Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

It should really not be possible for a single anonymous phone call to dispatch a heavily armed response team to break down someone's door.

Aside from that, people who do so are despicable. 20 years is a light sentence. Taking money to put people in situations that could easily become deadly.

I'm sure a lot of consideration was put into how to deal with this problem. It's probably not cheap or easy running specialized SWAT teams for calls and there's nothing police would hate more than being taken advantage of by criminals.

But they seem to have decided this is the least bad option. They have a duty to respond to serious phone calls about armed situations.

The main issue is the insecurity of the old telecom system where spoofing is so easy. But we're heavily invested in it as a society.

> The main issue is the insecurity of the old telecom system where spoofing is so easy.

I disagree.

The main issue is qualified immunity.

The phone companies never killed anybody in a SWAT raid. The phone companies never claimed to be building a "secure telecom system", nobody ever offered to pay for them to ensure high grade authentication and integrity checking of phone calls.

And the cops know that. And don't care. They are the people showing uo with military weapons to people's homes. It's their responsibility to know and understand the reliability of the information they're acting on, and the ease with which the phone system can be made to show them misleading information.

Cops with guns and police unions and qualified immunity who now they're never going to be held accountable for killing people based on false information are the problem, not the phone system.