Reps. Katherine Clark (D-MA) and Patrick Meehan (R-PA) have introduced a bill that would give those who perpetrate an extreme form of cyberharrassment called swatting serious jail time, Motherboard reports. The Swatting Hoax Act of 2015 would make swatting—the act of calling in to law enforcement a fake emergency in order to send a SWAT team to a victim’s physical address—illegal. Investigative reporter Brian Krebs was a victim of such an attack in 2013. Under the proposed legislation, providing false or misleading information over interstate communications to intentionally cause an emergency response would be a felony, the report states. “Perpetrators of these hoaxes purposefully use our emergency responders to harm their victims,” Clark said. The FBI estimates there are approximately 400 swattings per year, costing law enforcement as much as $100,000.
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