It's worth noting that this is just the latest in a long series of episodes of harassment which Randi has experienced -- it's not just another case of gamers taking their competition offline, which is the most common swatting backstory I hear about these days.
Rather than allowing herself to be driven out of the field as many other women have been[1], Randi is fighting back and recently founded the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative (http://onlineabuseprevention.org/), which aims to help people protect themselves from harassment and to help tech companies and law enforcement to better respond to this problem.
If anyone expected this to stop Randi, they're sorely mistaken. I know Randi as a FreeBSD developer, and she is one of the most fearless people I've ever met.
[1] Not intended to cast aspersions on those women who have been driven out; if I faced the same experience I too would have been driven out of this field.
Please don't belittle victims of crime by describing their experience as "just another case of gamers taking their competition offline". People of both gender experience harassment in life, and at times it goes into the realm of becoming victim of crimes. It should not matter what gender you are or your chosen profession in life, by belittle it you are causing direct harm to other human beings.
Please assume good faith when it comes to subtleties of wording like this. Just because you feel the post could be interpreted as belittling doesn't imply that that was the author's intent.
I read cperciva as criticising the commonly given justification of online abuse. Many people say it's not actually harassment and that it's just mean comments or that it's just an extension of online competitiveness.
I read cperciva as condemning that and using this example to show that all online harassment edit[is / can be] severe.
> I read cperciva as criticising the commonly given justification of online abuse.
Are you sure? His opening 'graph is:
"It's worth noting that this is just the latest in a long series of episodes of harassment which Randi has experienced -- it's not just another case of gamers taking their competition offline, which is the most common swatting backstory I hear about these days."
This seems to me to say: "This isn't a one-off incident; it's yet another terrible incident in a very long string of related harassment incidents."
He goes on to say that Randi has done a huge amount of work to actively combat online abuse.
I don't see where cperciva makes the claim that all online harassment is severe. (Truly, not all online harassment is severe. When my boss uses email to get on my case for overdue deliverables, that's online harassment; but it's a) minor and b) justified.) [0] :)
[0] Or, look at like 80% of what happens in Eve Online for boatloads of examples of minor online harassment.
I guess it depend on how you want to interpret it, and a clarification from cperciva would be nice.
To me it was as a statement that because the long series of episodes of harassment which Randi has experienced, this specific case is much more than all those gamers who complain about getting swatted, as their problem is just another case of gamers taking their competition offline. That this case is different from the norm (as Manishearth phrase it bellow), and thus worthy of notice in contrast to the problems of "gamers".
To me, that is belittling. Maybe cperciva meant the opposite, that swatting is a real crime and not something to be perceived as just "gamers taking their competition offline", but it was not the impression I got from that comment.
I think you are right, there aren't any good reasons to do a SWATing and there isn't anyone who deserves to be the target of one. But I guess almost everybody, including cperciva, believes this.
I guess if you said 'Please be careful not to' instead of "Please don't belittle" you would get less argument. Instead of assuming a particular intention, point out how you read the phrase and ask if that was intended.
Good advice and thus upvoted. Its a fair point, and just because this article mentioned gamergate, it doesn't mean some people would belittle one group of victims on order to make an other set of victim more likeable. It should have seemed more strange, and thus promoted a investigating question rather than an assumption.
Please don't belittle victims of crime by describing their experience as "just another case of gamers taking their competition offline".
Not what I intended at all. Perhaps it would have been clearer if I had written "yet another case"; my point was that this was not like most swattings and readers shouldn't pattern-match and assume they know what was going on.
This isn't belittlement, it is -as was stated- the most common motive for SWATting. Angry 14-year-olds [0] (whether they're raging about getting pwnt in Call of Duty[1], or doing it for the lulz on *chan) are the vast majority of the folks who engage in SWATting.
I urge you to carefully re-read the comment that you criticized. It's pretty clear to me that cperciva has no intention of belittling anyone.
Belittling or trivializing is exactly what the word "just" makes the comment look like. If you can't see it, maybe try it with phrases like "it's just another case of harassment" vs. "it's another case of harassment".
It's not made any better by describing it as "gamers taking the competition offline". Two problems; first, it's making it appear as some kind of a natural extension of playing a game / watching a game stream. Hey, it's just some competition, boys will be boys! Second, it's too symmetrical, basically spreading the blame between both the perp and the victim. Again if you can't see this, what would you say about describing this case as "some Twitter users taking their gender politics discussions offline"?
