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“Conservative bloggers are on heightened alert following a string of so-called ‘SWAT-ing’ incidents and are taking precautionary measures to ensure they don’t fall victim to the potentially dangerous prank as the political blogosphere prepares for a heated election season,” Fox reports. While conservative commentators aren’t the only ones being SWATted (as above), redstate.com blogger Erik Erickson and electronic columnist Patrick Frey were recent victims of bogus 911 calls. There appears to be method in this madness . . .

At the end of last month, theblaze.com fingered a potential mastermind behind Mr. Frey’s SWATting: Brett Kimberlin. Seems Mr. Kimberlin has been “terrorizing” commentators on both sides of the political divide. Fox (and others) don’t see SWATting in non-partisan terms . . .

The growing trend, which some say could one day prove deadly, had conservatives on edge at the annual RightOnline conference of right-wing bloggers and activists in Las Vegas this weekend.

I reckon right-leaning bloggers should be more afraid of STDs that SWATs. I could be wrong. One their members, Ali Akbar, reckons conservatives are in the crosshairs . .

Akbar told FoxNews.com that he believes he is a target after he claims his mother’s home address in Texas was posted on various Internet sites to “incite someone crazy on the fringe left to do something absolutely awful to one of us for what we’re talking about.”

Akbar and others are urging troops of conservative bloggers to protect themselves by contacting their local law enforcement before they post about a “controversial” topic.

“Notify law enforcement,” he said. “It’s uncomfortable to talk to your local police about this, but it’s absolutely important because getting SWAT-ted is not a joking matter. They come to your house with their guns drawn. They’ll kick in your door.”

Contact the police before you post? That may not be the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, but  it’s certainly one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard.

In fact, one wonders if an anti-blogger will call the cops pretending to be the blogger notifying the cops that they’re about to post something controversial. What would we call that? Straight-jacketing?

Still, SWATting is a serious, seriously scary, cowardly crime. As many of TTAG’s commentators have pointed out, it’s only a matter of time before a “no-knock” SWAT team encounters armed resistance. All then all hell will break loose.

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50 COMMENTS

  1. I wouldn’t go to brietbart unmasked with out using a proxy. These people aren’t beyond screwing with random people. Patterico’s commenters have been harassed by these people for following links to their pages…

  2. “Hello, 911. I want to report a man who’s going completely nuts! He’s threatening everybody! You better get a SWAT team there real quick!”

    911 Operator: “What’s the address?”

    “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

    • Ralph,

      Look, up in the sky! Is it a bird, or plane, or just a drone that has been tasked to cover your house?

      It’s not nice to mess with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, no matter who is the temporary occupant. (No one wants to be SWATed by Seal Team 6!)

  3. Fox News= rich people paying rich people to tell middle class people to hate poor people. Pure RepubliCON propaganda.

    • MSNBC and CNN = rich people paying rich people to tell upper middle class people to hate lower middle class people and poor people. Pure DemocRAT propaganda.

      See how easy that was? Large media conglomerates make everyone pick a side (a multibillion media empire side) in political shadow-boxing. Guess who wins?

  4. Well welcome to the new world order! jk
    Seriously it seems stupid I know. Maybe you could simply given them your number let them know you are a blogger and to call you if someone says you killed your wife or something. I know ok second dumbest idea ever. Sounds like a forced registry for conservative bloggers to me doesn’t it?
    I just have this odd feeling that at some point the gun-ho SWAT team is going to run into someone who is as good as they are and go down in a blaze of glory taking a few with them because they thought they didn’t need to knock politely and ask to come inside. Nothing against law enforcement either. If you bust down someones door regardless of reason and the 911 is an anonymous “tip” from someone who won’t give you a name or specifics then you might be waking someone out of a deep sleep who happens to be armed. If they don’t hear you clearly identifying yourself as police then there is a good chance you might meet some resistance until and miss understandings are worked out.
    It would be interesting if the tables ever got turned on some left wing folks. Course they wouldn’t worry about firearms as much as pot grows in their houses lmao!

  5. While there’s a difference between cautious and paranoid surely, I wouldn’t put anything past progressive drones, up to and including violent harassment and attempted murder. Now all you “democrats and republicans are the same” chaps are already thinking about your flames, so let me just say I mean libertarian/classic-conservative-minded people versus modern-progressive-minded people. Rs and Ds have nothing to do with it.

    Quite simply, the progressive mental disease attracts a certain kind of politician and person. Why would a person hell-bent on controlling and oppressing everyone around them for their own selfish gains NOT have a problem with murder, harassment, and the like?

    • The progressives want to oppress everyone? Sure they do. Go tell it to my lower-middle-class Mexican gay friend when she tried to get time off from her union teaching job (where she makes less then her male counterparts) to have an abortion funded by single-payer healthcare while trying to reduce the defense budget and eating broccoli.

    • The progressives want to oppress everyone? Sure they do.

      Go tell it to my lower-middle-class Mexican gay friend when she tried to get time off from her union teaching job (where she makes less then her male counterparts) to have an abortion funded by single-payer healthcare while trying to reduce the defense budget and eating broccoli.

  6. The fact that TTAG tells me my comment hasn’t been published when it actually has is horrible progressive oppression too!

