Seattle police rolling out anti-swatting service for streamers
12 replies, posted
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/police-to-seattles-techies-streamers-sign-up-for-our-anti-swatting-service/
The practice of "swatting," or calling in fake threats to activate an aggressive police response to an unwitting home or business, has unfortunately lingered for the past few years.
Starting this week, one police department in the United States is rolling out a system targeted directly at this illegal hoax practice.
On its official "swatting" resource site, the Seattle Police Department acknowledges how swatting works, along with the fact that citizens have requested a way to submit their own
concerns or worries about being a potential victim. "To our knowledge, no solution to this problem existed, so we engineered one," SPD's site reads. The site claims that swatting
victims are "typically associated with the tech industry, video game industry, and/or the online broadcasting community."
SPD's process asks citizens to create a profile on a third-party data-management service called Rave Facility (run by the company Smart911). Though this service is advertised for
public locations and businesses, it supports private residences as well, and SPD offers steps to input data and add a "swatting concerns" tab to your profile.
With that information in hand, SPD says that any police or 911 operator who receives a particularly troubling emergency report and matches it to a location that has already been
flagged with a "swatting concerns" notice, will share that information "with first responders to inform and improve their police response to the incident."
According to Seattle Police Department Public Affairs Director Sean Whitcomb, the effort to build an anti-swatting tool for residents began taking shape in June of this year. That was
shortly after "a community member reached out to us and asked if there was any way for us to, how should I phrase this, have a record of their residence in the event a swatting
incident took place." From there, SPD staffers began talking to officers and 911 dispatchers before being directed to the department's private partner for data references, the
aforementioned third-party company Smart911.
The issue, however, is that Smart911's default system, which lets police departments flag issues at a specific address and phone number (pets, allergies, elderly residents, special-n
eeds residents, etc.), is designed more for legitimate reports of crimes or fires. Meaning, it doesn't work in the case of anonymous or spoofed phone numbers calling in hoax threats.
Whitcomb tells Ars Technica that his team asked Smart911, "How can we take this platform and customize it to say, 'also in this household, someone who makes a living working at
one of our tech companies or in game development or online broadcasting, or they have an elevated profile publicly'—how can they let us know there's this concern?"
In today's public notice, Whitcomb emphasized SPD's claim that the department had to "engineer" its answer to the problem of swatting. "If you do an Internet search for 'swatting,'"
Whitcomb says. "You'll find a lot of instances of how people are affected, calls for stiffer penalties, and how police investigators have tracked down swatters from all the way across
the country when that crime has ended in its most tragic form." "But you won't find any anti-swatting solutions," he adds.
"This phenomenon, which is a national issue, is quite frankly causing a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety in the community that we serve," Whitcomb says. "This is Seattle, right?
We've got technology here—video game development, both from big companies and indie studios, and a very rich online broadcasting community. Everything from arts-and-crafts to
cooking to video game streaming. We know swatting has ended in tragedy in its most vile form. At its most general form, it's a way to intimidate or harass people. That's just wrong."
A step in the right direction
That's neat, it doesn't even prevent the SWAT team from showing up. All it does is make it known that the person's home is a streamer who's possibly is getting swatted.
I wonder how effective it is.
From what I can tell, it'll likely result in the first responders being a lighter team instead of the usual 4~7 officers they might end up just sending 2.
They'll still have to send someone as its a called in report and its their duty to act upon it, but when they've got a record that links it to potentially being a hoax, they can lighten the initial load a bit and approach it differently, hell maybe even call the residence before actually having an officer arrive.
In the unusual case it ends up not being a hoax they can then act in the usual manner after approaching it.
I can imagine the odds of a needed actual swat team response for a legitimate crime at a streamers residence is so infrequent that being told "this person registered that they have potentially false calls to their address due to swatting" is worth the risk of potentially lax response vs a dead streamer for how often it would actually be needed.
so what you're saying is, I should become a streamer and the swat team will never show up to bust me for my human trafficking operation?
Stream your human trafficking operation.
The FBI will never catch on!
Since most people SWAT someone when the stream is actually LIVE, they should embed a link to their streams as an iframe so that first responders can just look at the stream to see if the streamer is actually holding a gun to his wife's head or not
at least something's being done. swatters are pieces of shit.
smh these big shot Twitch streamers using SWAT to boost their view count
Lawmakers won't act, but it's great to see a police department take the initiative.
A lot of streamers actually already do what the Seattle now offers as a real thing.
They contact their local police department and most of them already take notes on those things, especially after it happened once already.
This is a good thing but sad this needs to be a thing in the first place. Swatting should carry heavy sentences especially since death of innocent people is a real possibility and of course the large costs with all that.
And the countdown for their data-stores to get hacked & leaked begins..
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