Linux Developer Swatted and Handcuffed During Live Video Stream (tomshardware.com) 99
Last October Slashdot reported on René Rebe's discovery of a random illegal instruction speculation bug on AMD Ryzen 7000-series and Epyc Zen 4 CPUs — which Rebe discussed on his YouTube channel.
But this week's YouTube episode had a different ending, reports Tom's Hardware... Two days ago, tech streamer and host of Code Therapy René Rebe was streaming one of many T2 Linux (his own custom distribution) development sessions from his office in Germany when he abruptly had to remove his microphone and walk off camera due to the arrival of police officers. The officers subsequently cuffed him and took him to the station for an hour of questioning, a span of time during which the stream continued to run until he made it back...
[T]he police seemingly have no idea who did it and acted based on a tip sent with an email. Finding the perpetrators could take a while, and options will be fairly limited if they don't also live in Germany.
Rebe has been contributing to Linux "since as early as 1998," according to the article, "and started his own T2 SD3 Embedded Linux distribution in 2004, as well." (And he's also a contributor to many other major open source projects.)
The article points out that Linux and other communities "are compelled by little-to-no profit motive, so in essence, René has been providing unpaid software development for the greater good for the past two decades."
But this week's YouTube episode had a different ending, reports Tom's Hardware... Two days ago, tech streamer and host of Code Therapy René Rebe was streaming one of many T2 Linux (his own custom distribution) development sessions from his office in Germany when he abruptly had to remove his microphone and walk off camera due to the arrival of police officers. The officers subsequently cuffed him and took him to the station for an hour of questioning, a span of time during which the stream continued to run until he made it back...
[T]he police seemingly have no idea who did it and acted based on a tip sent with an email. Finding the perpetrators could take a while, and options will be fairly limited if they don't also live in Germany.
Rebe has been contributing to Linux "since as early as 1998," according to the article, "and started his own T2 SD3 Embedded Linux distribution in 2004, as well." (And he's also a contributor to many other major open source projects.)
The article points out that Linux and other communities "are compelled by little-to-no profit motive, so in essence, René has been providing unpaid software development for the greater good for the past two decades."
Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:2)
Any chance of a few basics here like what, why, and how?
Re:Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, a fairly minor SWATTING story, as apparently the cops didn't come in with a battering ram like US cops often do.
The bug was mentioned as a hook for why he's important enough to slashdot to report it. Basically, Slashdot had a previous article on him, about the bug.
We don't know why or for what he was swatted for, apparently it was an "anonymous tip" email. It's not even in the source article.
Re:Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:5, Informative)
"According to the conversation with the police, an email was sent to the police and another to other rescue workers saying that I had killed my wife and now wanted to take my own life."
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WTF are you talking about. If the wife was dead and the guy is threatening to kill himself how is the police showing up an act of protecting feminism? If anything they are saving the poor white male.
Also if this were America everyone would be dead.
Get some mental help for yourself. You're unhinged.
Re:Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations. You fed the troll. He will live to troll another day rather than dying due to a lack of attention.
Re: Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:2)
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that trolling -- for lack of a better word -- is good.
Trolling is right.
Trolling works.
Trolling clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Trolling, in all of its forms -- trolling for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind.
And trolling -- you mark my words -- will not only save slashdot, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
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Congratulations. You fed the troll. He will live to troll another day rather than dying due to a lack of attention.
The troll has a UID the same as yours. He has been at this for as long as you have. Not sure if the OP was trolling - they may just be stupid, that is a thing, especially on this site. But the one thing that is irrefutably certain is that my commenting has zero influence on the life of someone who has been "trolling" for 2 decades. The poor troll's life was never in danger.
Re: Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:1)
Hypocrite lecteur!
Mon semblable!
Mon frère!
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Anyone from Germany care to comment on the legality of what the police did, based off an email?
In the UK it would be difficult to justify such an arrest based on the email alone, especially once they arrived at the house and found the person in question did not appear suicidal or like they had just murdered their wife.
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Anyone from Germany care to comment on the legality of what the police did, based off an email?
In the UK it would be difficult to justify such an arrest based on the email alone, especially once they arrived at the house and found the person in question did not appear suicidal or like they had just murdered their wife.
Considering in the UK the police recently showed up to harass a guy for having the wrong opinions on his X account, I think any semblance of justification for police action is gone there.
