Almost two years ago — June 2, 2010 — a family on Cascade Road in Springfield, Pa. suffered a night of terror when a murder/hostage situation was reported to be occurring at their home via a 911 call.
A SWAT team was called and a helicopter, guns were drawn, and the father of the house was handcuffed and wrestled to the ground. Instead of the home being a crime scene, however, it turned out that the families were victims of one big prank done by hacking the emergency dispatch system.
The practice of using the 911 system to send law enforcement on false and potentially dangerous alarms is called “swatting” and it is now being practiced for political reasons.
On May 26, sheriff’s deputies were sent to the Georgia home of Erick Erickson, the editor-in-chief of the conservative website RedState.com. to investigate a false report that he had shot his wife.
Erickson had been writing about a swatting incident perpetrated on conservative blogger Patrick Frey aka Patterico, a California Deputy District Attorney, who was handcuffed following a 911 call reporting that he had shot his wife.
Frey had been writing about Brett Kimberlin, who is now Democrat political activist after serving 17 years of a 51 year sentence as the Indiana Speedway Bomber.
Another political victim of swatting is Mike Stack, the New Jersey resident who helped bring down New York Congressman Anthony Weiner.
Former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams notes that the practice could easily be ended by a Justice Department led by an attorney general so inclined.