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White supremacists 'swatted' my home to silence me. I will not be silent.
by Ijeoma Oluo @IjeomaOluo
The Guardian
Fri 30 Aug 2019 06.00 EDT
Last modified on Wed 11 Sep 2019 10.42 EDT

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[i]Author Ijeoma Oluo’s son was endangered when someone called police, pretending to be him, and said he murdered two people -– and the harassment didn’t stop there[/i]

A few weeks ago, in the culmination of weeks of escalating abuse from white supremacist trolls, our home was swatted, endangering my 17 year old son who was home alone at the time. In the weeks since, the harassment of me and my family has continued fairly relentlessly, online and in person.

I’ve been told by advisers and law enforcement that it is in my best interest to stay quiet until this dies down. That it is best to pretend like none of this is happening so that I don’t give these terrorists “what they want” – which is to see a black woman in pain and fear.

Here’s the thing about that.

I started writing as a black woman in pain and fear. That is why I am where I am. If white supremacists want to get off on black pain and fear, they need not do anything more than sit back and let our system work the way it has worked for hundreds of years.

I started writing because every single day I was living a half-life. I started writing because I was tired of taking in every racist joke, every insult, every assumption. I was tired of hearing the locks on people’s cars click down as I walked past theirs in a grocery store parking lot. I was tired of worrying about my brother’s safety when he went on tour. I was tired of worrying that I might die at each traffic stop. I was tired of seeing black body after black body lying in the street like so much garbage after an encounter with police.

And I was so very tired of being silent through it all. Silence was not helping me. It was killing me.

Before the events of these last few weeks happened, people still regularly asked me if I ever considered to give up my work in order to protect my safety and sanity as a black woman.

My answer has always been the same: I would still be a black woman in America – I just wouldn’t be able to speak openly about what I was enduring.

These last years, since I started writing, I have been as free as I can imagine a black woman to be in this country. I have been able to speak openly, without reservation, about my lived experience and the experiences of my community. I have been able to look at white supremacy and call it what it is. I have not had to worry about losing my job; it is my job. I have not had to worry about losing friends (they left many essays ago). I have not had to bite my tongue in order to provide food for my family. I have not had to bend over backwards to prove that I am a “nice” Negro in order to not end up in HR for my “attitude problem”. I know that if I encounter violence because of my race, while I will not be avenged the way that white people would be, I will be heard and believed in a way in which few people of color are.

And the price I have had to pay for that is that I get fairly regular death threats, occasionally my personal address and the addresses of my family members are posted online, occasionally my financial information is posted, and occasionally six rifle-carrying police officers will pull my son out of bed at 6am because someone pretending to be him called and said that he had murdered two people in my home.

If I let this work go in order to avoid paying that price, every other price of existing as a black person in America still waits for me and my family. It does not go away. It does not make my sons more safe. It does not make me more safe.

There are different ways to kill a person. Not all of them make headlines.

In the midst of all of this, I have been surrounded by love. Deep love from my family, my black community, my people of color community, my queer community, my activist community. I have been held and renewed in the knowing black love of my partner. I have been refocused in the light and hope of my two children.

I am not going anywhere. I’m not going to disappear. No matter what comes my way.

There are also different ways to live.

There is more to me than the terror that I’ve experienced these last weeks. There is more to me than the lifetime of trauma I’ve experienced. While I do not ever want to be reduced to that, I know that I cannot be a whole person in any space if I cannot bring that experience in with me. I know that I cannot heal if it cannot be known.

I do not believe that white supremacy will allow me to “take a break” and then get back to the fight for liberation when things calm down. I do not believe that white supremacy will settle for anything less than my silence. And while I do not know what the future will bring I do know that I will not go quietly.

Whether I am afraid or not is beyond the point. Yes I’m afraid. I have cried more these last few weeks than I have in years. I’m sure there is more to come in the future. But we are all afraid. And there are people who are facing the brutality of white supremacy to a degree that I have never known – and there are no news stories talking about them. And they fight still, with everything they have.

There is no beauty in this. There is no glory in this. This is shitty and disgusting and absurd and embarrassing that in 2019 this is what our society is. People of color should not have to live in fear and pain. Highly-functioning-with-PTSD is not a cultural attribute of communities of color, it’s a fucking crime of an entire nation.

