17 year old 'serial swatter' charged after police say he made threats across US | Hacker News Reader

17 year old 'serial swatter' charged after police say he made threats across US

cnn.com

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Ah wow, I just found some audio recordings of this guy's "swat" calls

https://soundcloud.com/user-233140213/torswats-call-1

https://soundcloud.com/user-233140213/torswats-call-2

https://soundcloud.com/user-233140213/torswats-call-3

from https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7z8be/torswats-computer-gen...

Here’s something I don’t understand.

I see numerous cases of juveniles committing heinous property and safety crimes in California and the media always says names withheld because they’re juveniles. However why is this person’s name released?

Genuine question because I feel I’m maybe missing something.

Different states have different rules. My state doesn’t reveal the names of minors. It also doesn’t make mug shots public until after conviction. Other states publish everything from the moment of arrest. Both have their pros and cons, though I tend to side with the more restrictive approach.

I'm curious what you think the "pros" are about publicly exposing someone who hasn't been lawfully convicted?

He’s being chanted as an adult. It’s a bunch of paragraphs down.

Ok... and why is it possible to charge a minor as an adult?

That doesn't work elsewhere, does it? When a 17-year-old walks into a bar and the barman gives him alcohol, saying he decided to "serve him as an adult", will that be accepted?

> Ok... and why is it possible to charge a minor as an adult?

In short: because laws were written to allow or require it in certain circumstances (combination of age and alleged crime).

"Filion allegedly offered his swatting services in Telegram posts, which were tracked by the FBI"

from https://globalnews.ca/news/10266313/teen-swatter-911-calls-a...

Better link: https://lite.cnn.com/2024/01/31/us/teen-serial-swatter-charg...

Weird this only making news now when Wired was reporting it a week ago?

(and weirdly has multiple stories on it now)

Jan 26: https://www.wired.com/story/torswats-swatting-arrest/

Jan 31: https://www.wired.com/story/alan-filion-torswats-swatting-ar...

A 17-year-old “serial swatter” from California is believed to be responsible for hundreds of swatting incidents and bomb threats throughout the United States and is now facing charges in Florida, according to a pretrial detention motion.

damn. Talk about a menace on society. Give this guy life.

They should have at the very least sent a SWAT team to break fown his door at 6 AM, arrest his parents etc.

How about not locking up children for life? How about not making snap judgements based on a short article?

I’m a victim of a SWATting. You cannot imagine the hell you get put through until it happens to you. This kid deserves life.

Can you elaborate on the hell you get put through when SWATting happens?

My understanding was that SWATting means someone calls the police and says that you have a bomb in your house or something to that effect. I imagine that the SWAT team breaks down your door and arrest you and everyone else in the household.

Soon enough, they must realize that you are all good, right? SWATting is common enough that they must be aware of it and take it into account. If they started arresting and prosecuting people who were victims of SWATting, there would be big court cases against the police.

To clarify, I am not trying to underplay what you went through. I just want to understand what you went through that made you describe it as "hell".

I feel a need to point out that a force of armed men pointing guns at you with their fingers on the trigger is very much a deeply traumatizing and frightening thing to go through. We also have occurrences of swatting incidents leading to the deaths of innocents (links below). I also want to add that during a swatting incident, having your dog shot on sight isn't irregular, as they are considered a threat while sweeping through your home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-man-targeted-...

> having your dog shot on sight isn't irregular

That's a bad way of phrasing it. Shooting the dog is POLICY. The very first thing they do.

You can start by imagining how traumatic is it to have a huge team of armed men break into your home and violently restrain you or a loved one. If you've been SWATted you don't know why these people are there. Heck even if you recognize they're SWAT, you're not going to have any clue if they really are or of they're people posing as SWAT to kidnap you for ransom or worse.

Also that SWAT team isn't just going to come in, realize you're not armed, and laugh at the situation before letting you go. For all they know, you are as dangerous as the person who called in said and were just putting on an act when you saw the SWAT team roll up. So now you're at least going to deal with questioning which is going to be extremely difficult to deal with in a state of panic and confusion.

