A fake emergency call to police resulted in officers responding Friday night to the home of Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows just a day after she removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot under the Constitution’s insurrection clause.
She becomes the latest elected politician to become a target of swatting, which involves making a prank phone call to emergency services with the intent that a large first responder presence, including SWAT teams, will show up at a residence.
Bellows was not home when the swatting call was made, and responding officers found nothing suspicious.
Question: what isn’t swatting a punishable act for the person who called?
Sure, but these folks are masking themselves with spoofed numbers, VPNs, etc.
Then so for an identification or lower the response force. It feels like they just get a random phone call, no proof of anything and they just barge in within 10min. But when my neighbor plays loud music all night no one cares.
You really want to try and work out such a system? Tell me how your algorithm is going to work and I’ll start throwing exceptions.
Lives are on the line! You better have quite the bulletproof plan.
Why would a swat team be sent for your neighbor’s loud music?
Why does your comment have almost 50 upvotes?
All you need is a VPN and a VOIP number. It’s not hard to do and you can order them easily online. Let alone text to voice readers.
There’s a reason why swatting and bomb threats have been popular for a decade now.
Privacy is a two way street. When it comes to serious threats, the same things that protect you, protect people who would abuse those tools.
Well unless you want FBI back doors built into every VPN in every sovereign nation, then it’s unfortunately a byproduct of our need for privacy due to corporate and governmental overreach.
The FBI and other three letter agencies already pay huge bucks for hats when they can. Common encryption aren’t going to be broken for at least a couple decades. We almost always encrypt better than decrypt though by the very nature of the process though.
Quantum computing is moving faster than most people realize but it will never beat out better encryption.
Arguably, the cops knew the address they were going to was a Secretary of State, but they went there anyway.
More stochastic terrorism. Used to be the political party involved would be tripping over themselves to disavow such actions. Now? 🦗🦗🦗…
Attempted murder is a prank now?
Bunch of fucking children, these trumpets.
I believe they meant to say fraudulent phone call and not prank phone call.
