• abbiistabbii
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    4 days ago

    So (not so) fun fact: Keffals, who was targeted by KiwiFarms for being trans (yes that’s all) and got Swatted. She then went to stay with another streamer (EllenFromNowOn) in Northern Ireland. Just for information sake, Northern Ireland is still a bit rocky security wise, Police there still carry guns on the regular. So when she went there, Ellen called up the police and explained the situation to them (they had never heard of Swatting weirdly enough).

    Sure enough, someone found her flat, posted her address (with a message referencing a Unionist Slogan, Ellen was from the Catholic Community), and sure enough, the police came. Instead of raiding her all guns blasing (which they normally would) they saw the warning, knocked on the door, saw nothing was wrong, called off the squaddies, and came in to basically make sure everything was okay.

    Bare in mind, this was in Northern Ireland, a place where the Police still drive Armored cars and have regular riots, and they handled this better than the Police in London, Ontario.

      • Zink@programming.dev
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        4 days ago

        As an American, this line short circuited my brain:

        Police there still carry guns on the regular

        I live in a quiet but growing suburban town that’s closer to rural areas than the nearest city. When I walk my kid to elementary school (how European of us, lol) the police officer working as a crossing guard for the kids still has their gun, taser, bulletproof vest, and all their other gear on.

        And it’s not a school-specific thing. You just never see cops without their weapons here. Armed and armored is just part of the uniform, essentially.

        • vala@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          The bullet proof vests really get me. They are so heavy and unlikely to be nessesary but some cops wear them ever day just to LARP.

          • deafboy@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            One could argue the vests are like seat belts in a car. You don’t need them 99.9% of the time.

            • vala@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              Ironic because it’s not unusual for cops to not wear seatbelts but they are more likely to die in a single vehicle accident than a gun fight.

      • Elaine@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        As an American reading this, I kept wondering when the mayhem and death would occur.

        • 800XL@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          As an American I wondered when the police would be made the victims and the actual victim would either get shot or arrested and blamed.

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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      4 days ago

      Yeah the cops on this side of the pond are crazy, and their leadership staff tend to fall a lot further into the “complete psycho” side of the human spectrum.

      Thanks for sharing that story though - the dichotomy is absolutely fucking wild, especially considering we’re talking about Northern Ireland.

      • tpihkal@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        How often are police tipped off before hand that someone is anticipating being SWATed though?

        That situation is practically unheard of so it’s impossible to know how police in the US would respond.

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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          4 days ago

          Yeah, that’s definitely a quandary. But in the case of people who know they might be (or have been previously) targeted with that sort of bullshit, it’s a prudent precaution in the US (and Canada too, evidently)

      • abbiistabbii
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        2 days ago

        Oh there’s several ways, especially if you have poor opsec. People used to raid people’s twitch accounts and bring down their internet connections by looking for their username on Skype which had a vulnerability which they could use to find a person’s IP.

        For swatters on the otherhand, they tend to either know the streamer themselves or they tend to be groups like KiwiFarms who are a lot more organised and do a lot of research and detective work, like looking at the video, looking for usernames elsewhere, looking for emails, and looking for location clues. It’s really fucked up. They found Keffels’s Motel by the sheets in her room. It’s bad enough if you do not think about these things and just have sloppy OpSec, but even if you do, they can still find you.

        • barsquid@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          The sheets in the motel room, that’s insane. A while back I read something like a stalker caught a reflection in someone’s eye at a train station, that’s horrific enough. But I would have thought being indoors is relatively safe. It is like impossible to put out video content at all without being vulnerable.

      • orcrist@lemm.ee
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        3 days ago

        In the US, property records are public records. Easy to find someone’s address online if you know their full name and the county they own property in.

        Go try it!