In which speaker crimes give way to crimes of infrastructure
Radios and speakers are primary components in mobbing harassment, whether the punishment is distributed to the victim via the computer, the phone, or the car. The end-to-end “surround-sound” pipeline of mobbing harassment includes both these components. Radios may interpret analog or digital signals; they may be implemented on the hardware level or in software. Speakers may receive sound transformed into signal over stranded copper wire, over Bluetooth, or over another wireless protocol. These basic principles hold true for the criminal harassment that is mobbing. The phenomenology of mobbing harassment relies on the transport and transformation of pressure waves, usually into human-audible sound.
We implicitly understand that electronic devices bring us sound through speakers. The position of an ear on either side of the human head allows us to localize the source of the sounds in our environment. So when mobbing harassment or any unexpected sound crops up when we use a music player or a television, we consider the speakers as the source of the sound. Even though being mobbed was unfamiliar to me, it didn’t take long after the inception of the criminal attempt to force me from my home by the administration of continual unwanted sound to understand the connection between mobbing harassment, radios, and speakers. Unfortunately, the Seattle Police weren’t nearly as reflective.
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Even early in the mobbing it was clear that the harassment that inescapably sounded from the speakers of any active device was quickly silenced when visitors, including the Seattle police, came to my door. Mobbing is highly organized harassment that strives through the exertion of continual stressors, to bend its victims to some criminal end. The real estate mobbers of northeast Seattle employ verbal abuse as a primary stressor.
Forced to hear verbal abuse whenever I tuned in NPR or connected my iPod to my home stereo system, I sought relief by putting a speaker outside on my deck. This way, I reasoned, the nasty neighborhood watch captain of the northeast and her criminal counterparts would have to discontinue the transmission of verbal abuse onto my devices or risk creating witnesses of passersby on their way down to the Burke-Gilman rail trail that runs along the northwest shore of Lake Washington. Any relief I got from this countermeasure was short-lived, however; the mobbers immediately clamped down.
During this period, stuck with a victim they could not evict, the mobbers sought to control and shut me up. A key element in this initiative was the continued use of a “police provocation strategy” to bait and set me up. Whereas the unceasing nuisance complaints were intended to construct the rental property on which I resided as a legal nuisance, the threats the mobbers made to attempt to control me were evermore dirty. In some other entries I’ve mentioned the early threats that there was a “potty-cam” or a “shower-cam” in my bathroom. Telling me they’d removed the video from the Internet for a time, they threatened to restore it to some dark corner of the web if I did not do as I was told. I would never be able to find it, they said. My vocalization of anger within the walls of my own home at the violation of my civil and legal rights was met with threatened “welfare checks.” Hinting that the lack of privacy for sexual expression “gets [most guys] out,” they threatened to “put” the sounds of any sexual activity heard in the privacy of my home “into the street.” Those mobbing me in northeast Seattle seem to relish using the apparatus of recording and playback in tandem with the “crosstalking” system of directional speakers they appear to have deployed from their properties north and south of my home to “put” sound where they will. This tactic ensures the continuous experience of sounds ranging from the ripping, pounding and skittering of sheetrock hanging, to the clink and clatter of the dinner table and the sexual grunting of the missionary man on both sides of your house.
The response to my refusal to acquiesce to the mobbing harassment was an emphatic smack-down. The north mobbing house owner who’d been quick to tell me of his years in the military wasted no time in Trumping me (no pun), turning reality on its head with a call to the Seattle Police Department’s North Precinct. Reminding the police of his noble profession, the north mobbing house owner apparently told them that he was a day sleeper and that I was harassing him by having my speaker outside. This of course is the same guy who routinely turns on outdoor speakers or makes a ruckus in some other way when I go out to garden and who, as of late, runs a mechanized windmill that he appears to have positioned to move smoke and sound across the property line and toward my bedroom windows.
The white male officer who was dispatched responded gamely, bounding up the steps to my front door and confronting me with a question that sounded more like an accusation: “Are you harassing your neighbor?” The solicitous concern for the interests of these white male home owners who were bitterly harassing me inside my own home was markedly different from the impatience with which my own complaints were met.