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I don't know who you're talking about but... maybe it was a little more than "opinions" like incitement to racial hatred, violence, conspiracy to commit crimes, etc.. A number of such people have been sentenced to prison for such crimes in recent weeks.
There are a number of recent examples, but they all more or less point to the same problems. That the real crime isn't assault, robbery, murder or rape, but in noticing that your society is sick and sliding into the toilet in front of your eyes. Included in this is the assertion from the authorities in the UK the intent to pursue people outside of the boundaries of the country for prosecution.
To be fair to all involved, the actual fault is more or less entirely at the feet of the academy, who had the opport
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The law is mostly there to protect property (the infamous "9/10ths") but also for public safety. Making society less safe by inciting racial, religious, & other types of hatred is therefore just as serious a crime as committing assaults, etc. yourself. The main convicting factor in a crime is the convict's intentions; anyone whose actions reflect an intention to do harm & to make society less safe a
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I don't know the specifics of the incident you are talking about, but check out Ian Gould's blog. He regularly sues UK police for wrongful arrest and wins. While they may be arseholes, the law is quite clear.
Re: Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:2)
In this case in Germany, there was no swatting. There is not the assumption that anyone is likely to have a gun and capable of killing police officers. He was arrested because of a serious but false accusation. His life was not in any danger at any point.
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That's why he was out in 1 hour.
In the UK it would have taken ten hours to even get to the interview stage, even if they knew it was rubbish during that time.
The police have to take the email seriously, and then the process has to run. In the US that means guns and dead innocent people. In Germany that seems to mean a house check, removing him from the property to presumably check it over and some fact checks.
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That's true. Just today I was reading about someone detailed overnight on a false arrest, and eventually awarded nearly £50k compensation. Legal fees on top. All because a cop lied about him attacking her, when in fact she was the one who attacked him for no reason.
That's why I asked. Maybe the process is different in Germany, maybe arrest works differently and 1 hour is somewhat normal for this kind of thing.
Re:Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:4, Funny)
Turns out they found this partially concealed button on the wall and pushed it repeatedly until someone opened the door from the inside.
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Turns out they found this partially concealed button on the wall and pushed it repeatedly until someone opened the door from the inside.
Oh my god, what is this button and why would you have such a device. Also, does it work all the time? Asking for a friend who likes to surprise people.
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It's called a "door bell" and they can be quite annoying indeed....
Re: Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:2)
No compensation for the broken door because the officers did the right
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"The German police got an anonymous tip &
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Well, from watching the video, they did get quite excited for a bit.
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Which lie? Swatting means he was victim of a hoax ("Swatting is a criminal harassment act of deceiving an emergency service" -- Wikipedia).
The relevance is quite low but it happened to the founder of a linux distro that people here might be using. It could be important for that person that the world knows it was swatting not a legitimate arrest for something he has done.
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I suppose though, we do live in the age of AI chatbots now. If a news article saying that an anonymous tip claimed that he killed his wife is published, even if it's total fiction, the AI will scrape it and start reporting that he killed his wife. We've seen it happen before. AI chatbots are total morons by human standards, because they have no idea what's actually going on, but people often still take them as authoritative.
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AI chatbots are total morons by human standards
I think you mean "normal human standards", thus ruling out typical politician standards where the repetition of obvious falsehoods is currently a major strategy.
Re: Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:2)
Sounds like âoeyouâ(TM)re as comprehensible as an AI chatbotâ would be a fine âoecomplementâ to some, in this day and age.
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If a news article saying that an anonymous tip claimed that he killed his wife is published, even if it's total fiction, the AI will scrape it and start reporting that he killed his wife
That's true, indeed. But here the police were careful not reveal any detail of the false accusation. We know he was handcuffed, questioned for 1 hour and released. That's all the information AI chatbot has to make up an answer.
Re: Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:2)
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Or what are you thinking I was referring to?
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It's a special case: the swatting was performed while streaming. A number of people saw it live, and had to believe he was taken out for legitimate reasons. So voluntarily publishing the story on Tom's hardware or Slashdot is his way to clean his reputation. Everybody was careful enough not to disclose the contents of the emails, so his name will not be tainted by a false association.
Re:Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, the newsworthiness angle is that it's already well-known that contributing to open source efforts can be thankless [xkcd.com], but now it also got someone swatted. [wikipedia.org]
This is why we can't have nice things.