  7. Did you not read this before posting? Its pretty incoherent and really feels like you wrote pressing down on the keys really hard.

    The Fox article makes no mention of Kimberlin. Yet you make the insinuation that Fox News is saying hes targeting conservatives and only conservatives, and that this is happening to leftists, which its not.

    In the end these bloggers trying to make sure this doesn’t happen to them, is no different then you getting a CCW for self defense because you heard some other person had their home broken into. The discussions surround trying to make sure your address is not online so this cannot happen to you.

  8. God SWATing is fukcing hilarious. I can’t wait till someone gets killed over it and it sparks a national debate on the necessity of those teams. I don’t know why the right thinks it is anything new, or they are sole targets, it has been going on for god knows how long to everyone.

    • Oh, now that’s priceless.

      I don’t think everyone understood your humor though.

      • Some of us did – Indiana just passed a law that says (more or less – please consult your lawyer before relying on this statement) you are legally entitled to forcibly resist an illegal entry by the police. Of course, you had better be really sure it is an illegal entry …

  10. How long is it going to be until we have folks using Tor to forward kiddy porn to people and then reporting that to Johnny Law?

  11. I do not like the tenor of this post at all. SWATing is a deadly serious subject, if you experienced what Patrick Frey did , I expect you would feel very different about the subject. Maybe you should read a little more about Mr. Kimberlin and rethink your position.

    “Contact the police before you post? That may not be the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, but it’s certainly one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard.”

    Seriously? Why wouldn’t you give the local authorities a heads up if you knew for a fat that this is happening? Ask Glenn Reynolds, (who links you regularly) he did.

    This is the worst post I have ever seen on here, and it’s causing me to rethink the wisdom behind every thing else I’ve read here.

    • I feel the opposite, this post made my day. I can just see these guys jumping every time there’s a knock at the door after they’ve post about president being a foreigner or some shit, lol.

      NeoCon’s have god on their side so they should be ok.

  12. Mr. Farago, maybe it’s my medicine, but I couldn’t understand what you wrote 🙂 ummm, I think I’ll reread in about 4 hrs when meds wear off.

  13. Anyone that would “SWAT” someone else, is a pants wetting, sniveling, inbred, mutant coward. Most evil folks that have the urge to see someone killed, have the balls to do it themselves, using the police to do it for them is so incredibly lame, it defies my ability to describe it accurately.

    • its not lame, its a great idea, if your careful online no one will ever find out who made the calls. leme guess, youre a LEO.

      • Nope, not now or ever a LEO. Just don’t like the idea of a coward using the police to commit murder. It’s bad enough when the cops do it on their own, they don’t need outside help.

  14. You do realize that Kimberlin is a convicted terrorist known as the Speedway Bomber? Some of these bloggers might come off as a bit goofy, but this is deadly serious stuff. Do a little research before cracking wise about a SWAT team coming through someone’s front door as a “prank”.

    • No, I really don’t think he knows what they’re capable of. He made no mention of what happened to Aaron Worthing, so I really doubt he has any idea the minutia of this case. Its a lot more then some “secret blog war.”

      I also don’t think he reads Radley Balko, or Reason enough because ‘no knock raids’ often do meet armed resistance.

      • “I also don’t think he reads Radley Balko, or Reason enough because ‘no knock raids’ often do meet armed resistance.”

        You must be new here. And if you want to say something, it usually helps to list specifics and references, because most people don’t want to go thru hundreds of pages of shitty blog posts to figure out what youre getting at.

  15. The real problem is, why do they respond with a SWAT team to a random 911 call? Why is that much force brought to bear so readily on one citizen simply on the word of an unknown individual?

    • because its fun to get all them goodies out and show em what you can do!
      you have to justify the budget for a huge swat roster, armored personel carriers, paramilitary training, etc. Also many police departments are AFL-CIO or ASCFME union anyway and really enjoy putting the boot on the neck of some conservative kids.

    • Of the people mentioned here, none of them were responded to with a actual SWAT team, just plain cops/sheriffs. It is the far right saying the sky is falling as usual.

        • that unnecessarily long article even says “At 12:35 a.m. on July 1, 2011, sheriff’s deputies pounded on my front door and rang my doorbell.”

          Sheriff deputies, ie: regular cops, not a SWAT team.

        • you act like this is OK as long as the cops are wearing the right uniform,

          if you read the rest of the unnecessarily long article you would have seen how the affair was handled,
          “after I answered the dooor and was rushed to the police car, police rushed into my home. They woke up my wife, led her downstairs and to the front porch, frisked her, and asked her where the children were. Then police ordered her to stand on the front porch with her hands against the wall while they entered my children’s bedrooms to make sure they were alive…….”

        • I never said it was ok, I said it was not a incident of SWATing. SWATing as the name implies, involves a SWAT team. Was their dog shot? Was everyone placed in cuffs and left there for half a hour to a hour? Did a trigger happy cop thought he saw a gun and shot a unarmed person? They got Coped, not SWATed.

    • SWATing uses a method of manipulating the Caller ID information so that it appears that the 911 call is actually coming from the residence. It’s easily done with land lines and VoIP lines and is possible with mobile lines as well. A typical swating call would be someone calling 911, claiming to be the resident, reporting some type of hostage situation whether it be a home invasion or the resident himself holding a hostage.

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