A fake emergency call to police resulted in officers responding Friday night to the home of Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows just a day after she removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot under the Constitution’s insurrection clause.
She becomes the latest elected politician to become a target of swatting, which involves making a prank phone call to emergency services with the intent that a large first responder presence, including SWAT teams, will show up at a residence.
Bellows was not home when the swatting call was made, and responding officers found nothing suspicious.
All you need is a VPN and a VOIP number. It’s not hard to do and you can order them easily online. Let alone text to voice readers.
There’s a reason why swatting and bomb threats have been popular for a decade now.
Privacy is a two way street. When it comes to serious threats, the same things that protect you, protect people who would abuse those tools.
That’s my point. It should not be that easy.
Well unless you want FBI back doors built into every VPN in every sovereign nation, then it’s unfortunately a byproduct of our need for privacy due to corporate and governmental overreach.
The FBI and other three letter agencies already pay huge bucks for hats when they can. Common encryption aren’t going to be broken for at least a couple decades. We almost always encrypt better than decrypt though by the very nature of the process though.
Quantum computing is moving faster than most people realize but it will never beat out better encryption.
Or maybe calls from voip are identified before sending out a swat team
Problem is there’s a ton of legitimate VoIP. My brother had a VoIP home phone for years because it costs next to nothing. Police can’t just not go to a call because it’s a VoIP call.
I’m saying show a little more caution. (I know lol)
They can spoof the phone number so it’s a phone number associated the address.