A couple years back, some vulnerability researcher friends found a series of horrible security flaws in a very popular pacemaker brand. Does anyone here really doubt whether, if fully weaponized exploit scripts for those flaws made it to the wrong IRC channel, some depraved asshole would kill a stranger for "lulz"? I don't. Technology is amplifying something truly bad inside of us. Maybe it's worse than we think; see: the Fermi Paradox.
I think you probably underestimate how common SWAT-ing is. I have relatives with no unusual connections to the grimier communities on the Internet who have been SWAT-ed after disputes in video games.
It's easy to underestimate unless you've listened to it happen tens of times in a single hour.
The calls take two minutes or less, individuals have literally been competing on how many they could do within a single day.
"I'm at 725 5th Ave, I've shot a bunch of people and will shoot any police that come" Takes only seconds to say and would almost guarantee a heavily armed police response.
There must be thousands, possibly over ten thousand of these incidents every year.
It's a shame we can't have any reliable statistics based insight into exactly how often it happens because of the widespread policy amongst US police departments of not collecting and/or publicizing such data. The Obama DOJ was attempting to correct this trend (in a collaborative manner, which was the only available avenue) with many such departments, but cancelling that policy initiative was literally Jeff Sessions's first policy action as AG.
Me too. I often wonder how much worse the results of a modern-day Milgram experiment might be.
This is one of those things that keeps me up at night. I've instructed my wife and children that if police ever come banging on the door, get on the floor, face away from any entry points, call 911 immediately and negotiate compliance over the phone.
I'm with you until that part. For one thing, many SWATings result in no-knock entries - even if you're prostate and facing away, holding and manipulating a phone, and/or continuing to talk through a phone instead of responding to the verbal commands of the assault officers are both Bad Ideas imo.
In any case, my advice does not preclude obeying orders if an officer is pointing an MP5 at you and telling you to put your hands on your head-- it's too late then, so just comply and hope for the best.
Perhaps I need to look into that more. However, also note that not all instances of SWAT-ing are equal. How often do they result in fatalities? I'm sure that Sturm und Drang novel readings resulted in quite a few more family arguments and morose journal entries than resulted in suicides. Maybe I should rephrase that to fatal SWAT-ings.
No disagreement here.
This seems to be the first publicized incident. Pets have had worse luck in the past though.
I think this applies to that theory only if we assume an evolution of strong small group tribal mentality of species in all cases. For all we know, that could be a requirement for intelligent high-technology using life, but there's not a lot of facts about that to my knowledge.
> Perhaps the existence of walled gardens is akin to the building of town walls and the rise of feudal lords.
> People in the virtual 0th and 1st worlds are still in a feudal world of rule by force and of personal/tribal loyalties taking the place of principle.
I think those are the money quotes right there. It's important to remember that there are many people that can remember life before the internet, and had to learn as they went, and those are the people that the younger ones that grew up with the internet saw as elders and the people who set norms. It will probably be a few generations until we get to a normal cyclical situation where the pendulum swings back and forth between online behavior, privacy, etc. We're not even close to knowing where there center/average is on these issues yet.
As someone who has been using the internet since before the existence of the World Wide Web, the younger generations who came along happily ignored many of the preexisting norms and groupthinked/made up their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
What's more, this sort of thing happened again and again in smaller, less global contexts. Programming is termed "half a field" by Alan Kay because it forgets its own history. There is a tremendous tendency for human society online to re-invent its own body of knowledge whole cloth, ignoring what has come before in a way that further propagates ignorance.
Well, nothing happened in a vacuum. It may have appeared they ignored it, but some behavior may have been specifically in rebellion of existing norms.
It's chaos currently, but I think we'll be able to identify trends in future decades.
> What's more, this sort of thing happened again and again in smaller, less global contexts. Programming is termed "half a field" by Alan Kay because it forgets its own history. There is a tremendous tendency for human society online to re-invent its own body of knowledge whole cloth, ignoring what has come before in a way that further propagates ignorance.
I think there are explanations for this. The main one being that Computer Science is much too large a field for areas people are expected to use it later. It's like not having Engineering as a Major, much less the subcategories such as Mechanical, Civil and Aeronautical engineering, and just expecting people to have a Physics or Mathematics degree.
Of course that results in a lot of people reinventing the wheel, because so much of what you actually were exposed to relevant to what you're doing comes from employees who happened to have interests in that area or your own research of whatever material you can find, of which it's all pretty new (relative to most other fields), and a lot of it may have been kept as trade secrets (or seen limited exposure which is why it's hard to find).
Of course this is all exacerbated by ungodly amounts of money being thrown at these people to develop something quick and get it out and iterate on it before someone else can.
Computer Science isn't half a field, it's the spoiled child of the sciences, where money smooths away all the problems and mistakes are never learned from. That doesn't paint a good picture for the future (and now I'm depressed, but at least feel I have some job security :/)
In the history of media, there have always been a small fraction of maladjusted people who cannot distinguish the fantasy of the medium from reality. ( Here's an example from 1774. Search for "suicides" http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Storm_and_Stress ) These instances are rare, in the same way that instances of "swatting" are rare. There are multiple reports of such accounts, the damage each such instance produces is outsized for the planning and effort to pull it off, and the details are quite lurid. However, as a fraction of the general populace, the affected population is tiny.
I say this as someone who counts himself in the gamer camp. I have seen firsthand, adults who are gamers transfer the morality they learned in their online community -- where the consequences are only in the context of games -- to the running of real world organizations. People can be treated as fungible/disposable. Truth and morality doesn't matter -- if the system allows it, then it's all fair game. This is quite different from the false and long debunked notion that the fantasy violence in media can lead to real violence -- precisely because of the demarcation between fantasy game-world objects and real people and the real world. When you shoot a soldier in-game, people know full well it's not something real that just happened, and the object of such treatment is objectively not real. When someone "kills" a prostitute in a Grand Theft Auto game, there is literally no victim. However, when someone sh#t-talks another player, the human mind on the other end is quite real, and the emotional impact is intended to be every bit as real as if the event happened in person. The game is fantasy, but your fellow players are real human beings, and the moral experience gained through the interaction between fellow human beings is also real. So too, the moral experience gained through the running of an online organization of real human beings is also real.
It's widely acknowledged all over the internet, that the reality of the humanity of people on the other end of communication is somehow often forgotten. The real emotional toxicity of such behavior is widely acknowledged in the gaming community and over the general internet as well. These things aren't in question. The things that are in question are 1) what it means and 2) what we should do about it. Without question, the toxicity of online interactions is due to an online disconnect between communications and consequences. It is a failure of the mechanisms which regulate the social animal Homo sapiens. There are entire libraries of novels and nonfiction books about how the breakdown of aspects of the social fabric reduce human interactions to might-makes-right brutality. Perhaps it's progress that all of human nastiness moves onto the digital realm and away from the world of flesh and atoms. Certainly, the immorality and nastiness of even attempts to regulate/counter the general toxicity seem to devolve down to the same level as the general toxicity itself. Perhaps the existence of walled gardens is akin to the building of town walls and the rise of feudal lords. People in the real-world 1st world adhere to the rule of law and generally live by principles. People in the virtual 0th and 1st worlds are still in a feudal world of rule by force and of personal/tribal loyalties taking the place of principle. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the nascent moralism of today's online world often resembles medieval moralism in its acerbic irrationality and absolutism.