.
I think I prefer to live in a society in which these sorts of fake calls are intentionally and randomly made - without notice or authorization of any sort - in order to continually test and verify that emergency services are functioning properly (in this case, not killing anyone based on an anonymous tip).
Making a 911 call is an anonymous venture; there's no deposition or oath or penalty of perjury here. A civilized society is one in which calls made to such an endpoint (whether by a human or bot or whomever) are treated accordingly.
Police need to stop killing people. Stop violating people's rights. SWAT teams have not made society better and are easily deprecated. That's the real message here.
There was absolutely no need for that cop to shoot that person who got SWAT'd either. The guy was completely surrounded by police with rifles, at a far distance, and he was obviously confused at being told multiple different commands. They are way, way too quick to pull the trigger.
All 911 calls are and should be taken seriously though. Even when you misdial 911 they will sometimes even send a car out to make sure, unless you explain yourself well over the phone.
So these scammer guys will always be able to get a police response, especially as long as phone calls can be spoofed to look like it's coming from "inside" the house. The only variable is how the police handle it and, of course, how many sociopaths there are who can pull it off properly without getting caught.
> as long as phone calls can be spoofed to look like it's coming from "inside" the house.
Many times they don't even need to bother that far. A fatal incident last year involved a 911 call from an overseas number (that couldn't accurately describe the house he was supposedly looking at as he called). There has to be some astronomical odds about you internationally roaming, and seeing a supposed multiple execution style homicide "from the sidewalk", but yet, SWAT still showed up, and killed someone.
> All 911 calls are and should be taken seriously though.
It depends what "taken seriously" means here. If it means followed-up upon in a rapid way to see if there is any corroborating information to indicate that there's a real emergency, then sure.
If it means instead to suppose that any of the provided information is true tout court, then no, this is a recipe for ongoing disaster.
It's important to have a rapid, anonymous reporting system. It's also important to have auxiliary systems in place to verify information that comes in through this system.
Plus a calm rational authoritative person on the ground who isn't in Captain America hero mode but instead expects verifiable and multi-sourced evidence that the situation requires escalation to extreme force. Rather than relying on his lackeys to observe for very lax rules of engagement based on some hyper-pessimistic risk models.
I don't really follow the Marvel universe very closely outside of X-men, but isn't Captain America a figure who stands in contrast to government overreach, Nazism, police brutality, etc? I think of him as being a sort of left libertarian.
I think we might actually need more Captain Americas in these situations, not less.
It is ultimately still the cops' judgement to kick down doors and shoot at anything that moves. The swatter just provides low-credibility information that sets them into motion.
I might be wrong, but a whole bunch of heavily armed guys busting down doors in response to an anonymous phone call is not in the spirit of prioritizing de-escalation over violent resolutions. I want cops de-escalating situations, not shooting up the neighborhood, or going on high-speed chases on neighborhood streets.
Now, I imagine swat teams don't like doxxing either. Sounds like a business opportunity.
Unfortunately in our world of active shooters the thinking is now that the police should enter the situation to try to engage the shooter as fast as possible as research shows this is what saves the most lives.
I'm trying to explain why de-escalation is not the preferred tactical response from the police when it comes to active shooter scenarios. I think it makes sense from a law enforcement point of view to take every threat as credible until proven otherwise.
I also think it's important to understand why the police respond like they do. It isn't arbitrary, it's statistically suppose to save lives, but SWATing is intentionally abusing that response.
250 incidents in 17 years seems to hardly be an explanation to rule out de-escalation by default when interacting with the general population. Even in these cases, it's not like SWATting is a new phenomenon. As an alternative: Maybe invest in proper training for LEOs instead of military grade equipment, that would at least decrease the frequency of stuff like [1].
You mean surrounding a house with 20 guys with AR-15 rifles, with the right to shoot any moment the persons hands aren’t where various officers yelling at him at the same times wants them to be, isn’t a good deescalation strategy?
> I think it makes sense from a law enforcement point of view to take every threat as credible until proven otherwise.
Doesn't that strike you as something people might say but never do? Kind of like innocence until proven guilty? I mean of course the state and its employees don't think like that.
> I'm trying to explain why de-escalation is not the preferred tactical response from the police when it comes to active shooter scenarios.
As a first responder who has trained with, and documented photographically, multiple active shooter scenarios (training, at high schools, community colleges and even malls) and responded to more than one...
These scenarios are not active shooter events. That is someone well, actively shooting. Usually with confirmation from 911 dispatchers ("we have gunshots in the background of the call").
Usually these situations are highly Hollywood-ized. One caller described "I can see from the street through the window - they have the whole family on their knees, hands on heads and have guns to their heads, about to execute them all".
More worryingly are stories of sending quantities of drugs (often possession, not even supply levels) to a residence - that shouldn't be able to evoke a no-knock SWAT response in the first place.
Why would the police want to de-escalate when they can put on their battle jammies and act like they are in Fallujah while knowing full well there will be zero repercussions for their actions?
May SWAT team guns shouldn't have independent triggers, but require some kind of consensus algorithm across SWAT team members for a pulled trigger to have an effect.