And no, it's very unlikely that the SWAT team would be held responsible for anything. Police have too much protection against that. To spin it for them, they were operating in good faith on the assumption that they needed to raid the house in the manner they did otherwise people would die.

And in this particular case, all while your elderly mom is ziptied on the ground in the front yard wearing just her underwear in freezing, raining weather at 1:30 at night, will all her (now very much awake) neighbors looking on.

There are plenty of other, longer articles about him discussing how he's swatted a dozens of mosques, temples, synagogues, and others.

He's also not a child. He's 17 years old, and fully capable of understanding the risk of harm he exposed hundreds of people to.

Yes, I read that the other day. I never claimed he is innocent, but "life" is a long time. I don't know the kid or any details, but are you really sure he's still going to be a danger in 10 years? Or 20 years?

> He's also not a child. He's 17 years old, and fully capable of understanding the risk of harm he exposed hundreds of people to.

It's not. Brains keep developing until the age of 25 or so. Age of consent and age of $lots_of_things is 18 (arguably too young, IMHO).

Trailing people as adults when they're considered too young to vote, buy alcohol, etc. is quite frankly ridiculous.

It's not like he just did this once or twice. He has apparently engaged in this activity some hundreds of times. Purposely putting people's lives at risk, probably specifically hoping to cause as much harm as possible. He literally offered his "swatting" services on Telegram. This isn't like some one-off bad decision, this was a persistent extremely malicious intent and could have resulted in substantial loss of life. Yeah, I don't think he should be jailed for life, but this is a person who should not be walking free in society until he has proven substantial fundamental change.

> I don't think he should be jailed for life, but this is a person who should not be walking free in society until he has proven substantial fundamental change.

Fully agree with that; obviously this is all very serious. But that is a fundamentally different position than "he should be locked up for life!"

Yeah for real, a life sentence is a pretty over-the-top suggestion.

> but are you really sure he's still going to be a danger in 10 years? Or 20 years?

Nobody knows, but the person lost the chance for society to give them the benefit of the doubt.

They know it’s wrong. They did it HUNDREDS OF TIMES.

Sociopaths cannot be cured.

SWATing is literally equivalent to shooting at someone with the intention to kill.

Until there is serious consequences for people who do it, it won't stop.

I never said there shouldn't be serious consequences. Ya'll treating this as some sort of binary choice between "lock a teenager up for life" vs. "give him a slap on the wrist".

It's far from certain he actually is a sociopath. Half the teenagers out there are semi-sociopaths on account of being teenagers. And it's really not the same as shooting at someone, much less "with the intent to kill". SWATting is SWATting, and comparing it to other things is silly because other things are, well, other things.

Neither is being a child or an adult a binary. Yes, the law generally makes a sharpe distinction based on age, but it does sometime recognize that someone who is close to the age of adulthood and who has been charged with particularly high impact and violent crime can be treated as an adult.

Whether an adult should or should not be imprisoned for life is a different question, but I cannot see treating this person a “child” appropriate.

What an absurd position. Comparing things helps calibrate the response. You compare situations to others you've experienced in the past to come up with an appropriate reaction.

What's the intent of SWATing? It is attempted murder.

And no, half the teenagers are not sociopaths. Sociopathy is a well defined condition that cannot be cured.

You're clearly neither a doctor nor a lawyer and have chosen a weird hill to die on, but carry on.

He has exposed a critical security flaw in the system. Give him a bug bounty!

He will: free room and board for many many years.

Every criminal by definition exposes a critical security flaw in the system. Should we pay them all?

Unfortunately the flaw isn't getting fixed. Punish the hacker!

I’d be okay with the book being thrown at this teenager. Hopefully set an example to discourage others from doing the same.

Looks like they’re only charging him for the mosque thing where they traced his call. Presumably they can’t rule out the accounts being a larger ring of swatters. It does make you wonder that they traced the call after he had supposedly done it so many times before.