There's some context that you're omitting in your analysis. cperciva says:
"It's worth noting that this is just the latest in a long series of episodes of harassment which Randi has experienced -- it's not just another case of gamers taking their competition offline, which is the most common swatting backstory I hear about these days."
(Emphasis mine.)
Asshole gamers calling in real-life SWAT because they can't handle feelings of inferiority is the most common reason for SWATting that I hear of.
I hold the opinion that giving police fraudulent information in order to summon SWAT on someone's house is HIGHLY inappropriate and -often- very dangerous[0]. While cperciva doesn't explicitly express his opinions on SWATting, the remaining 'graphs in his comment would lead one to believe that he also thinks that SWATting is serious business, regardless of motive.
I find it interesting how much analysis has been given to the tone of cperciva's comment. There is an awful lot of this going around lately.
What is the goal commenters in such threads are pursuing? To correct a wrong or misunderstanding? To show someone as biased or bigoted (or to advocate the other way)? Who are we training, and what is it we are teaching? Could it be done a better way?
Is the error cperciva may have made large or small? Does it have an impact? If insignificant, why does so much effort need to be expended? Otherwise, why are there not articles to reference on the issue? (Or are there?)
To be completely blunt, this all seems incredibly passive aggressive to me. I'm not talking about sexism--again, I'm simply referring to all of the meta analysis on communication and tone.
I am honestly curious, and my questions are not for dramatic effect. Could this all be short-circuited by a "I doubt the OP meant to trivialize XYZ, [...]" and be done with it?
I'd suggest it's a case in point for why the principle of charity is so vital to useful communication.
The trouble is that people's standard for whether or not a post is awful (belittling/sexist/etc..) tends to be whether or not they feel it can plausibly be interpreted that way. This is the wrong standard - we should judge a post awful when there's no other way to interpret it.
I made what looked like to me as an obvious interpretation, and then others made the opposite interpretation and said theirs was the obvious one.
Some discussion about the words in the comment is thus nice, as it hopefully helps everyone to understand why both interpretations are valid (or in extreme cases, reach a consensus on a single interpretation). I find in particular jsnell comment interesting, as it let me know how much value I unconscious applied into the phrase "just another".
This is only a matter of time until someone is killed... It looks like it almost happened on January 15 when a victim shot home invaders that happened to be SWAT making a no knock entry.
If police not identifying themselves is becoming a pattern, it's going to be very confusing and dangerous to ordinary people.
I live in Germany, in a completely safe and virtually crimeless idyllic suburb. A couple of months ago I came home at noon and noticed a small group of what looked like thugs loitering at the front door of my neighbor's house. One of them kept banging the door and shouting "open up, or you don't want to find out what happens next" (or something to that effect) in a thick regional dialect.
All the neighbors were hiding in their houses, but I was already on the street right in front of them, so I walked over and asked "is there something wrong here?". Two of the thugs blocked my way and the shouting guy exclaimed "move along, there is nothing to see here".
This was the point when I was getting out my phone and started dialing the police emergency number, just as two trucks of the fire department and a police van were moving in from opposite ends of the street, coming to a halt in front of the house. Uniformed people swarmed out and joined what I had assumed to be thugs before. Turns out they were plain-clothes officers.
In the end, it came out it was a pot raid, but apparently nothing was found. In slightly different circumstances, this could have escalated quickly. The plain clothes officers were clearly looking for trouble. At the very least they were enjoying their effect on the civilians. It's not a SWAT yet, but it's enough to make me uncomfortable; especially considering the history of the country.
It's not always been like this here. I do have friends who are police officers, and generally they take pride in the fact that (and I quote) "it's not like in the US", but I'm afraid we might be importing this problem now.
I mean - let's be honest - there is a reason why somebody chooses to become a cop. And more often than not - this very reason isn't about "helping people". It's more likely about enjoying the exertion of power over people. There is a stronger psychological similarity between ordinary hooligans and police men than what is good. It's also always the police who will eagerly suppress people in case a state turns increasingly totalitarian - policemen don't like thinking for themselves - which is why they choose those hierarchical jobs in the first place. They like to have action and the feeling of adrenalin.
