Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

I cannot be convinced that swatting is something that used to happen. Is there a history of this?

I legit do not remember seeing anything on the evening national news about that in the past, like from before 2000.

The earliest it could have started is when SS7 links and the internet were bridged by dodgy / nefarious owners of said SS7 links. That started to take off around the mid 90's to spam phones with spoofed numbers. I wanted to get the SS7 links terminated but my boss in the wireless industry, tied heavily to SS7 would not let me because they were paying their bill. It would have been one phone call to terminate many of them.

I suspect you are probably right about the timeline for swatting as shady VoIP providers started getting popular in the early 2000's and started being used for more than just spoofing text advertisements.

It became really easy and cheap to use a VPN and VOIP number.

9/11 policy panic, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan producing surplus equipment, 400 million privately owned firearms in the US, US history of police standoffs, DoD investment in military PR including Navy Seals worship, and much more have ALL contributed to the Swatting phenomenon.

I don’t think we could have intentionally created an incentive structure for swatting more if we had tried.

And it’s going to continue because guess what was one of the major issues in this election? Domestic security!

There's also the super weird (to people outside the US) insistence that the only possible response to gun violence (by gangsters, school kids, or cops) is "thoughts and prayers".

Constitutional amendments are basically impossible in the US. A congress member shot at a congressional event won't even vote change the second amendment (Scalise).

Even conservatives know the only hope is stacking the supreme court.

None of what you mentioned backs up the idea that swatting used to exist in the past as it does now.

The solution is obvious, but we unfortunately continue to choose not to do it.

Maybe not swatting, but bomb threats were probably the equivalent. My junior high had at least 2 that I can remember where we were all cleared out for hours as the school was searched. Swatting had the internet to fuel it's rise, local news programs didn't use things like reporting on every fake bomb threat to generate views or "engagement" and in turn did not spread the idea to a massive amount of people. But they still happened, quite a bit. Like many things fueled from the internet it rewards the more extremes, bomb threats are childs play now--but at one time they weren't

Swatting is something new (popularized by the Internet, made possible by military surpluss gear sold police wanting to larp in tacticool shit) but stupid pranks with deadly consequences are not.

Oh, that could be quite likely, copy cat crimes are a thing after all. I simply mean that people weren't harmlessly interacting before that is all, swatting didn't supplant relatively harmless pranks.

I didn't do a great job segueing from the parent. I agree with the parent, and my comment expands on why its happening now when it wasn't happening, at least to the same degree, in the past.