While swatting itself is terrible, I can see a weird benefit to it being mainstream: it may encourage more caution by SWAT and other armed police responses. To some extent, that is probably good given the number of times police have shown up to the wrong house and shit the homeowner and/or their dog.

SWAT is the opposite of encouraging caution and since there's never any repercussions for the police, why exactly would they change?

You might get the head of the SWAT force to exercise a bit of caution, though I have not seen much evidence of this in the US. The 20 guys in the back of the van are out for blood from the moment they leave the station.

There's no accountability when the police are legally allowed to blow up someone's home or kill with impunity. They will hide behind qualified immunity every time.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68169406

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/amir-locke-shooting-no...

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1047085626/supreme-court-poli...

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/30/774788611/police-owe-nothing-...

> it may encourage more caution by SWAT and other armed police responses

Good luck with that

It’s hard not to generalize, but it seems like there is a lot of built up tension in police to want to use their guns, so they’ll use any reason to do so. Some become a police officer for the sole purpose of being able to shoot someone. It doesn’t seem like there are a lot of repercussions for the police.

So, SWAT are going to show up hot and want any excuse to use their weapons. It’s a dangerous situation.

Until the penalty for swatting isn't the same as blindly firing a gun in the direction of peoples homes it's not going to stop.

Until US police are required to think of the safety of others before themselves, swatting will continue to kill people unnecessarily.

I genuinely believe that Swatting should be considered on the level of attempted murder or similar offence, for the person making the call. Enough of these events have already ended tragically and it just shows that every incident is on the knife's edge of something terrible happening.

And that's without getting into the other side of the issue where the cops are all too happy to show up ready to rock and roll, amped up and on a hair trigger.

Why is a minor being named in the press (with a photo even!), especially given the presumption of innocence unless and until proven guilty?

Shameful.

If I were the police, I would consider not kicking in doors with guns drawn in response to prank phone calls, but that's me.

Unfortunately, the calls that are real outnumber the fake ones. It's also impossible to know which is which.

Is he the infamous school shooting hoaxer talked about multiple times on HN? -

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Important to note it's reported he was a business - "A California teenager has allegedly been unmasked as a prolific “swatter-for-hire” who charged $75"

Every swatting incident I've read about over the years happened in the US.

Are police in other countries also vulnerable to being tricked in this way, or is it just police departments in the US?

"Yes" but considerably less often and to date with less drama and no fatalities.

Most famously https://globalnews.ca/news/9097654/twitch-streamer-and-trans...

the same person was targeted in both London, England, and again in Northern Ireland.

The police visited to make further enquiries ..

which was a little different to a fully battlefield ready para military unit detaching a door and storming a location.

Perhaps the US SWAT response could dial initial contact down to an 11 from its current over 9000?

> London, England

According to the article, it was London, Ontario, Canada.

Good catch - poor recollection on my part, I first heard of the Northern Ireland event when it happened and got the wrong London when skim reading earlier :(

These people are trying to maximize harm, and that varies somewhat. In US that means claiming a shooting or hostage situation, trying to provoke an armed police response. Elsewhere it tends to be things like bomb threats.

He could have gotten away with it for a lot longer and done just as much damage through anonymous false CPS child abuse accusations. By law his name couldn't be revealed, plus they basically have no mechanism to track reporters across jurisdictions for patterns. If I were one of these psychopaths I'd just have peoples kids removed knowing I'd always be behind the cloak of anonymity unable to be faced by an accuser.

Having both a standing armed breaching force (SWAT) and a centralized emergency routing system are prerequisite so generally no it’s almost uniquely an American thing

You could call it, a military posse comitatus executing the laws of the US.

The problem is guns. If someone claims to have one it's a lot more credible in the United States. Also we have a LOT more gun violence so the fake calls are outnumbered by the real ones. There are over 50k SWAT deployments in the USA per year. Most teams are deployed at least once a week.

https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/83980/why-is-sw...

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