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NancyLebovitz comments on Dark Arts: Defense in Reputational Warfare - Less Wrong Discussion
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What evidence do you have for your advice working? If it does work, what are the odds of it working?
I'm wondering what your advice would be for the targets in this case.
Rule #1. In some cases even #1 doesn't help but that is life. All strategies have weaknesses. If you defend against something you open other holes, take other risks and if by spending effort on the defense. Life is not fair.
I don't think that case is about reputation. To solve it you need a good connection to the police and or a plan to get a company like Twitch investing serious resources into dealing with the issue.
Fair enough that the case isn't about reputation, or at least mostly not about reputation.
As for involving the police, the article had quite a bit about how much trouble the police have dealing with swatting.
Warning: Grouchy libertarian response:
If they have so much trouble with it, why don't they stop fucking doing it?
Warning: Obvious non-libertarian response:
Because dealing with such things is part of their job, which (1) is valuable to society and (2) they are being paid to do in the expectation that they will, er, fucking do it.
If someone is able to make it credibly appear to the emergency services that there is an ongoing emergency, they need to respond. That is, after all, much of the point of having emergency services.
A more nuanced (and not particularly libertarian) version of your response is, I think, very reasonable: in some places, the US providing copious examples, the police are over-eager to respond to alleged emergencies with an immediate deployment of serious armed force, and are apt to be rather too trigger-happy when they do. It might be a very good idea for them to turn that down a few notches, in which case swatting would be less effective (hence maybe less tempting) and less likely to end in disaster. And maybe there are ways to verify reports more effectively without delaying rapid response when that's needed, though I'm not sure how.
But that's an entirely different matter from just not responding to apparent emergencies with what you take to be an appropriate level of force.
SWAT teams are a new phenomenon and are just a highly visible tip of the militarisation of police. Why this is happening is a big discussion, but no, sending in wannabe spec-ops teams in full military gear to do ordinary arrests is not valuable to society and I don't think that the cops are (yet) expected to react with this amount of force.
Looking at it from a bit different angle, the cops are just being gamed. They basically allow anyone with a modicum of acting ability to direct the SWAT teams. "But that's what we are paid to do" is not a good answer to being gamed and controlled.
As you will see in, er, a first cousin of this comment, I think most of my disagreement here was a consequence of my having underestimated how badly messed up policing has become in the US.
In case you're curious, that's what a "police" SWAT team looks like.
The issues are twofold: First, I don't think we'd disagree that a swat team is almost -never- an appropriate level of force. Second, anonymous phone calls are entirely insufficient evidence of an immediate emergency that would require that level of force.
So, if all you're saying is: "The mere fact of a single anonymous phone call should not produce a response of indiscriminately applied overwhelming force": yup, I agree.
If fixing that would be sufficient to make the swatting problem go away, then the problem is that I managed to underestimate the extent of the fucked-up-ness of the US police system. That wouldn't be a huge surprise, all things considered.
(And, having now actually read the article, it really does seem as if a single anonymous phone call can have pretty much that effect. That seems really bad. But I guess I don't know what sort of real incidents SWAT teams are used to deal with; perhaps, at least in some places, it's justified. If so, the best answer might be to come down heavily enough on people who abuse that system to stop them doing it.)
To be fare, it's a phone call that purports to be from the house being SWATed. It's just really easy to spoof the phone system.
My advice is for a slightly different style of conflict than existed there. As for evidence... I can't exactly provide case studies with control cases. I can only point to places where somebody violated the rules, and something bad happened.
There, the issue is more straightforward: It's a blackmail game. Each step enables the next. The first mistake is always standing out; the local fame they develop makes them stand out, which makes them targetable. The second mistake is responding to the first blackmail attack, the DDoS, by adding them as a Skype friend. Then the requests escalate, and previous granted requests provide material for more transgressive requests (personal information obtained from Skype profiles can then be used to dox them, or to gain account access somewhere else, which can be used to blackmail for nude photographs, which can be used to blackmail for... whatever is next in his escalation scheme). It's an escalation game, and the sooner the participant gets out of it, the better off they'll be.
So - reject the very first request. Don't agree to Skype him.
The specific examples could improve the article. Or distract from its general points to details of the specific cases.
My experience with these matters is that specific examples only ever serve to distract.