These cat-and-mouse games were played again and again as the nasty neighborhood watch lady and her allied house flippers cum tenant relocators reacted angrily to my refusal to leave my legal home. It was in this spirit in which one of the mobbers once cried, “We mobbed you; now get out!”
I don’t remember if it was on this visit from the North Precinct police that I tried to explain that my speaker was outside in an attempt to silence or at least to diffuse the radio-based harassment that my neighbors were transmitting onto my speakers. On that occasion, the north mobbing house owner who’d called in the complaint to the North Precinct police, conveniently appeared on his second story veranda and busied himself with some home maintenance as they arrived. The police officer stood at my door in a spot that I came to realize a year or two later, the north mobbing house owner had targeted with a motion-detecting light. (The City of Seattle should have a record of my complaint on the light, which I discuss in more detail a few other blog entries.) I remember the smirk on the face of the North Precinct officer when I explained to him that my neighbors were transmitting radio-based harassment onto my devices and that I put the speakers outside to discourage the harassment or at least to diffuse its sound. I also remember being asked at some point by one officer or another, if I had seen a speaker. I had to admit I had not. [Note 12/04/22: These days, if asked if I’ve seen a speaker, I might be tempted to indicate mine. In other words, any in the house that are subject to intentional signal diversion. See the discussion and linked demo by Ken Westin and Craig Young in Your TV doesn’t have to be smart to be hacked (part 2). When I began spending more time at the Albany house, I disconnected some but not all of the speakers from the in-wall speaker wiring; recently I got up on a ladder and disconnected a few more that were on shelves close to the exterior wall that continues to be attacked by the lowlife house to the north. It made an immediate difference, even with the circuit on that seems most affected. I’m no lawyer but it sounds like signal diversion, even if not pursued by the FCC, might present grounds to sue for trespass. I would think the deployment of hotspots and the provisioning of WiFi extenders into a neighbor’s home and over neighboring infrastructure might also be a form of trespass. If so, heat maps would likely provide good evidence.]
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It’s a false concept that one should visually confirm the presence of an audio speaker before a claim of harassment has merit. When neighbors complain about loud music in quiet hours, the police don’t require the sight of a speaker before responding to a noise complaint. Even if infrasound or ultrasound is being used for purposes of harassment, the police are still responding to a complaint of unwanted noise. The Florida police who searched the apartment of the woman who used infrasound to harass her neighbor didn’t see the speaker until they searched the unit. Noise complaints are founded on the perception of unwanted sound, not on the sight of a speaker.
Loudspeakers are heard but not always seen. In the case of the California private investigator who employed gamers to pilot surveillance drones in cases of suspected insurance fraud, the pilots took care to ensure that the surveillance drones were not heard since it would alert subjects to their presence (Letter to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requesting that the drone registry be made public). Audible harassment from a drone, in a case like mine, would likely be acousmatic, that is, the drone would be kept out of sight from the victim, not only to make it more difficult to identify the fact of drone harassment but to increase the chances that the victim might fall for the scam that she must be hearing voices. In my case the scam worked much better on Seattle police, attorneys and court personnel than it did on me.
The imperative to hide the speaker to construct harassing sound as sourceless, and perhaps even inescapable, would also apply to cases of Sonos “smart speaker” harassment. For example, in cases where the victim is being harassed by voices using beam-focused sound, the scam that she is a delusional who hears voices would have a higher chance of success if she did not see a speaker. But there appear to be other ways to contain sound and avoid creating witnesses. Audio systems like the Sonos may be attractive to specialists in criminal harassment because of features including its wireless and radio capabilities as well as its utility to harass within an autonomous system of IoT triggers and actions. Those mobbing me in northeast Seattle appear to relish the act of harassing “in plain sight” using devices and fixtures that are unlikely to raise suspicion, including speaker-enabled access points, motion-triggered lights, forced air, and dash-cams. For a mobber, the value of a device is proportionate to its potential to vex, harass or harm.