My fellow people of color who are hurting and afraid: I hear you, I see you. You shouldn’t have to go through this, and you shouldn’t be the one tasked with fighting it. Thank you. Thank you for being here in a world that has tried so hard to tell you that you don’t belong. I love you.

To those who really, really want me to shut up:

Nah.

Ijeoma Oluo is the author of So You Want to Talk About Race

This article was amended on 11 September 2019. A sentence that was moved during the editing process led an earlier version to incorrectly say that the police officers who attended the writer’s home a few weeks ago were carrying rifles. The writer’s original placement of the sentence has been restored.

Trolls turned 911 into a weapon. Now cops are fighting back.
by Olivia Solon and Brandy Zadrozny
NBC News
Dec. 22, 2019, 5:00 AM MST

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Once viewed as a prank, police are now treating 'swatting' as a serious crime that wastes city resources and puts targets' lives at risk.


Author and activist Ijeoma Oluo's home was 'swatted' in August while her 17-year-old son was sleeping Jovelle Tamayo / for NBC News

Ijeoma Oluo was boarding an early morning flight at Boston’s Logan Airport when she got a call from a number she didn’t recognize. A 911 dispatcher from Washington state was on the line: someone had reported a double murder at the author and activist’s home.

Oluo was almost certain she’d just been “swatted,” meaning someone had made a false report of extreme violence at her residence to prompt an overwhelming response by law enforcement. The term comes from the acronym for the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams that deal with active shootings, armed robberies or hostage scenarios.

Oluo told the dispatcher her 17-year-old son was home alone, and that no guns were in the house. Even so, she panicked. Having written about encounters between police and people of color, she was acutely aware of what could go wrong.

“I was terrified they were going to come in guns blazing. I was bawling,” she said. “To send cops to the home of a black person — expecting dead bodies and guns — is really risking someone’s life.”

Listen to the 911 ‘swatting’ call targeting black author Ijeoma Oluo
DEC. 20, 201901:42

Anonymous Caller: Hello, I just shot my parents.
911: I'm sorry?
Anonymous Caller: I just shot my parents.
911: Ok, what address did this happen at, sir?
Anonymous Caller: provides Ijeoma Oluo's address.
911: What city is this in?
Anonymous Caller: Shoreline.
911: Ok, is that [reads address]
Anonymous Caller: Um, yeah.
911: Ok hon and what's your last name?
Anonymous Caller: Am I going to get arrested for this?
911: I'm sorry, what?
Anonymous Caller: Am I going to get arrested for this?
911: Well, I don't know sir, I'm not an officer. All I can do is take your information and pass it on. Is this a house or an apartment?
Anonymous Caller: It's a house.
911: Ok. What did you use to do that with?
Anonymous Caller: I used a pistol from my Dad's closet.
911: Do you know what type of pistol? You're doing OK hon. You can -- I'm sorry, hon? What's your name dear? You're doing a good job by letting me know. What's your name? Calm down, take a deep breath OK? How old are you? Are you there? Hello?
[Phone hangs up]

Anyone with a grudge and someone’s address can make a ‘swatting’ call, but what was once a niche prank played by gamers has become a favored means of terrorizing famous, controversial and vulnerable people. It has also become more organized in recent years, with online forums and chat rooms dedicated to targeted attacks on individuals, including YouTube personalities, tech executives, activists, authors and journalists.

Law enforcement agencies and city officials around the country have responded with anti-swatting procedures and tools to blunt this weaponization of the 911 system. In Seattle, the police department has launched a three-pronged approach that includes special training for officers and 911 operators and — a first for the U.S. — a registry for residents who think they may become swatting targets. The registry gives first responders a warning that an emergency call about a violent situation may be a hoax.

After a year of honing these procedures, Seattle police are sharing their know-how with law enforcement agencies throughout the country, while calling on lawmakers to make swatting a federal crime.

“This is not an accident. It’s intentional behavior intended to punish people for who they are, where they work, the color of their skin,” said Seattle PD’s public affairs director, Sean Whitcomb. “It’s happening every day in America. It’s awful for us and it’s awful for the community.”