Re:Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:4, Insightful)
It's almost like not militarizing the police makes them consider other options before looking around for where they put the rocket launcher they've been itching to try out.
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Thank heavens ImageMagick is safe.
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So this guy found a bug in a cpu, and then while streaming (streaming what?) his place was raided and he was arrested (for what?)
Any chance of a few basics here like what, why, and how?
EditorDavid must have stumbled upon a most excellent stash and starting dipping into too much. /s
Re: Can someone translate the summary into english (Score:2)
To me, the summary leaves the impression that AMD swatted him.
Extremely unprofessional journalism.
The rumour is this is RUST related (Score:1)
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not really.... (Score:1)
"Finding the perpetrators could take a while, and options will be fairly limited if they don't also live in Germany."
Wrong. if the police wanted to find out where that email came from, they could. If they then wanted to know who sent it, they could find that out, too. if they wanted to trace that user back to their cellphone, they could do that, too.
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Indeed. All cases are solved by desire alone. The police have these magical fairies that grant wishes, all they need to do is want something to happen and it happens. /s
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It depends on how recently the message was sent, and how much tedious work the police's technical team want to do. Email isn't designed to be particularly anonymous.
If the sender was careful, then it's possible tracing the last couple of steps back to him will be more difficult... but probably still not impossible.
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It depends on how recently the message was sent, and how much tedious work the police's technical team want to do. Email isn't designed to be particularly anonymous.
If the perpetrator was stupid enough to user their own email account, that is.
If they use a free mail account they opened with forged data, and were always using Tor or a VPN, it's impossible to trace.
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I think the questionable part, in which I agree with the AC, is that "if they don't also live in Germany" is too broad. If they live anywhere else in EU, they can get arrested through a European Arrest Warrant and transferred to Germany for trial. Being a computer-related crime, extradition is automatically granted (except for Netherlands which requires a criterion of double criminality for their nationals).
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Because Email is that perfectly and easily tracable tool uniquely tied to someone and not able to be registered and abandoned on online services at a whim?
The question of arrest warrant isn't relevant. No one would make it that far unless the email was sent from their personally registered ISP provided mail account (and I don't think there's 80 year old retirees swatting anyone).
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if they wanted to trace that user back to their cellphone, they could do that, too.
Why are you so sure the email was sent from a cellphone? It could very well have been sent from the webmail of a mail anonymization service.
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The email probably came from an email account that was opened via a VPN, and sent via the VPN.
Tracing it beyond that will be a PITA.
Re: not really.... (Score:2)
Is it actually SWATting (Score:2)
when there's no SWAT team involved? Those were ordinary German police, not SEK forces.
Re:Is it actually SWATting (Score:5, Interesting)
Follow up: The distinction is when the German police show up people don't get randomly shot, unlike a SWAT team which is known of shooting first and asking questions later. SWATting doesn't have the same impact when your target isn't likely to die.
Re: Is it actually SWATting (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is that we kit our police out in military gear but without the training or brains to use it. The US military has minimum intelligence standards (put in place after a disasterous experiment) where as such minimal requirements are not used by law enforcement recruiting in America. Not all cops are dumb, but chat with any smart cop over beers and he'll admit that plenty of his coworkers need extra supervision.
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The difference is that we kit our police out in military gear but without the training or brains to use it.
Oh the police definitely have the training. https://slate.com/news-and-pol... [slate.com] For shits and giggles they're also shoot the family dog. https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_l... [unh.edu]
What they need is an end to qualified immunity and set a degree requirement like other civilized countries. If you can't do your job within the confines of the law then maybe you're in the wrong line of work.
Re: Is it actually SWATting (Score:1)
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The training workshops are usually 3-4 days, with a BBQ for the last half of the last day. I can't imagine anyone being so swayed in philosophical and ethical wrongness except for impressionable morons or people who already had the "warrior cop" mentality before they ever joined up.
Once we can sued them in civil court. They will have to pay for the fuck-ups out of the pension, then you'll see cops and union reps finally policing themselves.
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Also need a way for police unions to start rewarding good cops and stop protecting bad cops.
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Once we can sued them in civil court. They will have to pay for the fuck-ups out of the pension, then you'll see cops and union reps finally policing themselves.
