Free Republic

Significant updates are happening as the violent swatting epidemic targeting conservative influencers continues to unfold. As The Gateway Pundit reported, several conservative figures including Nick Sortor, Gunther Eagleman, and Shawn Farash have been swatted over the last couple of days. This comes after Infowars journalist Jamie White was brutally murdered in Austin earlier this week while another journalist from the organization got swatted twice. Now, independent journalist Breanna Morello has discovered an important clue: the individuals swatting conservative influencers are sending pizza delivery orders to their homes before placing the distress call to 9-1-1. Specifically, the orders are coming from...

A Romanian national pleaded guilty on Monday to charges related to his role in a “swatting” ring that targeted dozens of public officials, including a former US president. Going by the aliases “Plank,” “Jonah” and “Cypher,” 26-year-old Thomasz Szabo took part in a years-long conspiracy to place bogus 911 calls, claiming emergencies were taking place at the homes of top government officials, and make bomb threats against government buildings and houses of worship, according to Justice Department. Szabo and a co-conspirator, 21-year-old Serbian national Nemanja Radovanovic, allegedly targeted about 100 people, including members of Congress, governors, cabinet-level executive branch officials...

Defendants Alleged to Have Rigged Police Chief Exam, Misappropriated City’s Confidential Information Audrey Strauss, Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Acting Under Authority Conferred by 28 U.S.C. § 515, and David Sundberg, Special Agent-in-Charge, New Haven Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), announced the arrest of ARMANDO J. PEREZ, the Chief of Police of the City of Bridgeport, Connecticut (the “City”), and DAVID DUNN, the City’s acting personnel director, for defrauding the City by rigging the 2018 police chief examination, mandated by the City’s Charter, to ensure PEREZ would be selected for the position. ...

Law enforcement agencies across the country reported brief outages of their 911 systems Monday night, and it was not immediately clear if there was a connection with a major Microsoft system outage. Law enforcement agencies around the country, from Nevada to Pennsylvania and Arizona to Minnesota, tweeted that their 911 systems were down beginning sometime after 7 p.m. ET. Multiple reports indicated outages throughout Delaware and Ohio as well. By 8:15 p.m., many of those departments reported that their services had come back online. Others were still recommending that people call local department numbers instead of the emergency line. The...

PITTSBURGH – With her boyfriend in severe abdominal pain, Sharon Edge called 911 for an ambulance in the early morning hours of Feb. 6. Heavy snow was falling — so heavy it would all but bring the city to a standstill — and Curtis Mitchell needed to go to a hospital. "Help is on the way," the operator said. It never arrived. Nearly 30 hours later — and 10 calls from the couple to 911, four 911 calls to them and at least a dozen calls between 911 and paramedics — Curtis Mitchell died at his home. His electricity knocked...

Instapundit points to a Wired article about fixing the 911 system: HERE'S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE FROM WIRED on efforts to reinvent the 911 emergency-call system to take advantage of more modern technologies. The conclusion seems right: If national safety - the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes - depends on the execution of explicit plans, on soldierly obedience, and on showy security drills, then a decentralized security scheme is useless. But if it depends on improvised reactions to unknown threats, that's a different story. A deeply textured, unmapped system is hard to bring down. A system that encourages...