Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

Well he is facing 20 years

That's a pretty light sentence for 375 murder attempts and threats.

Not to mention the opportunity cost: victims of real violent/urgent situations who couldn't access timely protection, as well as the cost to society of perpetrators who marginally escaped while law enforcement were occupied tending to fake call outs.

He's probably not facing anything resembling 20 years. Charged as an adult under the fact patterns we know about, I get something like 15 years. But he's being charged as a juvenile.

That's more than a decade less than what Chelsea Manning or John Kiriakou was sentenced to. It's absurd that the punishment is much harsher for unspecified theoretical harm caused by whistleblowing than the very real harm caused by literal murder attempts.

He could face local charges in those jurisdictions? Does double jeopardy prevent each county seeking their own sentence?

Perhaps, but 20 years is a significan portion of someone's life.

The courts wanting to make an example of those that have embarrassed the government is a different issue entirely.

It's only attempted murder because American SWAT is trigger happy, equipped literally like an army and shoots before asking questions or establishing context, that's hardly his fault.

If there's one thing to take away from the last, idk, ten-ish years, it's that the US court system is remarkably forgiving, even on things it really shouldn't be.

He's not facing 20 years; he's facing a small fraction of that.

Crimes against the state or that that thumb their nose at the authority of the state always carry disproportionate punishments because the state is who's writing the rules, running the systems, creating the sentencing guidelines, etc.

There's a 0% chance he spends the next 20 years of his life incarcerated.

It's his fault if he knows his actions may result in the targets death and does it anyway.

"It's hardly my fault the police doused pluc with gasoline, all I did was throw a match"

It seems like he was a child when he made most of these calls.

Regardless, this is unlikely to be much of a deterrent. The police need to be held accountable at some point.

There are at least 30 countries that would apply the death sentence for that.

If you have smart police officers who do smart police work this is a mild annoyance at best. Not trying to defend him, but SWAT is just as guilty as he is.

Yes, they can't charge him again for the same physical act.

His federal guilty plea appears to admit to 375 swatting calls. So I don't think the state or local courts can subsequently charge him for any of those calls - they would need to find evidence of some separate calls.

Equipped like an army, unfortunately not trained like one.

I agree that he is complicit, but I find it hard to view him as solely culpable for a death. If a child feeds law enforcement false data, and law enforcement then kills someone, both parties should have known better but I have much higher expectations of our law enforcement than a teenager.

The kid needs to be punished, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have a glaring hole in our law enforcement procedures so large that even children can exploit them. That’s insane. Children are always going to do dumb shit, we need to have policies and procedures to guard against that.

IANAL, but some googling suggests you are wrong about that:

https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/federal-crimes/is-it-doubl...

The police didn't hurt anybody in this case, despite this person's attempt to make them do so. What are you holding them accountable for?

My response is in the context of the parent comment saying that it should be treated like attempted murder, and then the response citing the 20 years of sentence reading to me like it was implying that the crimes were being treated seriously enough. The premise you seem to disagree with was established by previous comments and isn't something I proposed myself.

Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months not 30 years.

As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people who cooperated with the US or the Afghanistan government against the Taliban. When the Taliban found out about such people they would go after them.

We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks because there is no way to know if the Taliban found them out through the leaks or through some other source. The odds are pretty good that it was more than one, probably a lot more.

The swatting teen on the other hand is known to have not actually gotten anyone killed.

A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you. They were there to do something that sometimes goes wrong and does kill, but most of the time that doesn't happen.

Someone coming to your house because the Manning leaks identified you as cooperating against the Taliban was there to kill you.

AFAIK the swat teams involved in the OP incidents didn't kill anybody, so they more or less did their jobs properly. Nonetheless, the intent was there; this guy committed hundreds of attempted murders.

You're right, I stand corrected.

I never said the police's problems were on display with this case. In fact i think the case is largely meaningless to the topic. the threat of swatting is going to remain until the police can be brought under some kind of democratic control.

I don't know, you brought it up. I'm asking: in this case, what do you want them held accountable for?

> Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months not 30 years.

My bad, but still egregious nonetheless.

> As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people

You're after different people. It's Luke Harding and David Leigh from the Guardian that published the password to the unredacted files.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/unredacted_us...

> We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks

This is exactly what I meant by "unspecified and theoretical." The government had over 2 decades to point to any instances of harm. Where are they?

Also again, Chelsea Manning didn't publish the unredacted files. It's rich to blame her for Afghanistan deaths while ignoring the actions of Bush and every president after him, where the ultimate responsibility lies.

> A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you.

No, the crucial difference is intent. Swatting kills people, swatters know that, but they do it anyways for their own pleasure. Obviously, swatters aren't sending trigger-happy cops so that their victims can survive.

Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes. This is whistleblowing, not some selfish "leak." The intent here is to save lives, the exact opposite of swatting. I don't know how anyone can demonize whistleblowing while trivializing swatting.

In criminal law, attempted crime is treated the same as successful completions. That’s because we don’t want to encourage people to make attempts: many such attempts could be successful.

Imagine a world in which someone is trying to murder you or your children. You know who they are, and you even have incontrovertible evidence they are doing it. Yet they get off scot-free every time because their bullets missed the mark.

(This is covered in the mandatory first-year criminal law course in law school, BTW.)

Yes, I agree. The SWAT-ter attempted to kill people. The police did not. I'm not sticking up for the accused; I'm saying the facile "this is a police problem" argument doesn't apply in this story.