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Special counsel Jack Smith was targeted by attempted swatting on Christmas Day

Police were dispatched toward Smith’s residence but were called off when they learned it was a false alarm and that everyone inside the home was safe.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the prosecution of former President Donald Trump in two federal cases, was the target of an attempted swatting at his Maryland residence on Christmas Day.

According to two law enforcement sources, someone called 911 and said that Smith had shot his wife at the address where Smith lives.

Montgomery County Police dispatched units toward the home but were called off when the Deputy U.S. Marshals protecting Smith and his family told police that it was a false alarm and that everyone inside the home was safe.

No arrests have been made in connection with the incident.

fosforus , (edited )

How the fuck can swatting work on such a high profile person? Should we all be swatting Trump himself 24/7?

“Hello 911, there’s a black man disguised as a bloated ex-president breaking in to my home! He’s heavily armed and he’s speaking arabic!”

mriormro ,
@mriormro@lemmy.world avatar

It clearly didn’t.

fosforus , (edited )

Came too close to working if you ask me, but ok.

ghostdoggtv ,

I’ve changed my mind about the death penalty. What is swatting if not an attempt to have someone executed by the state?

prole ,

How has that changed your mind on it? Did you support it before?

ghostdoggtv ,

I was opposed before.

TragicNotCute ,
@TragicNotCute@lemmy.world avatar

The scary thing is the only reason he was safe and didn’t get swatted is because he already had armed guards protecting him.

TreeGhost ,

Its crazy to me that people think its the telephone companies that need more regulations here and not the police. SWAT teams shouldn’t be going in guns blazing on anonymous calls and any injury or death should be solely their responsibility. By all means try to prosecute the people calling in the first case for misuse of emergency services, if you can identify them, but we all know who pulled the fucking trigger. Police can’t both get to decide that they get to selectively enforce the law and then take no responsibility when the injure or kill innocent people.

superduperenigma ,

Police can’t both get to decide that they get to selectively enforce the law and then take no responsibility when the injure or kill innocent people.

Supreme Extreme Court: That’s where your wrong, bucko.

JustZ ,
@JustZ@lemmy.world avatar

Telecoms do need more regulation. They can’t trace these spoofed calls. There will be no arrests.

TreeGhost ,

I think there will always be ways to make anonymous calls regardless of regulations, especially since telephone systems are on the internet, so are vulnerable to hacking and exploits. But if police can be held responsible for the death and injury they cause, then maybe they will stop going in guns blazing and remove the incentive for swatting in the first place.

Raiderkev ,

You’d be surprised. Someone swatted my neighbor, and they actually made an arrest. I don’t know if they will have enough evidence to convict, but it was good to see. It was traumatizing for my neighbor. She’s an 80 year old woman who lives with her son. I would assume the guy who did it did so from a spoofed number, but they still managed to track someone down.

I have no idea why they were even targeted, and neither did they. My money was on someone trying to swat a different neighbor who I always hear loudly talking shit while gaming. He’s always yelling loud enough that I can hear it next door. My thought is they were after him and they just screwed up the address and hit the house next door.

JustZ , (edited )
@JustZ@lemmy.world avatar

Hmm, that’s interesting. I was under the belief that when they do arrest swatters, they are the dumbest and least sophisticated swatters who aren’t really trying to cover their tracks.

Raiderkev ,

It’s definitely possible. There wasn’t anything about it in the article. I had just assumed he was spoofing the number because like I feel like that’s the 1st thing that you should do to avoid traceability, and the guy has apparently done it multiple times.

www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/…/3318438/

ook_the_librarian , (edited )
@ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world avatar

So I don’t want to bother finding a place to put this where anyone who would do this would see it. I’ll just rant here.

Hey jackass. Let’s consider the events of christmas day. Smith family sits safely at home. There is no mention of Jack even being informed.

Meanwhile, a mother is having an over-text conversation with her cop husband about how they are missing each other on Christmas Day. Then the cop texts “got to run. another guy with a gun.”

Now the cop’s wife is at home holding her children with the routine and traumatic thought of “will my children see their dad again?”.

Summing up. Smith family fine. Cop family scared. You know a certain percentage of cops’ wives are very sympathetic individuals.

deadtom ,

Its not the 40% being beaten by their husbands is it?

…temple.edu/…/do-40-of-police-families-experience…

ook_the_librarian ,
@ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world avatar

Oh, is that what comes up when you google “percent of cop’s wife’s”? Oops, I guess shouldn’t have said that. ;)

And I know I getting downvoted for being sympathetic to a family. But the person who sent the swat team presumably would care about them.

fosforus ,

Are they cops because they’re violent or are they violent because they’re cops?