Wow, I can imagine that going wrong in so many ways. Executions squads come to mind. Groupthink. Even less liability. Instant guaranteed kill instead of only probably kill, even fewer annoying survivors in court.
Well, the thought was to avoid a single agent having a fear reflex and pulling the trigger. In fact, I think the situation now is that one spooked officer shooting off the gun causes other officers to get spooked too and pull the trigger.
I think under those circumstances, having a consensus algorithm in place would diminish the likelihood of it occurring, since, presumably multiple agents would have to have the fear reflex at the same moment. Unless agents are getting feedback from others about their trigger pools, or decide before hand that they are going to do it all together, I just don't see the scenarios you describe being realized. Of course, if cops go in with the idea that they are gonna kill someone, then they are no longer behaving lawfully.
My real issue with the idea is how practical it would be. If an officer's gun didn't go off when it should have, and they were killed, then people are going to be really upset.
Novel idea, but how do you handle disagreement between the first person who can see an imminent threat and the person in the back of the stack in a way that doesn't get the first guy through the door killed more often, doesn't just become a rubber stamp, blanket approval "to be on the safe side", and offers improved outcomes compared to relying on the training and judgment of the individual in front with a gun?
Interesting idea, but the following two scenarios look identical to the consensus algorithm:
* One officer sees a suspect drawing a weapon, and reacts more quickly than the others or the suspect is not visible to the other officers, and thus fires a justified shot and saves a fellow officer's life.
* One officer misinterprets an innocent gesture, fires an unjustified shot and takes the life of a suspect/innocent person.
Furthermore, I'd worry that the diffusion of responsibility means that the officers fire more often, under the belief that their fellow officers agreed with their course of action, or are indicating that they are in danger (by trying to fire), or that they don't believe they alone have taken the decision to kill, so can justify shooting at a lower perceived level of threat.
See for instance firing squads:
> This is believed to reinforce the sense of diffusion of responsibility among the firing squad members. This diffusion of responsibility makes the execution process more reliable because the members are more likely to aim to kill if they are not entirely blamed for it, or if there is a chance they did not fire the lethal shot. It also allows each member of the firing squad to believe afterwards that he did not personally fire a fatal shot—for this reason, it is sometimes referred to as the "conscience round".
Regarding your first two points, a proper evaluation would involve some estimate the relative utilities of those two outcomes, and an estimate of their frequencies. Taking a cue from signal detection theory, one would want to design the algorithm such that the true positive rate maximizes expected utility, and takes into account how the probabilities shift in a situation. A tough task, on all accounts; however, the situation as it stands now is no different, except that, perhaps, we have less control over how we adjust the decision threshold (one thing that is apparent here is that there is a potential conflict between the individual utility of the police officer and the sort of social welfare function that the role of the police is supposed to fulfill).
With respect to the diffusion of responsibility effect, I think you are probably right that there are lots of possible unintended consequences. In as much as an officer decision to pull the trigger explicitly or implicitly takes in to account the reduced feelings of guilt and increased feelings of peer support in case the weapon is in fact fired, and if it takes into account the smaller likelihood that pulling a trigger will actually discharge the weapon, it may well increase the frequency which the trigger is pulled. More darkly, one could imagine a squad of officers making it into a distributed game of Russian Roulette.
On the other hand, I think this highlights the limits of our imagination. For example, one could imagine the following alternative. Each officer has a body cam, and a pair at base, who is actively monitoring the camera. A decision to fire the weapon must involve both the person on the ground, and the buddy. Or one could have a supervisor of some sort, who can override individual decisions, and so forth.
I don't have the answer, but I think it warrants thinking about.
Absolutely creepy website...Went on to see what they've got there.. Randomly clicked on one of the names on the list..Some kid's photo,with all his contact details,his parents names,photos,phone numbers,etc..FFS
I'm very sorry for the Journalists affected, but I have to say I'm glad it happened to them. We need high profile issues like these.
It's the only way it will change.
Untold thousands of regular joe's get hit with this every year. No one cares since it only happens to 'the bad guys'.
When you have authoritarianism, it doesn't always go your way. That's why we should be against authoritarian tactics, such as sending armed men to break down doors and terrorize people over an anonymous phone call (I personally think we should draw the line in the sand much more on the side of freedom, but this basic level should be agreed by all)
I grew up long enough ago when there was a feeling that the Western world was superior to the Iron and Bamboo curtains because these things didn't happen in America.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadedited for grammar all happy now.
https://hacked.wtf/2019/04/26/dear-brian-krebs-no-more-doxxi...
Then the bad person hacks their icloud and dropbox and releases their private pictures and videos, the naughtier the better.
And yes, all of that happened recently in Germany mostly to some prominent politicians, who also use their own names in public really often.
Now, Krebs doxed people in the past who didn't want their true identities revealed. Often because those people were up to no good, but sometimes Krebs went a bit overboard in my opinion.
More in general, and I am not saying Krebs ever did this, there are valid reasons why people might not want their true identities widely revealed. Think whistleblowers, some critical journalists, etc.
A more general definition of doxing would be "publish personal information that the people to whom this information belongs did not give consent to publish". As such, I don't see doxing as generally evil, it depends on the kind of information and context. Out a criminal? OK. Out a journalist? Probably not OK.
