SWATting

Patterico will have more on the attempted SWATting of Wolf Blitzer.

Comments

[henry]

Has Wolf blamed the Tea Party yet?

[Cecil Turner]

The more interesting post is the one about the other SWATing--of congressman Mike Rogers (R-MI).

[Rob Crawford]

Meh.

Patterico will never admit these thugs are being protected by the Democrat party. He'll never admit that it's an intentional strategy to use crazies.

And for an effing prosecutor, he sure doesn't show much interest in prosecuting.

[Clarice]

Most good retailers can instantly identify the phone number of a caller. Can't 911 stations obtain devices to do this and record those numbers? People who do this should be jailed and forced to repay the victims and jurisdictions for their costs and damages.

[henry]

Clarice, disposable cell phones (aka Obamaphones) have a number, but no specific person attached.

[PaulV]

I may watch too much TV, but many plots are based on routing calls through different servers.

[James D.]

Clarice, I agree completely. I'd say that people who do this should be charged with attempted murder.

This isn't a "prank." Ordering 20 pizzas to someone's house is a prank. Leaving a bag of dog poop outside someone's front door is a prank.

This is sending many heavily armed men on hair-trigger alert to someone's house with the intent of getting that person killed. That's a cold-blooded, pre-meditated effort to commit murder, and it ought to be dealt with accordingly.

[jimmyk]

Even with disposable cell, if a call like this comes in, especially if it's known to be about a well-known person's home, you would think 911 operators could be instructed to ask some questions, get a location of the caller, etc. and some red flags would be raised, I suspect.

[Danube of Thought]

I know that those infuriating "credit card services" calls use what are known as spoof numbers, such that the calls are untraceable. The FCC is powerless to do anything about them.

[willem]

Radly Balko SWAT and no-knock raid research. It's just a matter of time before swatting murders a celebrity or political somebody at the federal level.

Wolf is pure beltway "Tea Parlor" as are most of his sycophants. The creeping ennui of dysfunctional government family systems is making his Tea Party counterparts look less crazy by the day.

The Parlor elites are marching out Ed Schultz in full-blown working man catholic frenzy to make the Tea Partiers look dangerous.

Instead, these Parlor elites of the Schultz-Bloomberg-Ghristie nexus are looking more imperial by the day.

It's Tea Party vs. Tea Parlor. The disillusioned decent masses versus the maladjusted imperials still practicing the phrenological and wundtian fabulists of 19th Century european academics in active third-state syphilis.

[Clarice]

If it's a disposable phone or even a mobile phone the c 911 responders should have a means to pinpoint the location of call. If it's nowhere near the incident, the SWAT team ought to be informed it's a likely hoax and the cops put on a search for the caller.

If every website that wants to can pick out my location, the 911 sites ought to be able to, too.