Also it's worth thinking about this - the SS in Nazi Germany was made up of about 2% of the population. Now this personality type who would do SS jobs didn't just go away - the root is of psychological nature which is most likely more or less uniformly distributed within any population. Now those guys - in that psychological, statistical sense still exist - what do you think what kind of job they will choose? Elder care? Most likely either military or police.
> there is a reason why somebody chooses to become a cop..
Raymond Chandler: "Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men."
> It's more likely about enjoying the exertion of power over people.
It depends on the political climate. I grant you - and as a German by birth I used to think about it a lot - that Germans are especially vulnerable to this. Honestly I witnessed abuse of power far more often from public servants (if you need to interact directly with a low-rung city official here you're pretty much hosed), and I won't deny that everyday citizen-on-citizen malice has a special quality in this country to this day.
But it's been my experience that police officers are indeed mostly in it to help people. Sure, they're extra suspicious about everything, but I think that's par for the job. If this is indeed changing, it's a result of international osmosis.
I mean when police officers refuse to identify as such, ignorantly or willfully creating a situation where civilians think they're in danger. It's not safe for anybody involved.
> Especially with their new shiny uniforms.
I think they're updating the uniforms all over the EU, making them more alike. They do look snazzy. ;)
There was recently some articles about the phenomenon in the Finnish Helsinki Times, but they say it mainly happens in the USA "due to the agressive operating culture of the countrys police"[1]. Apparently the people calling the swat strike may be from other countries.
I don't know if you can entirely blame the police. These scenarios are sort of a product of their environment: guns are very available in the US and there's no room to make assumptions about emergency calls. Police are forced to respond like its a real scenario - almost like a low level DDoS attack. Makes you wonder what these SWATers are saying to police.
Guns were very available to civilians in the US before we started giving the police military hardware, before we escalated paramilitary tactics from a few dozen teams around the country to every single department, before the no-knock warrant and the guns-drawn entry and the highest incarceration rate in the world.
This stuff doesn't have to be the standard. This is a fad borne of the fact that most people who are SWATed find boots on their necks and cuffs on their wrists before they're capable of explaining themselves. If they're lucky.
Here's an example of a women with a knife making threats to kill people and ignoring police instruction where those police are clearly armed and prepared to kill.
She was pregnant; the knife was a three inch blade; the police had less-lethal options available but chose not to use them; police did not just have their pistols - one of them had an AR15 rifle.
There were things the police could have done that would have avoided the death of the woman (and the risk of death or injury to bystanders). (I'm not talking about shoot to wound - I know enough to know that's misguided). The police could have used their tasers. They should have been given better training in de-escalation.
My understanding of this situation from following on Twitter is that they claimed to be at her location, armed, with a hostage, asking for ransom.
I'm doing my best to spare the diatribe about how the Oakland Police Department is essentially the worst police department in the US.
Let's just take a step back. In what world does someone who wants a ransom for a hostage call the police? This isn't something that happens, except in action movies. The entire narrative, including the police reaction, is straight out of a sophomore film student's twisted imagination.
The police, esp in the US, but in general, aren't designed to protect and serve, they're designed to eliminate threats to power. Right now Oakland has a new mayor who wants to make sure voters see that she is tough on crime.
This situation is an unfortunate collision of two worlds that know very little about each other. :/
Surely we have to blame the police a little. (Procedures I mean, not individuals.) I mean, it's true that every anonymous call is a potential life-and-death situation, but it's equally true that every call is a potential prank.
To put it in a fire department metaphor, if someone anonymously calls in a fire, naturally you send out the trucks. But you need to check for smoke before you turn the hose on, right?
Why procedures and not individuals? Procedures don't emerge out of the ether, they are written, reviewed, approved, and implemented by individuals. If individuals aren't responsible, there is no accountability.
I'm finnish and I was really wondering how this could be happening in Finland as our police is not exactly known for swat style raids.
So FYI for other people nor unerstanding finnish: This is about some finns (probably teens) calling police to some address in another country, not police raiding homes swat style in Finland.
I can confirm that most indications we've been able to gather point at SWAT threats coming in over Skype and google voice. Location is harder to pinpoint. Many do appear to come from overseas.