Moira_Mayhem ,

No sympathy for cop families, they choose to be the thug army of our wealthy elite masters.

ook_the_librarian , (edited )
@ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world avatar

You folks have no theory of mind. All I’m saying is that the bootlicker with the great idea of trying ruin the Smiths’ Christmas ended up being at best friendly fire in a completely foreseeable way. The swatter is just having cops fight cops.

But stellar point about choosing your own family. Go home to your mom; tell her you’re brilliant.

Moira_Mayhem ,
  1. My mom is dead so fuck you on that point for reminding me.
  2. 40% of REPORTED police spouses have claimed abuse. I am sure there a lot more too afraid to report it. Every one of them could leave
  3. I have cut off every single magahead in my family tree from all contact after their support of jan6. It isn’t that hard.
ook_the_librarian ,
@ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world avatar
  1. I brought up your mother because they were a person in your life you did not choose. Pick a different mother. You can’t? That’s my point. I hope you had a great one. If you love you mom, I am sorry you lost her. But you had a lot of victim blaming in your small comment.
  2. I don’t know the relevance. You know I made up that cop story? Also, there is a strange assumption people make the the main character of a story is supposed to be a good guy. He not. I don’t care about him. My point was the swatter is dumbass whose plan had no hope of even bothering their target but could cause issues for their blue team.

Have you talked to many domestic violence survivors? Leaving is not simple. The kids are sympathetic too. I won’t let my hate of MAGA blur that. Targeting families is crime even in war. I won’t do it.

  1. Good. It is hard, but good. I wish it weren’t this way. I sorry you had some family members wrapped up in that. This is off-topic, but have you had any luck convincing any of them? I like to hear rhetoric that has worked.
Moira_Mayhem ,

This is off-topic, but have you had any luck convincing any of them? I like to hear rhetoric that has worked.

One, my cousin. It only worked because we had a special connection even within the family as being the only two males our age.

I appealed to his sense of nervousness for the future, I identified with his economic and social fears (he was on his way to inceldom at a rapid pace), I shared my own fears that aligned with him: Never owning a house, not being able to afford a family, not even really being able to afford to date or socialize. Being one accident away from poverty.

I reminded him of the minorities he was involved with on a daily basis and asked him of any of them came even close to fitting the stereotypes he kept saying about them.

After he began to come to terms with this, I started bringing up the direct policy choices that have been responsible for our current economic stagnation were almost universally Republican driven policy changes, and the fact that SCOTUS almost exclusively votes in favor of corporate interest in the last 40 years.

I also agreed with him that the dems were ALMOST as bad, but confronted him with statements made by AOC, Franken and Bernie that actively spoke out in favor of the worker and the student, something I CHALLENGED him to find a modern parallel to in the republican party. He could find zero examples.

But as he was searching, he did start to see that what republicans WERE saying about workers rights was that they needed to be restricted. I think that’s when the class betrayal the GOP heaped on him sunk in.

It took a while, wasn’t always forward momentum, and he hasn’t committed to voting blue yet, but he won’t vote cheetolini in any circumstance as he now realizes that the twice impeached one is a traitor to our democracy.

BeautifulMind ,
@BeautifulMind@lemmy.world avatar

It’s wild to me that when the phone companies need to bill for a phone call they know exactly who to bill for it, but when it’s something like this everyone is helpless because you can’t track these things

KevonLooney ,

Yeah, like did someone use the Captain Crunch whistle to make this call from a payphone?

lingh0e ,

Blueboxed it.

Schmoo ,

Love how esoteric this joke is. The only people who get this are nerds old enough to remember or people who watched that one Tom Scott video about phreaking.

prole ,

Anyone else used to read 2600 magazine?

fosforus ,

There’s a thing called prepaid which at least at some point in the past could be acquired with cash, without id.

And also, you’re forgetting that flip phones exist. You just crack that bad boy in half and everything that was done with it disappears from this universe.

prole ,

You just crack that bad boy in half and everything that was done with it disappears from this universe.

I… Hmm… I don’t think that’s how it works.

Semi-Hemi-Demigod ,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

Die Hard has John McClane making an anonymous report of terrorists, which is then responded to by a single cop who drives by to see if there's anything going on.

