Banning Leslie Jones’s trolls won’t change a thing — hate is still the norm online; Washington Post, 7/20/16

Mikki Kendall, Washington Post; Banning Leslie Jones’s trolls won’t change a thing — hate is still the norm online:

"This is not just a matter of speech, despite the persistent notion that online harassment is easy to escape because in theory you can close the tab or turn off the computer. Online harassment spilled offline years ago. Harassers may imitate a deceased parent, contact employers in an attempt get a target fired or track someone down and drive them from their home. The last is often accomplished via SWATting, a tactic where a harasser files phony reports alleging a hostage situation or something similar so that police will in theory send the SWAT team into their target’s home.

Can we really claim that the trolls are outside the norm when the norm dismisses their behavior or even supports it on flimsy free speech grounds? After all, the people behind those keyboards sending hateful messages and imagery can vote. They can work on political campaigns; they can run for election. Ignoring bigots in our midst and failing to take them seriously can have a negative impact on everyone.

People like Yiannopoulos and his supporters are the symptom, but the real disease is the way that bigotry is being normalized as something harmless. It’s not. Some of the world’s darkest moments have happened because hate of “the other” spread like wildfire and stripped people of empathy, reason or basic human decency."

The terror of swatting: how the law is tracking down high-tech prank callers; Guardian, 4/15/16

Dan Tynan, Guardian; The terror of swatting: how the law is tracking down high-tech prank callers:

"The first 911 call came at 4.30pm. The caller told dispatchers that a man, woman, and boy had been shot and another child was being held hostage. Police responded in force, sending more than half a dozen cruisers and emergency vehicles to a sprawling house in the affluent Atlanta suburb of Johns Creek.

But when they arrived there were no signs of a shooting; inside, police found a nanny with two small children. When the mother returned from shopping she found her home surrounded by emergency vehicles. The father, who had been on a plane, landed at Atlanta’s international airport to see his house on TV, with news reports declaring that his wife and children had been shot.

They were victims of a swatting attack, a malicious form of hoax where special weapons and tactics (Swat) teams are called to a victim’s home under false pretenses, with potentially deadly results...

In November 2015, around the same time that reports about Obnoxious became public, congresswoman Katherine Clark, a Democrat from Massachusetts, introduced a bill that made swatting a federal crime. (The bill has been referred to the House subcommittee on crime, terrorism, homeland security, and investigations.)...

In March, Clark addressed the second part of the problem – the lack of law enforcement expertise – by introducing the Cybercrime Enforcement Training Assistance Act, which would allocate $20m a year to train local police departments on how to investigate and prosecute cybercrime."