If I get shot by a cop in a SWAT raid, I'll be too dead to care if my next of kin can sue the cop who did it. End the practice of no knock SWAT raid warrants altogether. Also, fuck civil court, prosecute them for murder.
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I definitely want my wife provided for if a dumb pig kills me.
Also, fuck civil court, prosecute them for murder.
Luckily it's not an either-or choice. But criminal prosecution is up to a district attorney's office, since they'll be the ones prosecuting the case. If they don't pick it up, sue the county and state, but it's unlikely to get far. Or tell the media and embarrass the DA and possibly some state politicians.
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The slate article of my parent is worth to read!
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Also, if the applicant can't cut it as a cop then they can become prison guards instead.
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The difference is that we kit our police out in military gear but without the training or brains to use it. The US military has minimum intelligence standards (put in place after a disasterous experiment) where as such minimal requirements are not used by law enforcement recruiting in America. Not all cops are dumb, but chat with any smart cop over beers and he'll admit that plenty of his coworkers need extra supervision.
If the current crusade against police continues, you can be assured that the quality of officers will fall until you are being policed by petty dictators who will take any advantage of you they can. How many sane people want to be a police officer now with the constant abuse directed towards the profession, compared to when it was respected?
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If the current crusade against police continues, you can be assured that the quality of officers will fall until you are being policed by petty dictators who will take any advantage of you they can.
And that would in any way be distinguishable from the current situation how?
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If the current crusade against police continues, you can be assured that the quality of officers will fall until you are being policed by petty dictators who will take any advantage of you they can.
And that would in any way be distinguishable from the current situation how?
It would be quite distinguishable. Despite the popular narrative pushed by the media, police in the US are not going around busting down doors and gunning people down willy nilly, nor are they out hunting people down and shooting them based on their skin color. The concern is extremely overblown by a handful of very public incidents that are assumed incorrectly to represent the norm. There are something like two million police interactions with the public in the US every year, with a couple thousand inciden
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Despite the popular narrative pushed by the media, police in the US are not going around busting down doors and gunning people down willy nilly, nor are they out hunting people down and shooting them based on their skin color.
And despite how you think this is some kind of "narrative" the actual studies on this topic find the police in the USA are by a wide margin separated from police in other first world countries in racial violence disparity, and number of injuries and deaths they cause. When you approach every situation with an intent to kill you get the result you are after. Just because the problems are low given the number of interactions doesn't mean that they are disproportionately high in both per capita terms and in pe
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What sort of questions do they ask later?
Did we kill, maim, injure all of the people on our shopping list for today? Or do we need to stop by Aldi or Lidl on the way back to the station to finish the day's tally?
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If they ever do learn of the perpetrator, I think some serious shock&awe level terror would be appropriate. At a minimum, storm his/her place of employment in full swat gear to nake the arrest, announce loudly he is under arrest for terroristic threatening and endangering the lives of others. That should, at the very least, assure he lost his job the second he wore those locking bracelets they outfitted him with.
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Follow up: The distinction is when the German police show up people don't get randomly shot, unlike a SWAT team which is known of shooting first and asking questions later. SWATting doesn't have the same impact when your target isn't likely to die.
Ok... but they still effectively arrested him and took him down to the station... completely unnecessary. Fuck this timeline where an anonymous and unverified email can get you handcuffed and questioned. But yeah, at least he didn't get shot. Hurray I guess.
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Ok... but they still effectively arrested him and took him down to the station... completely unnecessary.
That's called doing your job. You get a tip, a lead, and you render the situation safe without hurting anyone, do your due diligence questioning on the record, and then let people go when nothing is found.
They didn't damage the building, they didn't hurt or kill anyone, they just caused 1h of inconvenience. If you think "this timeline" is bad, you should consider that this is a significantly better response than Germany is known for in the past. So yes, hurray.
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The reason nobody was hurt in this situation is simple: the fraudulent report did not implicate an armed or imminently dangerous individual. The fraudulent report claimed, that this linuxer had killed his wife (i.e. no amount of police force could change that fact) and was about to kill himself, which again doesn't warrant snipers or military style combat gear.
A cop still shouldn't arrest anyone based on an anonymous email, unless circumstantial evidence strongly supports those claims.
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The reason nobody was hurt in this situation is simple: the fraudulent report did not implicate an armed or imminently dangerous individual.
