From Washington to California:
Doug Bates and his wife, Stacey, were in bed around 10 p.m., their 2-year-old daughters asleep in a nearby room. Suddenly they were shaken awake by the wail of police sirens and the rumble of a helicopter above their suburban Southern California home. A criminal must be on the loose, they thought.
Doug Bates got up to lock the doors and grabbed a knife. A beam from a flashlight hit him. He peeked into the backyard. A swarm of police, assault rifles drawn, ordered him out of the house. Bates emerged, frightened and with the knife in his hand, as his wife frantically dialed 911. They were handcuffed and ordered to the ground while officers stormed the house.[…]
They were victims of a new kind of telephone fraud that exploits a weakness in the way the 911 system handles calls from Internet-based phone services. The attacks – called “swatting” because armed police SWAT teams usually respond – are virtually unstoppable, and an Associated Press investigation found that budget-strapped 911 centers are essentially defenseless without an overhaul of their computer systems.
In a grisly sounding call to 911, [18-year-old Mukilteo, Washington resident Randal] Ellis was putting an Internet-based phone service for the hearing-impaired to nefarious use. By entering bogus information about his location, Ellis was able to make it seem to the 911 operator as if he was calling from inside the Bateses’ home. He said he was high on drugs and had just shot his sister.
This is unlike the Winning the War on Drugs posts; the prank calls in the article mention carnage inside the house. But the response—officers charging in, middle of the night, guns drawn—is the same tactic police use when someone inside might be growing a few pot plants. Local police departments need to put a safety lock the hair trigger to conduct SWAT raids. And, um, maybe they need to join us in the 21st century and upgrade those 911 call centers so they can’t be tricked by voice over IP.
King 5 covered swatting two years ago:
http://www.king5.com/localnews/stories/N…
Bateses’ !!!!!!!
mulkiteo fairy.
in bed at 10pm? sad.
Geez Holden, way to twist this story to suit your own agenda. Your fervent pro-stoner mentality is the most embarrassing thing I have to scroll past in the Slog.
And let’s see, you’re advocating that police chill out and upgrade their call centers (with what money?), but you have nothing to say for the 18-year-old who wasted $14,000 of taxpayer money for his kicks. So the problem is with cops who take these phone calls TOO seriously? Really insightful. Put down the keyboard and go back to your bong.
@ 4) Someone sent this link our way because they know I write about police raids on innocent people–usually folks suspected of nonviolent drug offenses. But I didn’t call it a WTWOD post because it’s not about drugs, like I said in the post. And no, I didn’t feel the need to rally against this 18 year old; he’s already being prosecuted. Swatting is illegal. But it is legal to raid someone’s house based on hearsay for a suspected nonviolent drug offense, and it is easy to fake an IP address. Since lives are at stake in raids on innocent people, it only makes sense to upgrade call centers and raise the threshold for whom we subject to SWAT raids. It’s not about being pro-stoner–like all those people who cheered for Michael Phelps are all pro-stoner, too?–but about implementing policies and technologies that save lives. Sorry that’s “embarrassing” to you.
@2: It’s plural and possessive, and I’m pretty sure they did it correctly, though perhaps if leek is around she can set things straight.
So when the inevitable happens and the cops shoot some innocent homeowner, will the swatter pull a 2nd degree murder charge?
I also wouldn’t be surprised, if the prankster is a minor, the surviving family members squeeze every asset they can get their hands on out of the parents in a wrongful death suit.
SWAT raids for a pot bust are overkill, but a SWAT raid when they think someone just shot his sister is a perfectly appropriate response. To me it sounds like police acted correctly given the information they had available.
The SWAT raid wasn’t the problem. The problem is the pitiful hackable 911 system (and of course the moron that made the call). If someone gets hurt during one of these things, it isn’t just the hacker that will get sued. It will be the state/county/municipality that has a 911 system full of holes getting sued too.
If the police are going to send out SWAT teams with assault weapons drawn based on a 911 call, they need to make sure the 911 system isn’t vulnerable to stupid pranks.
the 911 systems are NOT being hacked.
The perps are using VOIP services to disguise their caller id. So, 911 gets a call saying it’s coming from say 100 oak street, seattle WA 98125 but it’s not.
This is the same (old) trick used to get into people’s voice mail. So, if you don’t have a password on your voicemail, now you know you need to.
There’s nothing they can do in terms of preventing spoofed caller ID. It’s inherent in the way the public switched telephone network is designed, and this problem will be with us until the day the current phone system is abandoned.
(VOIP is not the cause of the problem. VOIP just makes it easier to exploit.)
SWAT raids are NOT a perfectly appropriate response based on an anonymous call to a location with no prior incidents and without any sort of verification first.
People killed other people long before SWAT teams were in every neighborhood police force. They managed to get by just fine by sending officers to assess a situation, ambulances to assist and transfer any injured.
Storming into and devastating a house and its occupants should be near the last resort for situations, not a means to justify and maintain budgets.
sincerely,
diggum
@2: Bateses’ is exactly right. Grammar nerds are bad enough in comments sections, but incompetent grammar nerds are especially annoying.
This wasn’t Voice-over-IP or anything like that. Teletypewriters are used by deaf people to make phone calls. They call into a call center where an operator sees the typed words appear on their computer. The operator dials out to whoever the deaf/hard-of-hearing person is trying to contact (grandma, friends, pizza hut, whatever).
When the hearing person picks up the phone, the operator introduces the call and begins typing every single word spoken back to the deaf person. Then the operator reads what the deaf person types back to the hearing person, and so on.
Deaf relay operators make 911 calls and they’re incredibly stressful. 911 call center operators have been trained in how to receive those calls.
Unfortunately, there’s a new internet service for deaf relay. I worked nights at a center and 99 percent of those internet calls were pranks: teenagers calling in, typing a few dirty words, then hanging up. Or, if they actually knew how to use TTY, they would have the operator call someone – a friend or acquaintance – and have the operator read a stream of dirty language to the person on the other end, who would have no idea what’s going on (there are very strict rules about how to identify the caller, the TTY service, etc.).
The internet call-in is a very easy way to prank call somebody because the operators have to act as human telephone wires. They can’t read anything not typed by the caller except for clarifying what the call is. When I worked at a relay place a few years ago, there was no way to trace the IP of the call-ins. Unless there’s a way now, it’s basically untraceable. Privacy concerns are incredibly high on the priority list – there’s a few days of training just to cover all the rules.