From the Boston Globe:
US Representative Katherine Clark and her husband were watching “Veep” Sunday night, when police lights engulfed her Melrose [Massachusetts] home.
Clark went outside, assuming something was wrong with one of her neighbors. But she said she was alarmed and frightened to see cruisers blocking both ends of her street and “multiple officers, some with long guns, on my front lawn.”
An officer told her they had received a report of an active shooter at her house, where her 13- and 16-year-old boys had just gone to bed.
But of course.
As the Globe notes, Clark is the sponsor of a bill that would make swatting a federal crime. Swatting, of course, is the practice of maliciously making false reports in order to send swarms of police and/or SWAT teams to the home of your target.
It’s not a hypothetical worry: several Gamergate critics have been swatted. And it goes without saying that it’s pretty dangerous to send a small army of heavily armed cops to a home where they think an active shooter is barricaded.
If Clark’s swatters intended to intimidate her, they seem to have failed. The Globe again:
Clark acknowledged that the experience Sunday night was deeply disconcerting.
But asked if she would be less vocal about the issue now, she laughed and said no.
“If that was the intent of calling in this event,” Clark said, “I think they have underestimated my commitment to making sure that we do stop this practice.”
Clark said she had been very sympathetic to people have been the victims of swatting before Sunday night but now fully understands what it’s like.
“It will,” she said, “really cause me to double down.”
Targeting a politician with what is essentially terrorism? Doesn’t seem like a particularly smart choice on the part of whoever was behind this.
H/T — r/GamerGhazi
@Scildfreja:
That sounds really, really interesting. I’d love to hear you witter about it.
As it stands now, however, the system is something of a parson’s egg: getting it slightly wrong is as bad as getting it entirely wrong. This is a common occurrence in data science and I’m sympathetic to the coders involved, but that doesn’t mean that the business decision to publish the non-working system was a smart one.
I agree with everything Zyvlyn said.
Like I said when people were worrying about Trump, most of the time the establishment candidate does pull out the victory. That doesn’t mean Trump or Cruz can’t or won’t win, there’s precedent for that too. I do think Cruz has a better chance than Trump. Whether Rubio wins will depend on turnout I think.
@EJ, I’d love to trundle out the conversational semantics stuff but i can’t :c Not until we’ve published at least.
You’re right that it’s a bit of a parsons egg (fun term!) but I think it’s not as bad as all that. Pretty much any recommender system is going to pull in the negative hits with the positive, so the choice is really to have these negative hits coming in, or to not have a recommender at all. Partitioning the two sides of an internet debate is very hard!
@arash, thank you for coming back! I’ll reply in a bit, i’m at work.
@WWTH
Thanks. I think your point about the establishment candidate pulling it out is a good one too.
My one concern is that I think Trump may hang in there for a while simply because Trump supporters are more… shall we say… impervious to reality… than Cruz supporters. I’m actually kind of hoping for it because I think a long, nasty Trump/Rubio race could cripple the GOP for YEARS.
@Schildfreja Many GGers are intentionally bombing the machine learning algorithm. So their content comes up if you search “Zoe Quinn” or “Anita Sarkeesian” and it’s categorized with feminism-related content. Bombing ML algorithms is characteristic 4chan.
@ EJ
Will it matter though in the vast majority of cases?
It’s only really ‘political’ videos that will have ‘sides’ and they’re probably a tiny minority of videos posted. For the most time people who watch something about, say, a particular pop culture subject, won’t be bothered if they get recommendations for other videos featuring that subject.
Even if there are potentially ‘sides’ to a non political subject, people are unlikely to be that perturbed by a recommendation to something with a different view. Someone who watches a video lauding a particular motor car may not agree with the conclusions of a video saying it’s not very good or praising a different model, but it’s unlikely to nauseate them, like an abusive video about one of these gaming commentators might.
I’m actually a bit wary of the whole discussion. I didn’t follow it closely, and am happy to be corrected, but it seems to me that when we discuss SWATting as a form of harassment (which it is), we don’t talk about why it is such an easily achieved form of harassment, and why it’s so dangerous. SpleenyBadger mentioned “Rise of the Warrior Cop” somewhere upthread, and I think the militarization of US police and their readiness to employ deadly violence is an integral part of the problem. (btw, this is not exclusively a US problem, there are quite a few cases of German police killing mentally ill/handicapped persons in their homes and migrants on pursuits or in custody)
Thus I’m not sure if your proposition wouldn’t actually shift the blame away from SWAT teams shooting unprovokedly, even though I agree that part of the blame needs to be put on the caller.