I'm not asking why it would violate a norm to post home addresses or phone numbers; it's clear to me why that's problematic.
I'm asking what obligation Krebs has to pretend he doesn't know who a Twitter user is, when that information is available to anyone who knows how to consult public sources to find it. Why is Krebs obligated to help someone remain pseudonymous? It seems clear to me that he is not.
That isn't an excuse for compiling this information and publishing it as wide a possible. You still have to consider the implications if you want to act morally and in good faith.
Think of the stupid pseudonymous twitter user who made a really abhorrent, ill-considered joke and the people used "public information from public sources" to first get to their real identity and then crawl further until they find their employer and get the person fired. The person who did the research and then started the witchburning by publishing the information so that every other bored twitter user could write easily write a mean email to the employer should have considered what compiling and publicizing that dox could do.
Also, I think Krebs does take this into consideration, and is generally acting in good faith and with consideration, it's just that I disagree with his conclusion sometimes.
If he's posting home phone numbers or addresses, I'm clear on what the problem is. But if you have a public LinkedIn profile and don't have the OPSEC to keep public sources from linking your secret Twitter handle to that profile, I don't see any problem at all.
Dox some criminal? OK, but you have to be sure your allegations have merit and you've done your due diligence[0]. This is mostly what Krebs does.
Dox some politician who had an extramarital affair? Maybe OK. Dox their extramarital partner? Probably not OK.
Dox the latest terrorist? Generally OK. Dox every person that ever came into contact with the terrorist? Not OK. Publish personal information about the victims of the terrorist without their (next of kin's) consent? Not OK, even if you only report information you got from their facebook.
Dox some kid who misbehaved once on the internet, thereby directing an army of assholes on twitter to take notice, dox the kid further and bully them? Not OK.
When I was young (pre-facebook era), one of my teachers got murdered; her husband was later convicted. Some (tabloid) journalists showed up like locusts camping around our school, offering money for our pictures and other private information about the victim, her husband and their kids. Not OK. The same journalists also found "public information from open sources" about e.g. the kids' memberships in youth groups and such, and published that and also went to those youth groups for more information like they did at our school. Not OK.
[0] There was more than one case where "helpful" people on the internet and sometimes journalists published the names of alleged criminals who turned out to be entirely innocent, which didn't stop people from bullying them or even neighbors from forming mobs to "visit" them at home.
We do not agree about the particulars. For instance: the extramarital partners of politicians? To me, fair game. Kids who commit crimes on the Internet? To me, fair game.
Counterexamples? Sure. Undocumented immigrants who could be forcibly deported. I have a special obligation not to help ICE find those people. Iranian democracy activists. I have a special obligation not to subvert advocacy for democracy in authoritarian regimes.
But I don't have a general obligation to help maintain someone's pseudonymity, nor does anyone have the general right to restrain my own speech to protect their pseudonymity.
I understand that the rule exists on Reddit, and, to a lesser extent, here. And I respect the rule... on Reddit. And here. But in real life? I have a problem with message board norms leaking into the real world.
I knew somebody, part of our gang of friends, who had a one night stand with a local "personality", was then revealed by some "journalist" only giving a the first name and printing a picture with a black bar across the eyes (which is still more than enough for people who knew him to identify him, of course), outed as gay in the process, didn't even know the other dude was married or a "personality", and after being shunned and bullied by a lot of people including his parents and grandparents ended up hanging himself in a tree near the place in the woods where our gang used to barbecue in the summers. At least his parents showed up for his funeral.
I have no doubt the journalist who doxed him had no intention of causing that amount of harm. And yet, the journalist could have considered the situation a little more thoroughly, considering that the the identity of my friend had no bearing on the story whatsoever. I can only hope it was a mistake that this journalist learned from, and not general disregard for other human beings' welfare.
And I am telling you that story in the hopes you and others agreeing with your "fair game" will keep it in mind if they ever are in the position where they have to make a moral decision whether to dox or not dox somebody.
I have no idea why you keep trying to frame what I said differently.
And he doesn't just rely on public sources:
> KrebsOnSecurity uncovered strong evidence to support a similar conclusion. In 2010, this author received a massive data dump from a source that had hacked into or otherwise absconded with more than four years of email records from ChronoPay — at the time a major Russian online payment provider whose CEO and co-founders were the chief subjects of my 2014 book, Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime.
> Querying those records on Yalishanda’s primary email address — stas_vl@mail.ru — reveal that this individual in 2010 sought payment processing services from ChronoPay for a business he was running which sold counterfeit designer watches.
And he posted a copy of the guy's passport!
0) https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/07/meet-the-worlds-biggest-...
> ... you mean "reports", which is what reporters do ...
So this doxx site just reports on people, no?
The distinction between him and the doxx site he writes about is subtle.
Also, "semi-routinely break actual laws" is a huge bin. Reporters also get sued for libel. And sometimes lose.
Edit: And hey, once you're "break[ing] actual laws", you're a criminal. And by Krebs' standard, you're fair game.