When did that change?

yeather ,

9/11

Semi-Hemi-Demigod ,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

Damn I forgot

Sabata11792 ,
@Sabata11792@kbin.social avatar

We had 1 rule.

ook_the_librarian ,
@ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world avatar

When police started buying military surplus and find it’s not exciting if it sits in an armory. Here’s a blog post that links a good Last Week Tonight from 2014 about it.

billiam0202 ,

When all you have is an armored vehicle, high-powered rifles, and body armor, every problem looks like a brown-skinned terrorist.

Semi-Hemi-Demigod ,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

The police have themselves an RV

Moira_Mayhem ,

in the 90s when the War on Drugs gave every fuckdamn podunk cop corral the funding for assault weapons, body armor, and tanks.

Also Die Hard was an entertainment movie, not a documentary.

MagicShel ,

No arrests have been made in connection with the incident.

This shit needs to change. This has been a problem for too many years now.

Neato ,
@Neato@ttrpg.network avatar

Yeah. When I first heard about swatting you heard about arrests. Now it seems like the cops don’t give a shit.

When I was in school you’d get a bomb threat in the county once a year or so but they always caught them. How are police so inept now?

TowardsTheFuture ,

Because our phone regulations are absolute shit now and thus it’s much easier to hide this shit with everything now.

cantstopthesignal ,

This is the real answer. Arrest the spoofers. Anyone can vpn and spoof a phone call. It’s why I don’t answer my phone anymore

werefreeatlast ,

I don’t answer my phone either. I have a special Ring tone for the family, that’s it. At work I got moved to a new location and asked me if I needed my phone. I said no and haven’t used the office phone since. I email companies and setup in person meetings or teams meetings. There’s no need for a phone at work if one can just do teams.

voracitude , (edited )

deleted_by_author

    •
    TowardsTheFuture ,

    It’s the regulations that don’t exist when we’ve got new technology that needs to be regulated that are the problem. And sorry, I don’t have a list of every telephone regulation on me to go through and tell you which ones, nor the time to do so.

    voracitude ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    cogman ,

    VPNs, virtual numbers, voip, and tor are somewhat new and fairly unregulated. It’s dead simple to setup to make a very hard to trace phone call.

    voracitude ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    cogman ,

    it’s a minor inconvenience for the US Government

    Citation needed.

    Even if I granted the US gov as being all seeing, a major problem is that it requires local PD/prosecutors to get the feds involved.

    I’m not actually on board with attacking this via phone system regulations, but It is fairly easy to make anonymous phone calls using the techniques I pointed out. To actually fix something like this, you’d need every phone number to be registered in person with a star card and to completely outlaw virtual numbers providers with stiff penalties. But even then, there’s the issue of international numbers and illegally spoofing a number. Those can’t be fixed without revamping the telcos which is really hard with the amount of ossified tech in place.

    This probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but the two things that need to happen are reducing gun ownership and demilitarization of the police. Cops are way too trigger happy, actual consequences when cops murder or harm individuals would go a long way in stopping them from perceiving everyone as an enemy combatant. Pulling guns off the streets would reduce the justifications of busting down doors with a dozen cops ready to shoot anything that moves.

    voracitude ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    cogman ,

    To actually fix something like this, you’d need every phone number to be registered in person with a star card and to completely outlaw virtual numbers providers with stiff penalties. But even then, there’s the issue of international numbers and illegally spoofing a number. Those can’t be fixed without revamping the telcos which is really hard with the amount of ossified tech in place.

    This is exactly what you ask for (I’m guessing you didn’t read the full post).

    voracitude ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    cogman ,

    They aren’t required to verify who signs up for the service, which is the crux of the problem. Records are useless if they can’t be associated with an individual.

    Forcing in person sign ups with strong identifying requirements solves the swatting problem, because every number is directly associated with who is using it.

    voracitude ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    cogman ,

    Oh go on, come up with something instead of just downvoting me. I know it’s hard, actual work even, but you’re never gonna change minds otherwise.

    Dude, I just responded to you and did not downvote, calm down. Maybe take some of your own advice about anger?

    voracitude ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    Agrivar ,

    who’s angry?

    REALLY bro? Pretty obvious the snarky douche arguing all over this thread has some serious anger management issues.

    voracitude ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    TigrisMorte ,

    "What about “frustrated” do you not understand?" the part that motivated you to become angry while ignoring the content of the replies made to your comment. But that is just what I don't understand.

    voracitude ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    TigrisMorte ,

    I never tried to do any such thing. I answered the question you posted. Are you perhaps getting so angry you are confused about which thread you are in?

    Pips ,

    None of those are traditional phone services, they’re all internet based so regulated differently. I agree they should be regulated as telephone utilities but right now they’re not.

