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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

This is a problem created and continued by phone companies. It wasn’t a huge problem before VoIP because the phone company networks didn’t allow everyone to forge sender info (SS7, not CallerID). When VoIP came along they didn’t put strict authentication in because it would have cost more, and that really opened things up.

Right now, you could have extra caution for 911 calls which originate from VoIP. Pass a law that in five years telco CEOs are charged as assisting murder the next time a SWATing happens and they’d magically discover that egress filtering is easy to implement once you’re not looking at the revenue generated by spammers.

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Sounds easy, but I think you'll find that in practice, it's not so easy to just toss around murder (or accessory to murder) charges because something annoys you. Even if it annoys you a lot. It's a slippery slope from that to making basically anything a "murder" charge. Not saying you can't pass some sort of law or create some sort of penalty, but murder-related charges aren't going to fly.

Slippery-slope fallacies are bad to use, it's a slippery-slope to literally anything being called a "slippery-slope" to literally anything else. Eating beans causes more vandalism? Slippery slope! Poodles with weird haircuts cause global warming? Slippery-slope!

First, it’s a thought exercise - people are talking like this some unavoidable fact of nature when it’s largely unique to the United States where we have the combination of heavily armed cops with poor trigger discipline and a phone system which is increasingly useless because the companies were allowed to prioritize revenue over security.

Second, you can argue anything will be a slippery slope (you should hear what people say raising the capital gains rate 1% will do) but it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend there’s no distinction between contributing to a violence death and “basically anything”. Operating critical safety infrastructure should carry responsibilities beyond the average business.

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