But for what it's worth, I'll briefly clarify my position. I'm rather anarchistic, but not very collectivist or communitarian. I believe that we're all free to do what we like, consistent with our principals and values. Notwithstanding whatever laws exist. And that includes self defense, and weeding out troublemakers.
So in that sense, I agree that Krebs has the right to doxx supposed criminals. But I also believe that others arguably have the right to act against those who attack them. And of course, everyone else has the right to act against those who attack them, recursively.
So it's fair to root for Krebs, and to attack neofascist doxxers. But, in my opinion, it's deceptive to argue that one is moral, and the other is evil.
"researching and broadcasting private or identifying information (especially personally identifying information) about an individual or organization"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
I'm not talking about personal addresses and phone numbers. I'm talking about names and public LinkedIn profiles.
Or is it just the case that, as one friend said on Slack, "doxxing is when someone you don't like posts information about someone you do like"?
Apples and oranges are different, yes. A private individual communicating independently is a much different thing than a lobbying front.
>Isn't this just Reddit's weird norms leaking into the real world?
It could be that online culture might know a thing or two about the downsides of exposing people's identities, especially when done by journalists with large audiences.
>Or is it just the case that, as one friend said on Slack, "doxxing is when someone you don't like posts information about someone you do like"?
Do some people have double standards about doxing? Sure. Double standards are pretty common in general.
At issue is a site called the “Doxbin,” which hosts the names, addresses, phone number and often known IP addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and other sensitive information on hundreds of people — and in some cases the personal information of the target’s friends and family.
2. Linked article is poorly written and unclear as to what actually happened and the context. If I'm reading it correctly it looks like everyone was using a real name associated with their online work anyway.
3. In any case mentioning someone's name and town in a Twitter fight is a world away from systematically organizing armed SWAT police calls to journalist's homes, physically threatening them or have them falsely arrested because they write about white supremacists and terrorism.
I don't expect strangers to protect information about just how much cash I have in my wallet that they found out by standing behind me in checkout line. But I surely want them nailed if they purposefully broadcast that and a mugger overhears and robs me.
We should really stop with the scope creep attempts around "violence".
This makes no sense. The "attack" of letting people know who a particular person is has always existed, but applied as an attack only in the very rare case where an exile came to your town and was later exposed. The norm was that everyone already knew exactly who everyone was -- in other words, that everyone was always and automatically subject to exactly the "attack" you claim didn't exist.
The attack of shaming has always existed and has generally been much more serious than it is now.
Putting aside the debate over what level of doxxing is acceptable, I think we can at least assert that there no level of SWATting is acceptable in any context.
This is a genuine question, but is doxxing really illegal? I recently read that posting someone's social security number is not illegal, so I'm finding it hard to reconcile the two notions.
Please cite that. Last I checked, SCOTUS was very clear that there is only one type of forbidden speech: fighting words. See [1], [2], [3], and [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.A.V._v._City_of_St._Paul
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._Phelps
“Sharing someone’s private information online without their permission, sometimes called doxxing, is a breach of their privacy and of the Twitter Rules. Sharing private information can pose serious safety and security risks for those affected and can lead to physical, emotional, and financial hardship.”
I've stopped reading his blog and tweets, and he went way, way, way down in estimation after this.
Sometimes those relationships are quite broad! For instance: on HN, it is generally verboten to out people. That's a rule we've adopted to maintain civil discourse on the site, and something we agree to when we decide to participate here. But HN has lots of rules that are not in fact rules in the real world; for instance, 'pvg regularly chides 'dang for enforcing the HN's idiosyncratic (but good) rule about not putting quotation marks around paraphrases of other people's comments.
Does any such circumstance apply here? The professional ethics rules of journalism have more the opposite directionality, cautioning journalists against maintaining anonymity of sources to the detriment of the readership.
I’ll take that as an agreement that it wasn’t nice then?
Regardless, I don’t think I said anywhere that he had an obligation to be nice, only that his comments were a violation of Twitter’s TOS. Which presumably he does have an obligation to follow since he’s using their platform.
> The professional ethics rules of journalism have more the opposite directionality, cautioning journalists against maintaining anonymity of sources to the detriment of the readership.
Krebs is not posting their names and location as a journalistic act, he’s posting them to serve as retribution for speaking badly about something he has a personal involvement in. I don’t know what the professional ethics rules of journalism say about that, but I think it’s something most people would agree is pretty shitty.
While it’s a debatable point, it’s most certainly not “plainly false” that he violated the TOS; Twitter would be well within bounds to take action against his account.
What obligation does anyone have to behave well?
The pr0gramm (a kinda image board) members were upset and since "Krebs" is German for "cancer", they started donating to a German cancer charity, more than EUR 200k in total, to "cure Krebs".
https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/deutsche-krebshilfe/
Will the free speech crowd indict radicals who threaten journalists?
All of that stuff is bad, and bad for us.
According to https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_IdeologicalMotivationsO... there have been no deaths from left wing terrorism in the USA for nearly 40 years.
You can read the same information here: https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/683984.pdf
> Specifically, tables 1 and 2 show a description, date, location and number of victim fatalities for each far right [106] and radical Islamist [119] attack between September 12, 2001 and December 31, 2016. During this period, no persons in the United States were killed in attacks carried out by persons believed to be motivated by extremist environmental beliefs, extremist “animal liberation”beliefs, or extremist far left beliefs.