Weaponizing 911

The sudden arrival of unneeded law enforcement officers can be defused quickly, but at worst, it can result in injury or death. In December 2017, California man Tyler Barriss made a hoax 911 call about a hostage situation at an address in Wichita, Kansas, that resulted in police fatally shooting an innocent man.

At the time of the fatal swatting in Wichita, Seattle PD was already dealing with “dozens of attempted swattings” every month, according to Whitcomb. Targets included executives at some of the high-profile technology companies in the city, which include Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple, as well as video game streamers.

Swatting is not only a safety risk for targets, but also to police, both in terms of reputation damage and the costly waste of police time.

“Swatting can really tie up city resources,” said Seattle resident Naveed Jamali, a former intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve who now co-chairs Seattle Police Department’ Swatting Mitigation Advisory Committee. “Then from a human perspective, there’s a huge risk of violence. So there’s a huge liability potential to the city and it’s also weaponizing a police force against private citizens.”

In June 2018, a Seattle resident who feared a Wichita-style tragedy asked the department to pre-register his address as a swatting risk. The request gave Whitcomb the idea for a city-wide registry, and the registry became part of a unique three-pronged protocol. In September, the police department also established the swatting advisory committee, which includes police, prosecutors, and 911 dispatchers, as well as gamers and tech workers from the city’s large tech community.

Announced in October 2018, the Seattle swatting protocol includes two training measures already used in some cities, including Los Angeles, where swatting of celebrities has occurred sporadically for years. As in L.A., Seattle police teach workers in the 911 center to identify potential swatting calls, and ensure responding officers are aware of the potential for a hoax and take a cool, cautious approach to potential confrontations.

The most innovative part of the protocol, the registry, lets members of the public pre-register their addresses and contact details in an online database via a secure portal. To date, the city has registered 57 profiles of people who believe that they may be swatted. So far, four of them have been targeted by swatters.

The Seattle protocol has already been replicated elsewhere, including Wichita. Earlier this month, representatives from Seattle PD spoke to the New York Police Department to discuss a joint working group dedicated to swatting, sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

Seattle’s police chief Carmen Best told NBC News she was “reaching out to all my networks” including the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s Human and Civil Rights Committee to try and bring other agencies on board.

Anti-swatting registry

In September, NBC News toured Seattle’s 911 center to observe a simulated emergency call to an address that was flagged as a swatting risk.

When the call came in, the dispatcher entered the address into her computer and a red box appeared on screen containing the all-caps warning “SWATTING CONCERNS.” The message urged the dispatcher to check the profile for the property, pre-registered by the target via the secure portal, for additional information and contact details.

Even if an address isn’t pre-registered, dispatchers are trained to look for clues that a call might be swatting. One indicator that a call about a shooting or other violent incident might be bogus is if it comes via the department’s non-emergency phone line rather than 911.

If necessary, the dispatcher can then alert responding officers to the potential for swatting. Officers will still typically respond to the call but they will deprioritize it or change their tactics.

“They are showing up to verify everyone is safe, not showing up with the assumption that this is Point Break,” said Whitcomb, referring to an iconic action movie featuring violent bank heists.

Oluo was one of the first test cases. A few weeks before she was swatted, she found out her contact details and social security number had been posted to a website dedicated to this type of harassment. She told NBC News that she called the police departments in Seattle and Shoreline, the suburb where she lives, to warn them that she might be targeted.

When the swatting call came in, emergency dispatchers saw her address was a swatting risk and called ahead, using the number uploaded to the registry, to gauge the legitimacy of the claims made by the 911 caller.

Six officers, four of whom were armed with rifles, still showed up at Oluo’s home at 6 a.m. But because they knew the address was a swatting risk and had spoken to Oluo, they came to the door without their rifles drawn. They asked her son Malcolm some questions and swept the house to verify no one had been killed. It was all over within minutes.

“It would have been a very different response if I hadn’t pre-registered,” said Oluo. “Just knowing the cops are coming makes a huge difference.”

In June this year, another black journalist on the other side of the country found out what the police response can be like without anti-swatting measures. Leonard Pitts, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nationally syndicated columnist who is often critical of right-wing stances, was swatted at his home outside Washington, D.C.

