Imagine having a SWAT team under your command, willing to go just about anywhere you ask them to. Now also imagine that you’re a 15 year old kid with nothing better to do than play pranks on your friends. Carnage ensues.
This article, titled SWAT team goes to wrong home in 911 scam, from Salinas, CA, discusses a situation where the above presumptions were actually true. Apparently, a kid from Chicago was chatting online with another kid in Salinas, and decided to prank him. Using a yet to be determined method of spoofing his caller ID, he made his phone number appear to be the one of his “friend” in California. He then called 911 and told them he was being attacked by men with assault rifles. The police department obviously takes an emergency call like this seriously, so they dispatched a SWAT team to the unsuspecting boy’s house. Meanwhile, the guy back in Chicago is probably giggling like a school girl, knowing what is about to happen.
I haven’t heard the term “swatting” before, but that is what the media is calling this type of prank, which is actually a serious crime. The hard part in prosecuting something like this is attribution, just like any crime committed over the Internet. The swatter could literally be across the world in China. He could also be working with a group of people, simultaneously causing chaos at police departments across the country, or targeting a particular area. This type of attack makes me think of denial of service or intrusion detection system flooding. If you do it enough, eventually your targets become preoccupied with all the false alarms, and are not able to respond to a true emergency that might be happening at the same time.
Now, using caller ID to quickly and accurately determine someone’s location in a 911 call is generally very effective and helpful. A lot of times people calling 911 are too frazzled to even remember their address. But how can we ensure that these swatting pranks don’t get out of hand? As far as I can tell, the only real solution is something like the Truth in Caller ID Act, which was proposed by the Senate. That’s unfortunate, since I’m usually not a proponent of new, restrictive legislation, but some people will always abuse the system and ruin it for the rest of us.
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