In October 2017, it has been over four years when I had an incident where essentially my
entire neighborhood got shut down by police and it didn't take too long for us to uncover
that it was essentially a swatting call or a prank phone call, as it were, but one that
happened to say the right words, which triggered a lethal force response from local law enforcement
because they thought that people's lives were in danger.
So essentially someone claiming to me, me calling my local law enforcement and saying
that I had killed people and had hostages and bombs and all this other stuff.
And so thankfully that situation ended without incident because I wasn't even home at the
time.
And I ran into the police blockade trying to get to my house.
And this was, I mean, this was obviously fortunate.
And if not for that one thing, it might have ended differently.
But this actually, and I have several really long blog posts that go into all the details,
but that's actually an interesting point of operational security that I brought up, which
was that when I post things, I try not to do it in ways that would give away exactly
what I'm doing or where I am at the time.
And what I believe happened that morning is that I posted something at probably 630 or
seven o'clock in the morning talking about it being Monday and it was going to be a long
week.
And I suspect that that's when my attacker saw that and said, oh, he must've just gotten
out of bed.
So that was the perfect time to swat him.
But in fact, I was already on the other side of town at the gym because I'm a really early
riser and like to work out early in the morning.
And so it just so happens that they thought that that was a great time to swap me and
ended up not being a great time.
But fast forward a year or two, basically I announced that I had been swatted, but didn't
really say much more about the details for nearly a year because I spent the next year
basically tearing down my entire life and rebuilding it with a focus on privacy.
And I felt like one of my goals was I wanted to be able to go after the attacker without
worrying about more attacks against myself.
And also I didn't want to have to completely give up my identity and my reputation that
I had already built up around it and start all over again in order to protect my privacy.
So from a privacy perspective, I kind of took the hard route there because I wanted to keep
using my real name and yes, it is my real name.
Unfortunately, I was not smart enough a decade ago to think about creating a pseudonym.
And so then it turned into really like a four year long ordeal of talking to private investigators,
talking to a number of different attorneys, collecting tips, eventually talking to the
FBI.
But it took like three years to ever get someone at the FBI's attention.
And that was also just sort of fortuitous networking connection.
And after many years and handing over all the information I collected the FBI, it took
them almost a year after receiving the information to get back and say, hey, we found the guy.
And unfortunately, the federal district attorney has declined to prosecute because they're
a minor.
Apparently, the federal system doesn't really have good justice or enforcement when it comes
to minors.
And so they usually just sort of get off.
And so we thought it was all over at that point.
But then a few months later, the state district attorney actually came to us and said, hey,
we are interested in prosecuting.
And at that point, things happened pretty quickly.
The guy in question didn't contest anything.
He pled guilty to all the charges.
I actually ended up flying out there and giving my own witness statement.
And he basically got probation and a handful of other terms that he has to follow by for
the next few years since he did not have a criminal record.
So it was kind of a weird conclusion.
I had hoped that it had been an adult who should have known better and been able to
take responsibility for stuff.
But I get it.
I think we all do stupid stuff when we're kids.
It's kind of crazy that we're at the point now where due to advancements in technology
and certain times when law enforcement and the justice system can't keep up with it,
you can have these really weird asymmetries.
So some 14-year-old kid who knows a little bit about tech, just enough to be dangerous
is able to actually have lethal force arbitrarily pointed at really anybody that they want because
very few people have sufficient privacy to prevent you from being able to find their
home address.
And then that ends up being so difficult to have law enforcement even care enough to try
to track them down.
And then even when they do track them down, the justice system isn't really prepared to
do much about it if they're just a young kid without a record.
So it's a very interesting and complicated long case.
And I'm just glad to finally have it behind me now.