Depends on what is counted as far-left extremism. There were anti-white / anti-police attacks associated with BLM:
https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/IncidentSummary.aspx?gt...
https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/IncidentSummary.aspx?gt...
> he needed to bring destruction 'upon bad cops as well as good cops' because of what he saw as the justice system's failure to prosecute bad police officers who commit crimes
wanting society to hold criminal police officers accountable is a "extremist far left belief", regardless of this individual's deranged methodology.
What makes you think these were from far-left extremism? What groups or ideology did they profess to be a part of?
You don't need to be associated with a group to be an individual extremist deciding to advance a movement. The shooter's photographed doing a black power salute. The black power movement isn't right wing.
https://heavy.com/news/2016/07/micah-xavier-x-johnson-dallas...
While there may certainly be more extremists on the right the idea that someone on the left can't be an extremist, or that there are no leftist extremists, doesn't make much sense.
Well of course it doesn't, which is why nobody was saying that. There's been plenty of horrific deadly left wing violence historically, both in the US and other countries. It's just that in the last few decades and limited to the US, there has been little to no deadly left wing violence, a time period which has seen quite a lot of deadly right wing violence.
But also, yes, I think it's not unreasonable to expect that people might show more outrage for murders than for property damage, even if they disagree with both.
I never mentioned property damage. Antifa's violence isn't "property damage". This is the kind of thing I'm talking about: bad faith straw manning to justify ignoring violence by leftists.
The dataset that I mention above doesn't contain any references to antifa. This is probably because 'antifa' isn't a specific group, but an umbrella term for a number of groups, some of which are entirely nonviolent or target only property.
> This is the kind of thing I'm talking about: bad faith straw manning to justify ignoring violence by leftists.
This is pretty unfair. I'm not in a position to do anything about any particular act of violence, but there's a strong chance that if you suggest a concrete example to me I'll state that I disagree with it. For example, I don't believe that you should punch people you disagree with in the face, regardless of whether they are fascists or not.
You should not be surprised however, that people are more aware of violence resulting in fatalities and more vocal in their condemnation of it than other violence (even other violence that they also disagree with).
That's not a truthful statement, or even close.
https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/terrorism-in-america/wha...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_Lead_(Italy)
In The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis talks about how opposing sides exploit the mutual vicious cycle of outrage. The common interest between extreme groups who otherwise demonize and hate each other, is that they both benefit from the cycle of outrage and the breakdown of society. Both fringes want to let things break down and roll the dice, for the chance they might come out on top.
You don’t see antifa hooligans wearing Clinton garb. You did see MAGA hats at Charlottesville.
This isn’t a both sides issue.
To them, Clinton is a dirty centrist.
This isn’t a both sides issue.
It's not even a both fringes issue, as there are multiple fringes that don't even like each other. It is a fringes issue, however.
The old white man who firebombed the ICE facility in Washington a few weeks ago was repeating things that AOC recently said about "ICE concentration camps."
> You don’t see antifa hooligans wearing Clinton garb. You did see MAGA hats at Charlottesville.
He was also a member of Antifa.
We don't; domestic extremist violence for many years in the US has consistently been very one-sided, with the Right being the absolutely dominant source, especially for deadly violence against persons.
Are those the two "sides" you are referring to? If so, I fail to see how they are engaging in a "mutual vicious cycle of outrage".
You shouldn't be able to make an anonymous phone call and have the police bust down someone else's door guns drawn.
An unverified phone call alone should not amount to probable cause. That's not civilization.
911 call taker: “Thanks for your report. We’ll work on verifying this and might be able to get out there in 2-3 weeks.”
I don't think there can be any one-size-fits-all solution to this - each case must be assessed on its own merits.
Police: “Well, thanks for that. Have a nice day”...
Police don’t bust in and start opening fire, so your description of how this works is simply false, and removing their ability to respond to emergencies is absurd.
The solution is to take these reports seriously, but with a grain of salt. i.e. don't just shoot a guy that walks out of his house while confused.
It's not super scalable (that's why numbers are spoofed instead) but for a couple calls it'd be no problem.
In a pre-adtech surveillance capitalism world, it was possible to physically enter a location and be known to some but not all.
An IFF system that's readable only to friends addresses much this need.
Surveillance is orthogonal to the use of authentication, although is a natural consequence of needing to keep tracking of billing records.
I understand police in the US has to adapt to the assumption that everyone has a gun, but even when you suspect a hostage situation what's the problem with politely knocking and waiting if you get a friendly response?
That might be a big part of the 'root cause' of this issue.
In contrast to this, in the US, there appears to be practically no accountability for the police: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2019/07/18/cop-who-...
The United States has had a high level of gun ownership for several hundred years. The police response of "respond to anonymous tip by kicking down the door and opening fire" seems to be a mostly post-9/11 thing.
I suspect that the root causes are multifold:
(1) No-knock warrants became legal in 1995 to prevent the "destruction of evidence" during drug busts.