@ zyvlyn
If the Guardian (UK) is to the believed only 5% of Trump supporters tick the “the candidate believes in the same things I do” box. That’s unusual as supposedly that’s normally the most important factor.
It seems Trumps attraction is less about the message (although there will obviously be some true believers) and more about the perception that he’s his own man and not kowtowing to other peoples interests. We’ve seen similar things here in the UK.
@Bernardo
Perfect is the enemy of good. Making SWATting a federal crime will at least put a quick kibosh on that while the overarching issue of America’s dystopian police force is dealt with, especially since the latter will probably take decades (they haven’t even admitted that they have a problem yet!).
@Alan
I don’t doubt it. One of the political blogs I read (can’t remember which one) described that bloc of Trump supporters as poke-’em-in-the-eye voters. They don’t care so much for policy views (outside of a handful of pet causes, perhaps), so much as they are fed up with the political process as a whole and love Trump for the fact that he shows an equal level of contempt for the process as they do. That’s why he gets called a “truth-teller” even though he is very much the opposite of that.
Which leads me to my thoughts on what happens if Trump starts losing. Will his supporters fall off because he has the “loser stink” about him?
Or will they fight till the bitter end against the “PC establishment” that is trying to force him out?
And supposing they do abandon him, will they line up behind Rubio or Cruz? Or will they drop out of the process altogether in disgust?
I couldn’t tell you the answers to those questions.
@ SHFC
As I think you know, I do a bit of work with our ‘SWAT’ equivalents over here (legal stuff and occasionally the self defence thing). We have three near equivalents.
‘Fast entry teams’ – basically unarmed police (they do have batons and tazers) that do your ‘normal’ raids on crack houses and the like.
‘SCO 19’ – again police officers but this time armed. They do raids where there’s an indication firearms may be present.
‘SAS’ – Army. Similar to SCO 19, but they’re the only ones who do ‘explosive entry’. As that suggests, that’s where they have to use explosives to breach somewhere.
Over the last 12 month audit period there were 14,800 incidents where armed police attended (a third of those in London) and shots were actually fired on two occasions, no fatalities.
I know the use of guns by criminals is more prevalent in the US, but that would seem to suggest that a less gung-ho approach is possible.
Sorry, I didn’t want to derail the discussion into a general “police violence” discussion. And I agree, SFHC, that the issue is more complicated and that penalising SWATting is a faster solution for the immediate problem.
@ zyvlyn
That sounds familiar to here. In fact one of the best things that can happen to a ‘maverick’ politician is for it to appear that the regular politicians are ganging up on them. I think that’s why often they try to be so provocative.
I’m aware! I get the same thing on my youtubes. Thing is, we can’t really do without ML and still keep the internet as we understand it today. It’s too big – we need the outbrain to make sense of it. So, recommenders, search engines, etc. If we want our connected internet society, we need those things.
@ Bernardo
Whilst I agree that US SWAT (and police in general) needs a bit of an overhaul a danger is that if you over judge then you just get a refusal to do the work. We’ve got something like that going on here at the moment (and we don’t have anywhere near the same problems as the US).
It’s easy to play Monday-morning quarterback when analysing police decisions, but the people making those decisions have the luxury of not getting shot if they get something wrong. There are all sorts of stress and psychological distortions that kick in under those situations and that has to be taken into account. The police are often damned if they do, damned of they don’t. On balance, would you prefer the police not to attend to such reports? Serious question, it may be in strict utilitarian terms that might be an option (how many times is there a real threat someone in a house will start killing people?)
@Alan,
I hear all the time about how difficult and dangerous policing is and the way people make bad decisions under pressure. What you’re saying is true, but none of it is new to me, or likely to anyone else here.
@ Alan
This is a huge topic, and as I say I don’t want to derail. I mean, if we’re talking about militarization of police, there are so many issues, and most of them are issues of politics and policies, not of day-to-day police work. I don’t blame police for being underfunded, stressed out, not equipped or trained to react properly to subjects with mental health issues etc.
I have to say, though, I don’t buy the “we’re getting shot out there” argument when we’re talking about incidents in which the police were the escalating agent. Not to mention black people in police custody dying mysteriously (again, this is not limited to the US).