That's false. The German police responded to an imminent threat. You can actually see in the video they entered the apartment with guns drawn. The the reason nobody was hurt is because German police don't go in guns blazing for every situation, and actually rarely discharge their weapons even in more dangerous situations. This is what you get when you need to file paperwork for every gunshot.
Incidentally situations where German police discharge their weapons often makes the news even if it was just a warnin
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The fact he didn't get killed or flashbanged or whatever, and was probably at less risk of same than here, definitely makes it different. On the other hand, he still got handcuffed, detained, and questioned. All of that is illegal when done by a private citizen, and the first of those things is even considered an act of violence if not a necessity and preferably only in the course of executing a citizen's arrest in those states where such a thing exists. As such, it's a mild result on the SWATting scale, bu
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Oh absolutely. I just think a different verb should be applied here to reflect the fact that this is very different than a swat team showing up an kicking your door in.
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In Germany it is not illegal for a citizen to arrest someone, tie him to a pole or handcuff him.
Every citizen has the right to arrest anybody, as long as there is a legitimate reason.
Obviously such a citizen would need good judgement about such a reason and his physical abilities to perform it.
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It's not illegal in California either. But it's not encouraged, either. It is also the only way a security guard can make an arrest, as they are just a normal citizen. A citizen's arrest requires that a citizen witness a misdemeanor or has reason to believe that a person committed a felony. (Police can arrest for belief a misdemeanor was committed, and can detain for questioning even for potential infractions.)
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On the other hand, he still got handcuffed, detained, and questioned. All of that is illegal when done by a private citizen, and the first of those things is even considered an act of violence if not a necessity
The details vary from state to state, but in most US states it is legal for a citizen to detain someone they reasonably believe to have committed or to be about to commit a felony. Where detention is allowed, use of force -- including handcuffs -- is permitted. Typically, the only differences between police and citizen authority in these matters are that (a) police may be authorized to use lethal force to prevent the escape of a suspected felon, and (b) police are authorized to arrest for misdemeanors (thou
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I know all of those things, because long long ago I was a uniformed security guard. In fact, except that we didn't have the stripe down the sides of our pants, we looked like CHP because we and they alike wore khaki polyester at the time. This came in handy when doing crap like directing traffic.
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I know all of those things, because long long ago I was a uniformed security guard.
So if you knew what you were saying was false, why say it?
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So if you knew what you were saying was false, why say it?
What did I say that you think is false? Could your ignorance have been remedied by reading the rest of my comment, and also understanding English?
Keep in mind that the full comment history is publicly available here, so you're going to be confronted with what I actually said if you double down on stupidity.
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Maybe in more civilized countries, the police don't come bashing through doors and other things?
Likely the German Police probably got the tip via email, and instead of coming out guns blazing let's shoot everything on site, they decided that none of the parties involved were known to them or anyone else, and sent someone to investigate. And instead of bursting through the door, they knocked.
They probably looked around and
Open source developers would never commit a crime. (Score:1)
The article points out that Linux and other communities "are compelled by little-to-no profit motive, so in essence, René has been providing unpaid software development for the greater good for the past two decades.
I like how the article implies that open source developers are so altruistic that they'd never commit a crime.
It seems the lesson of ReiserFS has been quickly forgotten.
We are all just people, with all the same flaws as other people.
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Or maybe they just aren't that focused on money. There can be other reasons to do things. S.a. Hans Reiser. (The email seems to be an indirect reference to him.)
And yet ... (Score:1)
The officers subsequently cuffed him and took him to the station for an hour of questioning, a span of time during which the stream continued to run until he made it back...
It was probably then still more interesting than many streams and even political rallies. :-)
Nothing we can do about this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is this even a thing? There should be higher penalties for swatting.
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Why is this even a thing? There should be higher penalties for swatting.
The penalties are pretty significant in most jurisdictions. The problem is that swatters are hard to find. There are lots of ways to make an anonymous report.
I Should Not Have Laughed But (Score:2)
Luckily this happened in Germany and not in the US (Score:1)
If that had happened in the US he wouldn't have been back within an hour but days later. And if he were black, he might not have been back at all.
Re: Luckily this happened in Germany and not in th (Score:1)
The squishy slobs used to call it politics here in the US hilariously enough. Don't like someone's opinions? "Swat" them with politics. It protected under the bill of right and everything.....