I was wondering this recently. It's hard to imagine this happening here in the UK. The thought of police in riot gear kicking down doors and waving guns around sounds beyond crazy to me.
American police kill about 1,000 people per year. There's a thing going round saying that US police in March killed more people than UK police killed since 1900 but none of the sources look particularly reliable.
Several bad shootings over decades? What's your point? What a strange thing to say.
We don't shoot many people, America do. It's such a huge, cavernous gulf in magnitude that I have no idea what point you're trying to make with your last paragraph.
I'm saying that it's wrong to think that armed police officers do better than armed US officers. We mostly don't have armed officers over here. Where they are armed mistakes happen and people die, so it's important to keep UK officers unarmed.
Also: yes, even those few deaths are totally unacceptable in the UK. People are shocked by police shootings; investigations are rigorous. Contrast that to the US where shootin a dog sparks mass outrage but shooting a drunk pregnant woman doesn't.
No knock entries are indeed insane - I don't understand the scenario that would be required for a no-knock entry to be the only acceptable option. Are the police scared of the occupants firing guns at them? That would be ironic.
For one, you could detect these no-knocking individuals quite easily:
- Cameras on the exterior of the property
- Motion lights, motion sensors, motion bells are all quite cheap.
And re: destruction/obfuscation of electronic evidence-
-"One-click" destruction scripts, etc.
- TrueCrypt volumes, everywhere. Circuit breakers, power strips, etc. with switches. If you don't manage to destroy the volume, no aggressor will be able to access it.
- Degaussing setups for spinning disks, activated by similar mechanisms.
This stuff is pretty cheap, easily available. Anybody caught by these technically-incompetent police executing no-knock raids deserves to be caught.
Hell, if you don't have a few 6TB volumes full of random bits, labeled "Evidence," you aren't doing it right. Gotta tie up those investigative resources somehow.
Which would be exactly what's not happening if "a guy has a gun".
Either someone is in danger, in which case no-knock isn't needed, or they're not, in which case why the hell is a SWAT raid being carried out on the basis of an anonymous tip?
I really need to read Pat Cadigan's book "Tea From An Empty Cup"[1] again sometime soon, which was probably foreshadowing for SWATing-style attacks.
The story is centered around an online gamer who is killed in real life because of stuff that happens in-game. It explores the often-assumed belief that it doesn't matter what you do because "it's just a game" or "I was only trolling", and how for some people the line between fantasy and reality is not as obvious as it should be.
I don't want this to be seen as excusing this behavior or justifying it, so let's get that on the table right away.
In some cases, they may be well aware of the consequences & just not care. I went through a phase in my early teens where I might have done things like this if it was a possibility. I grew up in a home where rules were arbitrary and basically boiled down to one thing: whatever I did or didn't do was wrong. My friends were all bad people and I was forbidden from seeing them. Their parents were all irresponsible people and I was forbidden from sleeping over at their houses. Mom fell asleep on the couch and I turned the TV off; I was treating her like a child and disrespecting her. Mom fell asleep on the couch and I didn't turn the TV off; I was wasting electricity. If I fell asleep on the couch with the TV on I needed to learn some respect for other people who had to sleep in the same house with all that damn noise. You get the idea.
I acted out because nobody cared about how I felt, so why should I care about anyone else? I wish mandatory reporting was a thing back when I came to school with a red handprint on my face. As a pre-teen, I wanted to be the one making other people suffer for a change. Consequences didn't matter because I was already guilty of something, so why not have a real reason for it, have some fun along the way.
Again, this doesn't mean there shouldn't be consequences for this behavior. But we should consider that some of these misanthropes are themselves victims of abuse looking for some sense of power or control in life and find ways to get them help.
People keep on saying it's kids(mental age), but I don't buy it. I was reading a book on psychopathy/sociopath(can't remember the name) but one of the theses were just how common they actually are. In times past these people would just be dicks to people around them. Now they can actual fuck with people with far greater reach. I think they are fully aware of what they are doing and only find it funny because they lack empathy.
Given the recent judicial president set for revenge porn cases, I feel we need a similarly harsh ruling for those found guilty of swatting. This is a crime that could easily result in the deaths of innocent victims, and the punishment needs to reflect that.
Doxing for the purposes of shaming wouldn't be bad to punish either. I don't want us to become a vengeful police state, but this kind of cowardly behavior makes me angry.
