Comment on An 82-year-old YouTuber grandma was raided by police and SWATs during her live stream last night where she plays Minecraft to raise money for her grandsons cancer. Authorities brought 20 police cars

• luciferofastora@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Of course, as soon as it is seen to be a false call, the person who did the call should be arrested as that’s illegal

  Proving that they weren’t genuinely concerned can be tough, and mistakenly calling the police (or emergency services in general) shouldn’t be punished or people will hesitate to call for help when they need it.

  But you’re right: there should be some recourse to abuse, if not criminal then civil. Of course, a lawsuit is a lot of work and possibly money you would pay up front, and there’s no guarantee that you’d actually see much money if the perpetrator is a basement-dwelling neet whose meagre pocket money is immediately spent on Gacha games, trading cards or those weird plastic figures with oversized heads that some people go crazy over.

  So maybe the state / police should instead pay compensation to the victim and, if it seems like a case of abuse, bring their own suit to potentially recover those damages from the caller. That would reduce the damage of mistakes, protect well-meaning callers from retribution and thus shift the cost for this security from the individual to the collective. It also allows an option to shift it back onto malicious individuals.

  Of course, the police response could be more measured too, and the whole thing is contingent on the justice of the judicial system, but the latter part is true of any system and the former applies to many things the police do anyway.

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• rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  it’s too easy to make an anonymous call, telecoms are shit

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  • obre@slrpnk.net ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Conspiracy theory:

    Tap for spoiler

    it’s far from impossible to de-anonymize swatters, but they won’t go through the effort to do that, let alone prosecute the psychopaths who do this because it’s fun for the cops to cosplay as spec ops, everyone gets some fat overtime checks, and the event can be used for PR propaganda to say ‘we need this militarized platoon in case something actually does happen’

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    • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It’s an interesting theory.

      From what I understand, I worked in an adjacent field a decade ago, The de-anonymize is actually harder than it should be. a voip user gets service from a voip carrier who contracts service from a larger provider, who gets service from on the the biggest carriers. Noone in that chain wants to be responsible for the people below them. There is an unreasonable amount of trust on many carriers to let the clients choose their own ANI. The systems are not designed with accountability anymore. They’re all just a hodgepodge, and the smallest 2 levels of carriers get to charge a premium to let people stay untrackable (like cold calls)

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      • obre@slrpnk.net ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Thanks for the informed and reasonable take lol

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  • Hettyc_Tracyn@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    True

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