As he was asking for these things, they started to get weird messages on Skype, supposedly from their friends, but really from Obnoxious in disguise. Their chats filled with abuse from multiple screen names:

Mibbzz

im gona drive

to your house

[a friend] gave me money for the gas

and im gona pour it all over the

side of

your house

and pull out some matches

and just throw em

on your

house [ … ] obnoxious

LOL Mibbzz

[ … ] and who has her dox again?

wanna send me i

t FreezeD0ng

giv me

pls [ … ] Mibbzz

obnoxious send teh dox [ ... ] obnoxious

dude this guy

is hilarious FreezeD0ng

im gonna go swat myself

‘‘Dox’’ is a scary word. It’s a document of your private information posted online for anyone to see and exploit. Doxing makes you vulnerable to all sorts of mischief, from phone harassment to credit-­card fraud or worse. Obnoxious was able to obtain this sort of information for dozens of women. He mainly did it by cold-­calling Internet companies and duping customer-­service representatives over the phone. He would use one small piece of public information, a birthday or a favorite pet, to get yet another from one company, and then he would use the new piece to get more information from a different company. He had a con man’s gift for deception. Sometimes he was even able to take over a woman’s account. ‘‘He loved to tell me how he did it,’’ Janet says. ‘‘He told me that he would call customer service at Amazon, say that he forgot my password but he knows my birthday, and the Amazon people, they just give it. And if they wouldn’t, he would just call again.’’ (Amazon did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

When the women stopped responding to him, he escalated his attacks. He told a transgender streamer named Alexa Walk that he had her medical records and knew her birth name. Then he posted her birth name on Twitter. He posted nude pictures of some women on Twitter as well. He once posted a nude shot of a 14-year-old girl and later bragged that he was a pedophile. Women reported the abuse to Twitter, but whenever Twitter banned him, he would just make a new account and continue as before.

Online abuse began to cross over into the physical world. He sent pizzas to their homes. A string of deliverymen climbed the stairs to K.’s apartment in Florida, carrying unappetizing pies: deep-dish pizza with no cheese, pizza with anchovies and jalapeños, double bacon and double pepperoni. He called their cellphones repeatedly and sent ‘‘text bombs’’ of hundreds of messages at a time. If all else failed and Obnoxious couldn’t get a hold of a woman, he would start threatening to dispatch a SWAT team to her house, or her parents’ house, or her college — a kind of intrusion that couldn’t be ignored. When Janet wouldn’t respond to his texts, he reached out to one of her friends and asked the friend to convey a message:

[1:06:17 AM] obnoxious: and if she isnt willing

[1:06:21 AM] obnoxious: to speak to [me] secretly

[1:06:23 AM] obnoxious: she is going to get

[1:06:26 AM] obnoxious: a swat team

[1:06:28 AM] obnoxious: in her parents house

[1:06:30 AM] obnoxious: holding them at gun point

[1:06:34 AM] obnoxious: with all their ssns

[1:06:35 AM] obnoxious: on doxbin

[1:06:39 AM] obnoxious: and her credit ruined

Tell her right now

[1:07:31 AM] obnoxious: idc [I don’t care] where

[1:07:31 AM] obnoxious: or how

[1:07:39 AM] obnoxious: but this is last chance im giving her

[1:07:50 AM] obnoxious: be friends with me secretly or get wrecked

The SWAT team grew from the tumult of the 1960s. In Philadelphia, a string of armed robberies prompted a ‘‘stakeout’’ unit of officers who received extra weapons training; in Los Angeles, after the Watts riots of 1965, an ambitious police commander, Daryl Gates, who later became the chief of police, argued that the city needed elite officers with rifles, shotguns and armored cars, trained in military-­style tactics. Gates explained to The Los Angeles Times in 1968 that during the unrest, ‘‘suddenly we found ourselves with almost a guerrilla warfare without weaponry. ... I felt the frustration of being almost helpless.’’

At first, the SWAT idea struck some officers as strange — wouldn’t the units scare residents and damage relationships with communities? — but lax gun regulations and strict national drug laws encouraged cities and towns to invest in bigger weaponry. The ‘‘war on drugs’’ in particular pressured officers to conduct militarized drug enforcement. (Mother Jones recently analyzed 465 police requests for armored tactical vehicles that resemble small tanks, and more requests said the vehicles would be used for drug enforcement than any other reason.) And the grim logic of mass shootings and hostage situations, where seconds and minutes can matter, pushed communities to form local SWAT teams instead of relying on teams from farther away that took longer to arrive. (A recent study led by a professor at Texas State University analyzed 84 ‘‘active shooter’’ incidents from 2000 to 2010, and about half the time, the shootings were over by the time any officers arrived at the scene.) ‘‘We want to keep the community safe,’’ says the tactical commander of a SWAT team in Georgia. ‘‘And if responding in a very short time period saves lives, that’s what we want to do. And we can do that by having a team readily available. We do.’’

Through the 1990s and 2000s, SWAT teams started cropping up in smaller American towns, even in places where violent crime is fairly uncommon. According to research done by Peter Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University, by the mid-2000s, 80 percent of law-enforcement agencies in towns with populations of 25,000 to 50,000 had a military-­style unit, compared with just 20 percent in the mid-1980s. In the last decade, the ‘‘war on terror’’ has helped local law-­enforcement agencies acquire unprecedented firepower. One Pentagon program has sent at least $5.6 billion in equipment to police departments, including 625 armored tactical vehicles, more than 200 grenade launchers and around 80,000 assault rifles. Many people had no idea that SWAT teams owned gear like this until the protests in Ferguson, Mo., last summer, when images spread around the world of white officers confronting black protesters with tear gas and a type of armored truck called a BearCat. People all along the political spectrum expressed horror at these pictures; Senator Rand Paul wrote that ‘‘the images and scenes we continue to see in Ferguson resemble war more than traditional police action.’’