One of the problems with property mobbing and other tech-enabled crimes, is that they rely on specialized knowledge. These crimes are designed to avoid detection, to foil investigators, and to convince victims and those who might evaluate their reports in the psychologist’s office or in the courtroom, that they’re suffering from delusions.
This specialized knowledge turns crimes that we’ve known in more mundane forms, into IoT abuse in which the victim faces the double-whammy of being ridiculed or held for psychiatric evaluation when she reports flickering lights and unruly appliances.
This is what happened to a few women in the South Bay Area as their “technical” husbands began to leverage the proliferation of IoT devices that were “smart,” wired, or radio-controlled across the consumer market (The New York Times on the digital tools of abuse).
On one hand, specialized knowledge is venerated; on the other it is feared. Books like The Anarchist’s Cookbook (1971) are controversial because we don’t want the information to “get out.” The same has been true in the world of computer security where instead of sharing information about vulnerabilities some experts have claimed that divulging information about exploits is to teach them. With hacks and exploits increasingly falling into the public sphere, however, this kind of thinking protects companies that deploy unsecure technologies, appliances and devices into the residential ecosystem. This type of thinking ensures that consumers buy in with a false sense of security and have no idea of the risks they may face when they combine old technologies and infrastructure with the new. For example, whether solar charging technologies should be installed on top of knob-and-tube wiring systems or in proximity to homes with active knob-and-tube wiring. Given what I’ve seen, for contractors and speculators who want to “acquire” nearby properties, the installation and use of charging stations and technologies may be strategy.
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“Tech worker at Bay Area company rigged house to explode.” The article stood out on a quick skim of the SFGate front cover. In the article, there was a near-casual reference to the use of cellular phones in sabotage, a statement that mixing traditional infrastructure with cellular phones might trigger a dangerous interaction. The software engineer, a German national living in Gilroy, was apprehended in his vehicle after a DUI—a loaded gun at his feet, a loaded assault rifle in the trunk:
Officers went to Beck’s home to seize other weapons, according to prosecutors. “Upon arriving at his home, officers were nauseated by the smell of gas. The oven unlit burners were on high,” the district attorney’s office said in a statement sent to SFGATE. “Firefighters turned the gas off and investigators found numerous cell phones strewn around the home, in a possible attempt to remotely ignite a fire. The chimneys and fireplace were plugged.”
March 7, 2024, https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/tech-worker-bay-area-company-rigged-house-18713592.php
The attempt to blow up a house, ostensibly by using cell phones to “spark” a blast, got my attention. I removed the natural gas service at the Albany house because it became obvious the mobbers were tampering with it. A worker at the lowlife house next door had at one point offered to clean the gutters of my roof, an offer that I came to question. I suspected that with the use of carrier current transmission over conductive piping, the mobbers might be heightening the ingress of natural gas in an environment in which they sought to create and exploit electrical and radio frequency interference. The article has not been updated with any new information on whether the cellular phones strewn about were expected to be useful in sabotage for their batteries, for their radio frequency, or both, but I easily found technical debate over whether a cellular phone can cause an explosion. Engineers argue with each other over theory. The victims of mobbing come to an understanding that is more practical.
The incorporation of specialized knowledge into crime means sabotage that is not detected, and crimes that are not recognized. The result is adaptations of the spark-gap, like Nikola Tesla’s cattle prod, resurfacing for use in the form of the picana. Or maybe another Tesla invention—the Violet Ray machine—a banned electrical interruptor suspected to have been used in torture by Jon Burge and other members of the Chicago Police Department as late as the 1980s (The mobbers’ “World Wireless System” and hate culture in Albany, California (part 2)). The result is living-off-the-land crimes that exploit the everyday and the benign, crimes that use industry to kill and medicine to maim, and crimes in which automation is a massacre. These bad acts leverage resources that are allocated to the common good for criminal endeavor. Most of all, these crimes are designed to demonstrate the superiority of the criminal over his victim.
“It’s because you don’t STEM,” said one of the Seattle mobbers early on, as though to blame me for the victimization. But that’s another lie. Because we all STEM. Observation, an essential scientific method, is a faculty within the reach of us all. It’s the liberal arts, the writing and reading part of the equation, that is so difficult for some to comprehend. It’s the human part of the humanities at which we increasingly fail as we march in lockstep toward Hitler’s America. But perhaps this is the sentiment of those mobbing me tonight, the sounds of their giggling picked up by their microphones and repeaters; they know there’s little I can do at this moment, to stop them from pumping whatever it is that they continue to pump into the house when I’m alone. Given past experience and the interesting timing of some Albany Police drive-bys, I certainly can’t call them. The sadness is that the mobbers are so removed from their humanity that they think victimizing others is funny.
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In the last weeks, I removed the remainder of the ducting from the basement and was able to bypass the knob-and-tube electrical system. The change was profound and something I intend to write more about in my next entry. But removing what seems to be some underground access to the low-pressure drainage system or perhaps to what remains of the irrigation system my mother installed or the sewer lateral beyond is more complicated and between and during asthmatic bouts of coughing, scraping and panicking (“She won’t get out!”), the lowlife is venting, spewing or drafting matter that should not be breathed into my house, probably by dint of some kind of generator or pump. They may be venting into or blocking abandoned piping and drain routes or perhaps they’ve jammed pipes beneath the foundation in hopes of breaking it with pressurized air and harassing me until they do. Either possibility might account for the blasts of air or water fired at the ground level in the wee hours. These injections might not be made simply to supply a carrier current. “Did the house move?” I recently heard a mobber ask a co-conspirator when I was jolted awake by early morning fire. The new heat pump heating system with air cleaning stymies the monkey-wrenching when I use it strategically, and the fans I use in the basement help too. But I can’t continuously tend these appliances. The changes I’m forced to make to thwart criminals because of the complicity of at least a few who work with or for the City of Albany come one at a time and often at great expense. I’m considering whether a wired security system or the use of recordings from a sound-level meter I purchased sometime back might be helpful in forcing an investigation. There are other ideas, too, that I haven’t written about, including collection and analysis of soil, venting or piping, for example.
That said, if you can act before these crooks sink their teeth into you, taking some carefully selected defensive measures might keep you and your tenants from being attractive victims. Making noise might also help to force Bay Area cities like Albany to do some housecleaning and adopt a no-tolerance policy toward killing people in their homes. As an aside, if not already implemented, tracking the travel and whereabouts of police vehicles in Albany might help to discourage dirty cops from using paid patrol time to intimidate the citizenry.
There was nothing like the silencing that came the night a few weeks back when the electricians removed the electrical service from the original knob-and-tube connected panel. This measure combined well with the removal of not only the soft coils of ductwork that were available for monkey-wrenching on the “ground” story, but the fabricated metal ductwork that was tucked into the soffit close to high-efficiency landscape lighting, a transformer, and the now replaced galvanized water line on one corner, and more metal ductwork from a downdraft range exhaust system upstairs. I’ll tell you more about that soon.
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Postscript: For a research article on the white-collar crimes of engineers, see Douglas L. Oliver’s “Engineers and White-Collar Crimes” in Journal of Legal Affairs and Dispute Resolution in Engineering and Construction, Volume 1, Issue 1, https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)1943-4162(2009)1:1(32).