(2) Americans got really paranoid after 9/11, and more tolerant of this sort of police activity.
(3) Increasingly harsh prison conditions and unfair sentencing encourages suspects to fight back, rather than comply with law enforcement.
(4) We have a number of well-funded and well-trained paramilitary criminal organizations in the United States, thanks largely to the War on Drugs and decades of poorly-thought-out immigration policy.
Modern semi-automatic (double-action) revolvers were commonplace as of 1900.
Both of the above fired highly lethal ammunition, with rates of fire and reload not that far from modern semi-automatics, which were themselves common by the 1920s.
At which time you could mail-order a machine gun to your front door, which is So Not Even Remotely Close To Legal today.
Body armor suitable for police wouldn't become commonplace until the 2000s.
Ergo, for 130+ years, the police faced a populace armed with high-capacity assault weapons. And for most of that time, they did so with six-shot .38 revolvers and no bulletproof vests.
And only in the past twenty-odd years has kicking in doors with guns blazing become, somehow, necessary.
So, no, gun ownership, even of high-powered, high-capacity assault weapons, doesn't correlate at all to police violence.
I once pulled over a few blocks from a friend's house, so I could call her and get a few final directions. A man from the house I had parked in front of instantly started talking ominously and yelling at me. I think that guy was a meth head crazed out of his mind. In the back of my mind was the possibility that he'd bring out a shotgun and start blazing away at me. (Yes, my friend didn't live in a great neighborhood.) The police here have to be prepared to deal with people like that.
I think friendly looking police androids are going to be quite helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SThUJTApA5I
In this case, they smelled smoke coming from the unit, which is why the fire department broke down the door, and the officers didn't go in expecting to get shot at.
It's easy to fault the police when they respond with guns drawn, but at the same time it's often impossible for them to know what they're about to walk into.
I'm not saying being a police officer is an easy job, but isn't that what they signed up for? "To protect and serve" (despite being legally challenged and rejected when actually taken to court where an officer refused to engage with shooters) seems to be their mantra, and they talk about putting their lives on the line for the public safety.
I fear the problem is the police are more interested in protecting themselves than protecting the public, at least in the United States.
Being a cop in an area like Japan, where you mostly drink tea and stand watch outside of the police box trying to fight boredom’s is one thing. Responding to a call in Baltimore is another.
Cops are cops they are not Seal team, they collect paycheck and want to come back home alive and undamaged, expecting anything else from them is unrealistic.
The problem isn’t that the police respond to a false alarm. The problem is that they sometimes shoot people when they do.
What's (relatively) new is that they've discovered they can summon their own personal army in the form of an increasingly militarized police force.
To your point though - the fact that the swatting has resulted in innocent deaths is evidence that law enforcement is too aggressive.
Exactly! Especially since law enforcement has (successfully!) argued that they have no legal duty to serve and protect you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maksim_Gelman_stabbing_spree#L...
You can't have your cake and eat it too!
If you don't have an obligation to protect, you don't have immunity when you shoot at anyone who is not shooting at you.
IANAL. My understanding is police have a duty to the public at large, not to an individual person outside of a special relationship (i.e. witness protection). If the police did have a duty to individuals, the state would be unable to allocate police resources to best serve the public. Essentially, individual priorities would DDOS police resources. In the case you reference:
> a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen. [...] A publicly maintained police force constitutes a basic governmental service provided to benefit the community at large by promoting public peace, safety and good order. [...] Publicly furnished police protection may accrue to the personal benefit of individual citizens, but at all times the needs and interests of the community at large predominate.
"Is something on fire?" "Is someone injured?" "I'm sorry, 911 is for emergencies only, not personal therapy"
For the moment, replace "swatting" with bona fide criminals behind the door. If the swat teams ended up killing some of those criminals that wouldn't be evidence of over-aggression on the part of law enforcement.
Since you posit that "gun drawn" is the reasonable response to swatting, then the same logic applies. You're obligated to continue wearing your devil mask for that sentence, so you have to explicitly argue why that isn't the case. :)
Yes, it would. Our police are not, as the saying goes, "judge, jury, and executioner." Those "bona fide criminals behind the door" are only accused of a crime and are entitled to a vigorous defense and day in court. They are definitely not to simply be gunned down in response to the arrival of the police.
Yes, if those people happen to do something threatening that requires lethal response--like shooting at the responding officers--then the officers are entitled to defend themselves. But police officers simply happening to show up where criminal activity is occurring does not give those officers license to "kill some of those criminals." That is over-aggression on the part of law enforcement and, sadly enough, is one of the major problems we're dealing with in Seattle in relation to our police, petty crime, the ways our police force have reacted in the past, and how to balance the competing needs.
I'd suggest... you know... following the rule of law.
Basically, the whole presumption of innocence thing.
A call is a great reason to respond... with inquiry.
Guns ready sure IN the event and inquiry leads to life and death situation... but that should be after the fact of an inquiry: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
It's not up to me to find solutions that don't violate peoples rights. It's up to the people wanting solutions. Just because you have a problem doesn't put you above the law.
Same goes for everyone under the concept of rule of law. As someone who is dealing with a US Naturalization, the rule of law as a concept is drilled in hard. Shame people born with the right don't understand it.