Pitts told NBC News he was roused by a phone call from local police in the early morning hours on June 30. They had received a report he had shot and killed his wife and was threatening to kill police officers.

“At that point my wife sat up in bed and asked what was going on,” he said. “I told her, ‘I’ve killed you.’”

Police officers ordered Pitt to exit his home, kneel, and put his hands on the back of his head. He did so — still wearing his Captain America pajamas — and was handcuffed and escorted to a police car.

The police searched his house and quickly realized his wife was not dead. While the situation was resolved peacefully, it has renewed Pitts’ concern for his personal safety.

“It boiled down to getting me killed by the cops,” he told NBC News. “I’m not exactly Billy Badass with a gun here, but they may not have seen it that way.”

From 'doxxing' to 'swatting'

The swattings of Oluo and Pitts both appear to have stemmed from a site on the dark web dedicated to publishing the personal information of targets — a practice known as “doxxing” — and tracking when they have been successfully swatted.

NBC News is declining to name the website, which is under investigation by multiple agencies including the FBI, NYPD and HSI, to avoid amplifying its message and incite further targets.

The site, reviewed by NBC News, appears to feature the contact details of hundreds of people from all walks of life including gamers, Facebook employees, academics, activists and journalists including Oluo and Pitts. Among the more high-profile individuals listed are former president George W. Bush, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, TV host Jimmy Kimmel, actor Robert De Niro and Gina Haspel, head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The website is accessible via Tor, a specialized browser designed to obscure one’s digital trail that can be used for a variety of purposes.

Information about people on the list often includes home addresses, emails and phone numbers. It also sometimes lists information about relatives. It’s not clear where the information is collected, but some of it is available on commercial databases.

In chat-logs from the site reviewed by NBC News, users encourage each other to swat journalists as well as unsuspecting live-streamers, trade tips on disguising their voices and evading police detection, and celebrate when one of their targets is visited by police.

Each time a person has been successfully swatted, the site marks that person’s entry with a distinctive icon — a gun — and links to media coverage about that incident.

Other victims whose swattings have been noted on the site include Edward Carswell, a New York state “Doomsday prepper” known as “Prepper Nurse;” a trans woman YouTuber known as Rosie O’Kelly, who lives in Santa Rosa, California, and a top Facebook executive.

Once a person is listed on the site, they can be targeted repeatedly.

Oluo faced a second threat, possibly by the same person, against one of her public book events. The call, portions of which NBC News has heard, contained racist and violent threats against her.

Again, Seattle police reacted cautiously, sending plain-clothed police officers to the venue to determine whether the threat was real without creating panic. No real threat was detected, but the incident was referred to a federal law enforcement agency.

On top of the 911 threats, Oluo had dozens of food delivery people showing up at her home requesting payment for pizza and Chinese food she hadn’t ordered. Her phone messages were, she said, flooded with unsolicited “dick pics.”

“It was a constant reminder we weren’t safe,” she said.

She has since changed her residence and her phone numbers.

The group behind the doxxing site is small — in the last year, the active chat users have hovered in the tens — but their potential to do harm is outsized. And while trolls and secret harassment campaigns have been a fact of online life nearly as long as the internet been around, this group is operating in a time where online attacks on journalists and activists are common, and encouraged by the highest office.

“One thing you can say about those kinds of bad actors is that they’re fundamentally opportunistic,” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University who has written books on the history and evolution of online trolls and harassment. “They’re operating in a climate where: Who’s going to cry when journalists get attacked?”

Phillips explained that the doxxing site and chats were “a more violent articulation” of previous online harassment campaigns against journalists, including one waged early in 2019 in which trolls, and eventually even Donald Trump Jr., barraged Twitter accounts belonging to recently laid-off journalists with the message “Learn to Code,” then denied any connection to the wave of death threats and gore that accompanied many of the messages. “It’s precisely the kind of climate where attacks against journalists are not going to elicit very much sympathy by a significant percentage of the population.”

Despite her ordeal, Oluo remains undeterred in her activism and writing.

“I’ll acclimate to this level of terrorism because that’s what you do when you do this work,” she said.

Pitts agreed.

“This is par for the course, especially in a political environment as toxic as we are living in now,” he said.