Another reason why you could be mobbed without seeing speakers is that the mobbers are using yours. This is a feature of cyberharassment that makes use of your devices—your speakers—to harass you. It can take time before you become aware that a television on standby, for example, is just another “powered transmitter” to the mobbers. You may not realize that the low-level harassment whose source you couldn’t quite pinpoint was sounding from the speakers you left plugged in or the sound you forgot to silence on your machine—not until you pull the plug anyway. I was looking for the correct term to describe this acoustic phenomenon in which player devices left on standby emit sound at a low level and ran across a 2017 Wired magazine article that attempts to help the unfortunate users of digital devices turn off their devices, “How to Shut Up Your Gadgets at Night So You Can Sleep,” (https://www.wired.com/story/silence-gadgets-do-not-disturb-nighttime/). Our devices have become so complex, that we don’t even know when OFF is off. Complex interfaces aside, the capability to emit some type of “resonant” or low-level sound may be a device feature that mobbers prefer, whether at home or on the road.
Drones increase the mobility, as well as the affordability, of harassment and stalking. This is implicit in the replacement of a lead-foot gumshoe with a winged machine. Nevertheless, victims who try to report stalking by drone may be dismissed and packed off to the asylum. This is certainly true in the City of Seattle, a “tech town” whose agencies appear to suffer from a dangerous combination of bias and an Alice-in-Wonderland approach to tech crime.
Examples of drones being used to transmit sound are visible in our everyday lives. If you watched much coverage of the early days of the pandemic, you might have seen footage of service drones hovering over public byways as their loudspeakers transmitted instructions on social distancing to the masked populace below. We accept such footage as real, we hear the broadcast message as an aerial camera captures the service drone, and we infer that the drone is enabled to transmit sound. Given the ample capabilities of any police cruiser to transmit sound and to use emergency frequencies to interrupt the broadcasting of all radios within range (Radiohead: Cell phones are radios (part 3)), you’d think the police would exercise greater savvy.
In the case of a Florida woman harassed in her condo with low-frequency sound from a system of audio speakers that turned out to be weighted to the floor, the visual confirmation of a speaker was not required to evaluate the merit of her complaint (A case of neighbor harassment using infrasonic sound). Perhaps the problem in this Seattle enclave whose goodness has been corrupted by scheming neighborhood watch captains and a mentality of Real Estate Über Alles, is not the lack of a speaker but a lack of care.
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If COVID-19 has shown Americans to hopelessly—even fatally—be part of the global community, the virus has revealed a shameful American impatience with accommodations made for the collective good. Even in pandemic, we bury our heads in the sands of isolationism. Even in pandemic, we avert our eyes from the holocaust and boast that America is No. 1.
The same subjugation to false concepts of masculinity and strength that leads fools to refuse to mask their faces in pandemic, is reflected in our use of technology. Similar to the chauvinism that deludes some into thinking that their unsheathed organs and orifices are germ-free, we use technology without regard for its effect on others and often do so to express dominance. WiFi is a case in point.
I had hoped to complete and publish this blog entry by today, but given the shelter-in-place mandate for COVID-19 and the enforcement of curfew after the murder of George Floyd, the criminals mobbing me have doubled down on the illegal and dangerous use of radio frequency interference to inject verbal abuse into my environment and to physically harass. It’s been intense, but I’ve got the remainder of this blog pretty well mapped out and by the end of the week, I hope to be able to publish a basic summary on how property mobbers, nasty neighborhood watch groups and criminal speculators might use criminal interference to extract you from your home. Check back to read about mobbing with interference using infrastructure, network extenders and tactical networks, not to mention WiFi signal hacks and signal injection. All this as well as manspreading at the network edge if the Seattle Police don’t finally get a clue and ask the FBI to show up and arrest the neighborhood watch captains, haters and racketeers who continue to assault me in my legal home.
To read on, see Infrastructure crimes: Mobbing with interference; extraction by heat (part 2).
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