Aside from training the police, FBI, et al., how do we go about stopping this from happening more frequently?
> how do we go about stopping this from happening more frequently?
I suppose there's more to it than just better police procedures, but I'm gobsmacked every time I read about a police force breaking down a door, or even drawing a gun, based on nothing but an anonymous email or phone call. It smacks of a system that's never encountered bad inputs before.
In a way it's surprising that actual criminal gangs didn't catch onto this years ago, and start swatting their rivals.
> In a way it's surprising that actual criminal gangs didn't catch onto this years ago, and start swatting their rivals.
In England it used to be the case that many reports to "Crimestoppers" (an anonymous tip-off line) were from drug dealers informing on the competitors.
It's really easy to have your information posted publicly without even knowing it. There's a whole industry in the US that buys up public records, cross-references them and sells them as 'background checks'. Buy a house? Your name and address is now a public record. Sign up for Cable TV/Internet with free phone service thrown in? Hope you checked to pay the extra 'unlisted number' fee because otherwise your name address and phone number are now in the phone book. Ever have to settle something in court? Your name and address, along with whatever you went to court over are now publicly available.
In the past you'd actually have to go to some county government office to view the records, but these companies will collect them in bulk and sell the information on the internet. Most of them will let you claim it and take down the information for free, but then go on to offer sell you services where they go and send take down notifications to a bunch of other sites. It's a huge racket.
My guess is if you have haters willing to expend the energy, it's very likely almost anyone who has a significant online presence can be doxxed. In some cases, it's as simple as making a WHOIS query - for example, they could locate me from just my HN account in about two minutes.
It's not about communities, it's about people who think that they can mask naked misogyny and abusive, abhorrent behavior behind a community and behind some flimsy excuses.
This is always how it's been. Always. The Jews weren't persecuted in Germany without justification. And there were always pretexts for every lynching of a black or asian person in the US. But those justifications and those pretexts always skipped more than a few steps of logic. In every case the "out group" is made to live up to impossible, unrealistic standards of perfection of which failure to live up to serves as justification for them being ostracized and segregated, nevermind that those standards aren't ever applied with the same intensity for members of the "in group".
You can't just blithely use this "oh, everyone is at fault in this whole mess, tut tut" excuse to remove the blame from the people who deserve it.
The fact is that women have long faced double standards that were impossible to live up to. Moreover, they have long faced a heightened level of abuse, especially online. This whole thing is nothing new, it's just an escalation, an intensification, for what's been going on, often without much publicity, previously. I have numerous female friends who've been avid gamers for, in some cases, decades, and they all have stories that I have not experienced. Stories of creeps, stories of unwarranted excessive abuse and intense threats of violence. I've only had one semi-serious threat made against me online in my 20 years of using the internet, but women have routinely faced such threats for years and years.
This is not at all a recent thing. Kathy Sierra spent years maintaining a low public profile due to online threats against her. She's just one of many similar examples. There is a pervasive sub-culture of misogynist assholes who have been actively fighting the influence of women in "tech", and there is an even larger group of idiots who don't realize that's what's happening and pretend like it's just a small problem or some sort of schoolyard tussle where everyone is at fault to some degree.
Your first post appears to say that gamergate wasn't responsible for the swatting, just a couple of trolls using the GG name as cover; and that she was also engaging in similar levels of abuse and harassment.
Making a false police report in order to send police to someone's home is obviously wrong and should be easy to condemn.
Even this post you appear to be saying there's more to it than that. If you think she's lying you should gather evidence and post it rather than insinuating it.
EDIT: I mean, unless you called the police station to check the details you can either believe her version of events or believe someone else's version. I'm not sure why you'd go for that other person's version without very good evidence.
Rather than allowing herself to be driven out of the field as many other women have been[1], Randi is fighting back and recently founded the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative (http://onlineabuseprevention.org/), which aims to help people protect themselves from harassment and to help tech companies and law enforcement to better respond to this problem.
If anyone expected this to stop Randi, they're sorely mistaken. I know Randi as a FreeBSD developer, and she is one of the most fearless people I've ever met.
[1] Not intended to cast aspersions on those women who have been driven out; if I faced the same experience I too would have been driven out of this field.