'A serious crime'

While swatting has been a known scourge for years, it is notoriously difficult to investigate, charge, and prosecute at either the local or federal level.

In most states, it is a misdemeanor to make a false 911 call. At the federal level, there is currently no specific anti-swatting statute, although one was first proposed back in 2015. Officials have used other related laws to prosecute swatting suspects successfully, including obstruction of justice, access device fraud, interstate threats or extortion, computer misuse, and the malicious conveying of false information.

In the Wichita case, perpetrator Tyler Barriss ultimately pleaded guilty to dozens of federal charges, ranging from “conveying false information concerning the use of an explosive device” to “threats to injure in interstate commerce.” He was sentenced to 20 years in jail in March this year.

Kevin Kolbye, who worked on numerous swatting cases during his nearly three decades as an FBI special agent, has estimated that swatting incidents have risen from 400 in 2011 to more than 1,000 nationwide in 2019. But he says it’s difficult to know the true count because swatting isn’t a category that is reported and recorded in the FBI’s database of crime statistics.

“Most of that swatting is called a ‘false police report’ or could be a ‘terroristic threat,” said Kolbye, who is now the assistant chief of police for Arlington, Texas. “A lot of those aren’t data that’s grouped together where we have a real national focus.”

The Seattle Police Department hopes to change that and has spent the last few months trying to define and quantify the problem so it can measure the success of mitigation efforts.

The Swatting Mitigation Advisory Committee combed through two years of records looking for hoax bomb threats or fake reports of shootings that led to a police response. Its analysis found that SPD received 63 swatting calls, which required 42 hours of officers’ time.

To more easily capture this data in the future, the committee and police force are pushing to create a standardized definition of swatting that can be incorporated into the software it uses to log crimes. They are also inviting other major cities to adopt their definition and prevention measures.

“Without numbers, swatting incidents are being treated like one-off crimes instead of a concerted effort to silence political speech. It’s being done nationally and internationally. We can’t have individual police departments working on it,” said Oluo.

The ultimate goal is to get congress to make swatting a federal offense.

“If we can speak a common language, we can hopefully press lawmakers to have a federal definition and have swatting become a set crime with set penalties,” Whitcomb said.

“It’s not a hoax. It’s not a prank. It’s a serious crime that can have extremely detrimental effects,” added Best.

The White Men Who Threaten Me With Their Own Suicide: My writing about race and gender has made me a target for desperate white men who don’t want to change
by Ijeoma Oluo
11/30/20

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MEDIOCRE: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, by Ijeoma Oluo


So you want to talk about race, by Ijeoma Oluo

The emails started coming in 2018, the same year my book So You Want to Talk About Race came out. They would usually arrive after I had posted an article on race or gender, but sometimes they would appear at random. I still remember the first one, which shook me.

“I know you think I should kill myself because I voted for Donald Trump, because I’m white, because I’m a male, so I’m just going to, since that is the only ethical conclusion.”

The email listed the various hardships the sender had endured. Poverty, mental illness, discrimination. But none of that mattered, because I had shown him that the problem was that he was a white man and he should die. And so his death would be on my hands.

“I’m going to kill myself because that’s exactly what you want and will make you happy and I will teach you a lesson when the whole world learns about it.”

The email continued, describing how he was going to kill himself (with a Glock that he kept at home) and reiterating that it would be my fault. He then ended with a racist tirade, calling me a “worthless monkey bitch.”

I have received many violent emails from white men over the years, but I sat with this one for a while. I tried to process what I was reading and tried to figure out what I should or could do about it. In the end, I placed it in the same folder as all the death and rape threats.

A few weeks later I received another email from a different sender. The message, with slight wording differences, was essentially the same. This white man was going to kill himself and I was to blame. A few days later I got a similar message via Twitter messenger. A few days after that, another email.

They wanted me to know that the only option available to address white male patriarchy was either to maintain the status quo that was making us all miserable, or death.

As the threats of suicide piled up, I began to see a coordinated campaign to harass me, and as disturbing as it was, it was also sadly fascinating in what it revealed. These men were trying to terrorize me with what they saw as the only logical conclusion to my anti-racist, feminist work: the mass suicide of white men. They wanted me to know that they saw my work to end violent misogyny and white supremacy, and they saw that it was a threat, not only to their norms and their status but to their very lives.