    FlyingSquid ,
    @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

    When I was in school you’d get a bomb threat in the county once a year or so but they always caught them.

    I’m actually surprised about that. Maybe you went to school at a different time from me? I graduated in 1995. A couple of times a year, some kid (probably) would call in a bomb threat so they could get out of a test or whatever and they never got caught. We had a pay phone right outside the school, which didn’t help.

    pearsaltchocolatebar ,

    It’s because the cops get to play soldier without any actual training.

    prole ,

    The cops probably like it because they get to LARP like it’s Call of Duty for a few hours.

    newthrowaway20 ,

    For real. Maybe people will take it seriously now that we’ve gone from the swatting live steamers to swatting representatives and elected officials.

    HikingVet ,

    This incidence of swatting is literally terrorism.

    newthrowaway20 ,

    I get that, but we tend to not take terrorism very seriously when it’s domestic terrorism.

    porous_grey_matter ,

    When it’s right wing domestic terrorism

    dylanmorgan ,

    Yep. When it’s lefties chaining themselves to a fence to protest nuclear weapons we beat them half to death before giving them life in prison.

    n2burns ,

    I think it’s awful, but how do you suggest making changes? The only thing I can think of is tracking 9-1-1 calls, but doing more of that discourages people from anonymously calling in emergencies, which could lead to more deaths.

    seathru ,

    911 calls are tracked. Listen to your local police scanner. Even if someone calls and immediately hangs up, they have a pretty good idea where that person was calling from.

    I think @MagicShel meant we should actually use the information we already have, and prosecute it like the attempted murder that it is.

    n2burns ,

    Listen to your local police scanner.

    Can’t. It’s encrypted.

    seathru , (edited )

    Encrypted? Or digital? I thought the one here was because all you could hear was what sounded like modem static when someone keyed up. Turns out it was just a digital “encryption” that could be defeated with a $20 baofeng radio.

    There are however a few places that are straight up encrypted with their own keys, and not much you can do about that.

    MagicShel , (edited )

    At a minimum tell the responding officers that the call was anonymous and hasn’t been verified. I don’t know beyond that. Remove anonymity but also seal the records automatically to be unsealed only if the call itself is a crime? But we’ve had a long time to deal with this and think about solutions, and it’s hard to believe we’ve not come up with a single way to address the issue.

    voracitude ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    RaoulDook ,

    It actually could be very hard to find the perpetrator with overseas VPNs and VOIP phone numbers that can be spoofed.

    voracitude ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    RaoulDook ,

    Dude I knew about that stuff before most people in the world, 20 years ago.

    VPNs can still make users anonymous, regardless of all the above. They are not cracking strong encryption in those tunnels, and overseas VPN providers can provide anonymizing VPN services that they won’t be able to trace. There may actually be nothing they can do about it.

    voracitude , (edited )

    Er… What? You think they can’t or don’t already track 911 calls? How do emergency responders give where you are if you can’t actually talk while on the phone, like if you’re hiding from an intruder in your house?

    Calling in a fictional emergency needs punishment. The alternative is wasting emergency service time with impunity, having them off chasing wild geese while someone with a real emergency is dying.

    Edit: And yes, this is already illegal and has already resulted in arrests in the real world: fbi.gov/…/the-crime-of-swatting-fake-9-1-1-calls-…

    It just needs to be enforced.

    HikingVet ,

    Last time I called 9-1-1 they confirmed my location, and name without me telling them who, or where I was calling from.

    9-1-1 only cares about getting help to the scene. AND, if being anonymous is an issue for you, use burners.

    NOT_RICK ,
    @NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

    They’ll get whoever did this. The feds don’t take getting messed with lightly

    Moira_Mayhem ,

    So far I’ve not ever seen any news articles about people calling in a swatting getting caught, but plenty of articles on swatting.

    What makes you so confident that the rancid basement troll that did this will face consequences?

    NOT_RICK ,
    @NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

    People get arrested for swatting all the time

    tacosplease ,

    Not sure it could be considered attempted murder, but harm & death are real risks in a swat raid.

    Not to mention cost and risk to the officers. It should be a very serious crime. Not sure what crime it is though. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were treated the same as filing a false report which would be way too lenient.

    dylanmorgan ,

    Can’t have swatting problems if you don’t have swat teams.

    Seriously, there should be a major push for police departments to de-emphasize swat and stop executing no-knock warrants.

    fiercekitten ,

    This is the real solution.

    Moira_Mayhem ,

    No, it’s not a solution, it’s a goal.

    A solution would be planned systems of oversight and accountability that achieves the goal.

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