"As Finley demonstrated, it’s not impossible to hunt down suspects who use these technologies – it’s just extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive."<p>Here's the big problem. It can be impossible. If the swatter exercises extreme caution, never registers any device or service in their name, never uses their public IP address for so much as a Google search on "how to swat" and doesn't brag about it online, it is in fact impossible to trace. This makes it tough going into an investigation because you don't know if it's some stupid kid or someone who knows a thing or two about how to remain truly anonymous online. To this point, you'll note there's a common thread in all the stories of this type. It's some stupid kid who gets caught and I highly doubt that's because only kids are swatting. It's because they are catching the dumb ones.
I suspect we'll be seeing a lot of articles that end with some form of "let's make the Internet safer by giving up our privacy and right to anonymity" while the government is trying to pass the anti-encryption bill. Unfortunately, this police officer spent a ridiculous amount of time tracking down someone with no real op-sec skills simply because he wasn't trained to track someone on the web.<p>Note that I agree we need to treat swatting as a serious and potentially dangerous crime ... But what do we do when all the perps are juveniles?
The question is why it's necessary to have highly militarized police who respond with overwhelming force at the drop of a hat. Oh wait, that's right, the War on Drugs.
It seems to me that a few simple pieces of information can greatly help police departments know if it's a malicious hoax:<p>1. Is the call coming from a voip service?<p>2. Can the residence be reached via their normal phone line?<p>A small amount of caution should be used before local (and often times militarized) police forces go busting down doors.
>Complex anonymity tools mean it can cost $100,000 to identify just one hoax caller.<p>>Finley estimates he spent more than a thousand hours tracking down those two teenagers, neither of whom will spend much time behind bars, yet this is a crime that can cost police departments as much as $100,000 per incident and could result in fatalities.<p>The number seems to have been pulled from this sentence, but it refers to the damage caused by the crime, not the cost to investigate. (This seems more plausible than thinking the number came from the thousand hours quote.)<p>So it appears whoever wrote the sub headline didn't actually read the article.<p>Edit: also re costs in crime to allowing anonymity:<p>The stated argument for allowing anonymity doesn't extend to anonymous calling of emergency services. The article points out that such swatters already need to use the loophole of calling a regular number and getting routed to emergency; why not display to that operator whether the call is anonymous, and if so don't let them route it to emergency services? Are there a significant number of legitimate anonymous calls forwarded this way?
>Finley used an email address associated with one Skype account to uncover a personal website for the second swatter, whose online handle was Obnoxious. Using that email, he found a page on the text-sharing website Pastebin where one of Obnoxious’s enemies had revealed his name and address.<p>$100,000 OSINT... the police did no 'heavy lifting' in this case
The police are the ones deciding how to respond to these (completely unbelievable) calls, and making them face consequences for their actions would be more effective than going on elaborate after-the-fact hunts for the guy that "tricked" them.
The police should take a leaf from Corporal Carrot's book, "[...] a number of offences of murder by means of a blunt instrument, to whit, a dragon, and many further offences of generalized abetting [...]" and prosecute these non-pranks as "assault with a deadly weapon".