I realise that the question wasn’t aimed at me, but let me shift the Overton Window a little here.
I don’t give a damn about the opinions of the police. If they have the unappealable power of life and death over their fellow citizens (which is what a firearm is) then I expect omniscience and clairvoyance at the very minimum. If fallible humans can’t get death sentences right in a court of law (and they can’t) then they certainly can’t get them right in hot blood with only the evidence of their eyes.
Any policeman who has a problem with that can go and flip burgers instead.
@ Orion & Bernardo
Yeah, it’s a huge topic, and probably outside the general themes normally discussed here. I was just replying in regard to the specifics of SWAT teams mentioned and shifting the blame for the dangers of ‘swatting’ rather than the swatters themselves. I would say the responsibility lies with the swatters and they’re the ones who should face the penalties.
There’s the whole issue of how/when/why police get not situations where they’re under such stresses and whether that’s something that should be addressed or reexamined (I would say ‘yes’).
There’s also the whole policing by consent thing, and what happens when different parts of the community that the police purportedly serve are treated differently by the police.
It’s related to the discussion we had about law making. Whilst policy is set by politicians responding to an electorate then it’s the electorate that sets the policy, and that includes how we are policed. The problem though arises that democracy disfavours minorities by definition.
Still, the police currently act at the behest of the public (however flawed the process is) so if we ask them to do a job then the least we can do is not try to dismiss their actual lived experience of what that job entails.
I find your examples really confusing. It is not necessarily bad for a movie with a small cast to “fail” Bechdel. If you assigned genders at random to the characters in a 4-person story, 5/16 of your stories would have 0-1 women. There are also stories worth telling about groups and places that are near-exclusively male. It’s often worthwhile to think about broadening the scope to include women on the periphery, but I don’t think most people would watch Liam Neeson in The Grey and call for a gender-inclusive re-write.
However, I don’t see any reason the movies you named couldn’t have had women. You could probably do all-female versions of any of them.
@ EJ
I do see your point, and as discussed, policing has to be by consent. If we apply your standard though then the police may well choose the burger option (although in practice you could probably always find someone willing to take the risk. There’ll always be a pool of people desperate for any sort of employment).
The concept of a police force is a relatively new one in human history. For most of the time people have individually (either through their own strength or bodyguards) or collectively (either the hue and cry or town watchmen) taken care of their own protection. It may be that that comes back into vogue. We’re only three meals away from that anyway as they say.
ETA: actually with things like close protection staff and gated communities we probably are heading for that. Who needs a police force then?
American politicians don’t respond to the wishes of the people, and neither do American police. This has been studied.
Flipping burgers is an honourable trade; I have no problem with anyone who chooses to do it, and have every sympathy for people who do it to pay the bills because they aren’t qualified to achieve the task of their dreams.
I worked fast food in high school. Kind of enjoyed it, actually. If it paid well, I might have stuck with it.
On Iowa:
Trump’s loss hurt him; he’s a wounded animal, now. He’ll get more vicious for awhile, then die. The question is what happens once he’s out. And that gets a bit weird, because of how states all have their own rules about primaries and caucuses and such.
Psychologically, I think Trump supporters will most likely flock to Cruz; he’s the next biggest unrepentant thug in the race. However, a lot of primaries will be held in states where only registered party members can vote–and something like a third of Trump’s supporters come from outside the party, in the sense that they don’t identify as Republicans or register as such. Now, Trump himself might be able to get his people to register with the party to tilt the primary, but I sincerely doubt that Cruz will have the same level of influence and control over them.
Rubio, meanwhile, will pick up pretty much all the supporters of the other ‘mainstream’ candidates–Bush and Kasich and most of the other also-rans. The biggest wild card will be Ben Carson’s supporters. He’s been pushing the religion card pretty heavily to get his paltry 9% of Iowa. It’s not large, but it could counter-balance the aforementioned loss of Trump Independents enough for Cruz to carry the day.
So it ends up being Cruz vs. Rubio in an almost dead heat.
I do think Sanders is still a long-shot; he needs to prove himself in one of the winner-take-all races early on, but most of the early ones are in Hillary country, which will make this a tough uphill climb. If he CAN carry at least one of those early states, though, his candidacy will at least force Hillary to make some promises to the left. (I can go into a long side-road about why the nature of Obama’s opposition in various elections has contributed to his disappointing returns as the actual officeholder, but this post is already teal deer territory.)