There's like so many steps along the way where you can make an assessment of the situation before going FULL SWAT-raid. Mother in a night gown opening the door, yawning? Probably not a threat.
I'm not saying I want the job handling these situations or that it's easy, but "well, someone called, let's send in the Wet Ops team!" can't be the only answer, either! There's even videos of cops handling this super calm and professionally, basically how I described it above. So it's not impossible.
This is because in your country it is exceedingly unlikely the cops will receive a barrage of high powered assault rifle fire after knocking. The militarization of police in the US is a complicated problem that ultimately stems from our proliferation of guns which turn every interaction cops have into a potentially deadly one.
The US cops have talked about escalating risks for years but US cops haven't faced actual escalating dangers. One can track the actual danger faced by police and it has been declining.
The problem is the average citizen gets their information from TV dramas where cops indeed constantly face dangers.
headline: "Once again: police work is NOT getting more dangerous"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/10/02/...
I don't have an opinion on that, having not looked at the data, but it is entirely plausible.
stoking the fears of the average citizen to be fearful of cops likely increases their risk of death on the job which is all this does.
The question is whether this level of danger is a sufficient to justify police tactics that severely endanger civilians such as no-knock raids - factors that make "SWATing" so dangerous for the average person.
The further factor here is that the false belief that there's an armed camp ready to attack cops instantly with automatic rifles can give one the distorted impression that no-knock and related tactics will save lives.
However, the reality is there are few people ready to knowingly engage the cops (since even if you win, you lose against the authorities) but there citizens who have guns ready for persons known who might be breaking into their home and so SWAT tactics can be as likely to draw fire and casualties as to avoid them in the real world. And kill innocent of course.
I would never be an advocate for the kind of no-knock raids the article is describing. I'm not addressing that by contesting the use of those statistics. My point is more that _any_ risk of getting shot in the line of duty changes the entire playing field. Just because it's declining doesn't mean that it's insignificant. That being said, as said before I'm not advocating for the kind of overwhelmingly violent responses that SWATting describes.
I haven't seen many cop series lately but my impression is most police actors in hollywood don't dress up like John Rambo in fighting in the jungle.
https://www.journal-news.com/news/local/local-police-boost-a...
https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/crime--law/police-ex...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/15/local-...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/09/police...
In part, this is driven by programs (as mentioned in the USA today article) where the local police forces can get the equipment itself at no cost (they only pay the maintenance, cost of shipping the equipment, and cost of storing the equipment, or any other local accommodations; all of which are a bargain compared to its actual cost)
SWATting and police militarization seems to have started after the September 11, 2001 attack in New York.
Regardless of your opinion on the issue, it's pretty clear that "gun ownership" and "police kicking down doors" don't correlate.
I own guns, as my father did before me and his father before him. All my brothers own guns. We're sportsmen, hunting is a popular recreation where we live.
Of all the guns in my family, not one has ever hurt a human being. Not a single incident, over many decades and who knows how many shots fired.
I have many friends with the same situation-- I don't know of anyone who has ever shot another human being. Not a single one.
The problem is the dramatic drop in respect for other people and their lives. Some people have lost respect, they are dangerous. It's not the gun's fault.
In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes, 30,296 deadly, killing 32,999, and injuring 2,239,000.
There are a roughly similar amount of fatalities related to guns, though more than 50% of those are suicides.
A fatal SWATing recently should have raised so many red flags - caller was from an overseas number, described the house as two story when it was one, gave the wrong house color, and said that they could see things through the window from the street (when there were no windows visible from the street).
Furthermore, why do police feel obligated to respond to a phonecall that could be fake but not to a tweet, email, IM, etc?
The system is broken, phones that can call cops should have strict provenance standards.
If you're sending cops with guns to someone's house at 3am you should be required to prove your identity.
Maybe it works in military conflicts, but in civilian policing, it gets too many ~innocents killed.
Edit: There seems to be some confusion below. I'm not excusing the police of their responsibility by any means. Its important to remember the vast majority of swatting incidents end without violence, thanks almost entirely to the professionalism of the men who have just kicked down a door (or chose not to kick down the door, but knock instead) and found out that the phone call they got about a guy in his living room butchering small children is actually just a dude playing video games or whatever.
Edit2: I'm a pretty libertarian fellow but if you are incapable of thinking of a scenario where you would want the police to kick in your door and storm your house with guns, then you either have no imagination, or you live in a magical fairy tale land and I'm super jealous.
Making a 911 call is an anonymous venture; there's no deposition or oath or penalty of perjury here. A civilized society is one in which calls made to such an endpoint (whether by a human or bot or whomever) are treated accordingly.
Police need to stop killing people. Stop violating people's rights. SWAT teams have not made society better and are easily deprecated. That's the real message here.
All 911 calls are and should be taken seriously though. Even when you misdial 911 they will sometimes even send a car out to make sure, unless you explain yourself well over the phone.
So these scammer guys will always be able to get a police response, especially as long as phone calls can be spoofed to look like it's coming from "inside" the house. The only variable is how the police handle it and, of course, how many sociopaths there are who can pull it off properly without getting caught.