These men wanted me to know that they were miserable, they felt screwed over, and they felt demonized. They wanted me to know that the only option available to address white male patriarchy was either to maintain the status quo that was making us all miserable, or death. They wanted me to know that they were not capable of growth or change and that any attempts to bring about that growth or change would end them.

Nobody is more pessimistic about white men than white men.

I am the mother of two boys. Two beautiful young men who were born as beautiful babies full of endless possibility. It was shocking to watch how quickly the patriarchy came to claim my sweet little boys. They weren’t even in preschool before I had to battle a world that wanted to take everything that was soft and kind and generous about them and turn those traits into hardness, cruelty, and dominance. I watched my older son, who had the most brilliant smile I have ever seen, struggle under the weight of being repeatedly told by society that his loving, open nature was a weakness.

The teenage brain can be a very dangerous place. As young people grow and get ready for adulthood, their world is rapidly changing — as are their hormones. A great day is often the best day of their life and a bad day is often the worst. And if you ask a teen how they are doing on a bad day, if they are willing to talk to you at all, you may hear that every day they’ve ever had is bad, and every day they will ever have will be bad. Teenagers often have difficulty projecting themselves into a different, better future. It can be a very scary time, and the consequences can be very real.

I could have lost my son, the driving force of my heart and soul, to this despair. I’m forever grateful that part of him wanted to live, and that part decided to reach out for help.

It has been years since that terrifying time for my family. We worked with some great therapists, spent a lot of time healing together, and my son grew out of his hardest phase. Not all families are so lucky. Sometimes there is no intervention that can save our children from the claws of anxiety and depression. It has only been in the last two years or so that I’ve been able to relax somewhat — feeling confident that we made it through the worst of it, that I was going to see my baby grow into a man.

Then, early in the morning on August 14, 2019 — two weeks from my son’s 18th birthday — I got a call from the King County, Washington sheriff’s office that there had been a report of shots fired at my house. I was across the country, getting ready to head home from a conference. We do not own any guns, and my son doesn’t have any friends who own guns, so I knew there was a strong chance this was a hoax. But what if. They were going to send officers to my home.

What if?

I sent a neighbor to go knock on the door, then on my son’s window. My son had been sound asleep, unharmed. But the police had received a call from someone pretending to be my son and stating that he had killed two people in the house. They were going to send an armed response. To my home, where my son was alone and barely awake and very confused.

What if we had fought so hard to save my son only to lose him because an angry white man decided to send armed cops to our house at six a.m.?

When I read the emails I receive from white men threatening suicide, I read them as someone who knows what the despair of suicidal thoughts looks like. And when I look at the threats and harassment that I and so many women and people of color have received from angry white men, I know what that despair looks like when it’s mixed with the entitlement and bitter disappointment of white male mediocrity.

I don’t know if the men who emailed me were actually considering suicide; I doubt they were. I think they were just having some sick, twisted version of fun. But when I look at white male identity in America, I see it all. I see the desperation, the disappointment, the despair, the rage.

I can only imagine how desolately lonely it must feel to only be able to relate to other human beings through conquer and competition.

White male identity is in a very dark place. White men have been told that they should be fulfilled, happy, successful, and powerful, and they are not. They are missing something vital — an intrinsic sense of self that is not tied to how much power or success they can hold over others — and that hole is eating away at them. I can only imagine how desolately lonely it must feel to only be able to relate to other human beings through conquer and competition. The love, admiration, belonging, and fulfillment they have been promised will never come — it cannot exist for you when your success is tied to the subjugation of those around you. These white men are filled with anger, sadness, and fear over what they do not have, what they believe has been stolen from them. And they look at where they are now, and they cannot imagine anything different. As miserable as they are, they are convinced that no other option exists for them. It is either this, or death: ours or theirs.

I don’t want this for white men. I don’t want it for any of us. When we look at the history of white male identity in this country, it becomes clear that we are only stuck in these cycles of reactionary violence and oppression because we have not tried anything new. We have become convinced that there is only one way for white men to be. We are afraid to imagine something better.