Teen in Ohio faces 73 charges for allegedly making 'swatting' calls [telecom]

CNN reported that an Ohio teen has been arrested in connection with a series of prank calls to police in upstate New York and across the country, authorities said. The 17-year-old, who is accused of making "swatting" calls, was charged with 40 felony and 33 misdemeanor delinquency charges in Mahoning County, Ohio. Swatting is the act of making a false police report -- usually of an urgent or violent crime -- to lure law enforcement or SWAT teams to a location.

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***** Moderator's Note ***** | "Swatting" is an example of what Bruce Schneier, who coined the term "Security Theater" to describe the TSA, calls a "semantic attack," i.e., an attacker turning a system - in this case, E911 - on itself to obtain an result that wasn't anticipated by the designers.

I've said this before, so I won't labor the point, but politicians and bureaucrats at all levels of government have a bad habit of rushing to adopt "miracle" cures without considering how fragile those so-called cures really are.

Bill Horne Moderator