Many times they don't even need to bother that far. A fatal incident last year involved a 911 call from an overseas number (that couldn't accurately describe the house he was supposedly looking at as he called). There has to be some astronomical odds about you internationally roaming, and seeing a supposed multiple execution style homicide "from the sidewalk", but yet, SWAT still showed up, and killed someone.
It depends what "taken seriously" means here. If it means followed-up upon in a rapid way to see if there is any corroborating information to indicate that there's a real emergency, then sure.
If it means instead to suppose that any of the provided information is true tout court, then no, this is a recipe for ongoing disaster.
It's important to have a rapid, anonymous reporting system. It's also important to have auxiliary systems in place to verify information that comes in through this system.
I don't really follow the Marvel universe very closely outside of X-men, but isn't Captain America a figure who stands in contrast to government overreach, Nazism, police brutality, etc? I think of him as being a sort of left libertarian.
I think we might actually need more Captain Americas in these situations, not less.
What's a left libertarian? A liberal socialist? Those words are opposite.
Now, I imagine swat teams don't like doxxing either. Sounds like a business opportunity.
According the FBI there's been 250 between 2000-2017. https://www.fbi.gov/about/partnerships/office-of-partner-eng...
I also think it's important to understand why the police respond like they do. It isn't arbitrary, it's statistically suppose to save lives, but SWATing is intentionally abusing that response.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting
Doesn't that strike you as something people might say but never do? Kind of like innocence until proven guilty? I mean of course the state and its employees don't think like that.
As a first responder who has trained with, and documented photographically, multiple active shooter scenarios (training, at high schools, community colleges and even malls) and responded to more than one...
These scenarios are not active shooter events. That is someone well, actively shooting. Usually with confirmation from 911 dispatchers ("we have gunshots in the background of the call").
Usually these situations are highly Hollywood-ized. One caller described "I can see from the street through the window - they have the whole family on their knees, hands on heads and have guns to their heads, about to execute them all".
More worryingly are stories of sending quantities of drugs (often possession, not even supply levels) to a residence - that shouldn't be able to evoke a no-knock SWAT response in the first place.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think under those circumstances, having a consensus algorithm in place would diminish the likelihood of it occurring, since, presumably multiple agents would have to have the fear reflex at the same moment. Unless agents are getting feedback from others about their trigger pools, or decide before hand that they are going to do it all together, I just don't see the scenarios you describe being realized. Of course, if cops go in with the idea that they are gonna kill someone, then they are no longer behaving lawfully.
My real issue with the idea is how practical it would be. If an officer's gun didn't go off when it should have, and they were killed, then people are going to be really upset.
* One officer sees a suspect drawing a weapon, and reacts more quickly than the others or the suspect is not visible to the other officers, and thus fires a justified shot and saves a fellow officer's life.
* One officer misinterprets an innocent gesture, fires an unjustified shot and takes the life of a suspect/innocent person.
Furthermore, I'd worry that the diffusion of responsibility means that the officers fire more often, under the belief that their fellow officers agreed with their course of action, or are indicating that they are in danger (by trying to fire), or that they don't believe they alone have taken the decision to kill, so can justify shooting at a lower perceived level of threat.
See for instance firing squads:
> This is believed to reinforce the sense of diffusion of responsibility among the firing squad members. This diffusion of responsibility makes the execution process more reliable because the members are more likely to aim to kill if they are not entirely blamed for it, or if there is a chance they did not fire the lethal shot. It also allows each member of the firing squad to believe afterwards that he did not personally fire a fatal shot—for this reason, it is sometimes referred to as the "conscience round".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_by_firing_squad
With respect to the diffusion of responsibility effect, I think you are probably right that there are lots of possible unintended consequences. In as much as an officer decision to pull the trigger explicitly or implicitly takes in to account the reduced feelings of guilt and increased feelings of peer support in case the weapon is in fact fired, and if it takes into account the smaller likelihood that pulling a trigger will actually discharge the weapon, it may well increase the frequency which the trigger is pulled. More darkly, one could imagine a squad of officers making it into a distributed game of Russian Roulette.
On the other hand, I think this highlights the limits of our imagination. For example, one could imagine the following alternative. Each officer has a body cam, and a pair at base, who is actively monitoring the camera. A decision to fire the weapon must involve both the person on the ground, and the buddy. Or one could have a supervisor of some sort, who can override individual decisions, and so forth.
I don't have the answer, but I think it warrants thinking about.
It's the only way it will change.
Untold thousands of regular joe's get hit with this every year. No one cares since it only happens to 'the bad guys'.
When you have authoritarianism, it doesn't always go your way. That's why we should be against authoritarian tactics, such as sending armed men to break down doors and terrorize people over an anonymous phone call (I personally think we should draw the line in the sand much more on the side of freedom, but this basic level should be agreed by all)
I grew up long enough ago when there was a feeling that the Western world was superior to the Iron and Bamboo curtains because these things didn't happen in America.
How to set this up is a more boring than it sounds...
https://doxbin.org/robots.txt
User-agent: * Disallow:
Although it's done incorrectly.
site:doxbin.org
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxbin)