As crime begins to incorporate digital components, presence is increasingly severed from criminal act and crime scene. The portability and affordability of the microprocessor, emblematic in the Raspberry Pi, combine with apps, the smartphone, the stick, the dongle and now the drone, to make the remoting of malicious activity tantalizingly easy. It is as though crime becomes headless; acts without state of mind that are denied by the perpetrator who can flatly and honestly say, “Not me. I wasn’t there.”

In crimes such as these, what meaning can we take from the report of an eyewitness who sees the accused depart the scene? How does the legal concept of alibi change when motion detection, radar and biometric systems are chained together to create complex systems of crime? Between the proliferation of botnets, the distribution channels for malware, tracking by hardware and software, and sensor technology, crime is transforming from an act to a system.

How can these cybernetic crimes be prosecuted when police departments across the United States are completely ill-equipped to investigate, or even to comprehend, crimes effected using smartphone apps, triggered by motion detection systems, the theft of personal information by IMSI catcher, and brutal assault by drones unseen and unheard.

The rules of evidence do not consider digital crime. The legal concept of probable cause is ineffectual when digital crime is involved, at least when crimes are ignored because we do not know what to do about them. From my perspective as a victim of real estate mobbing in northeast Seattle, digital crime is not highly “sophisticated,” and the notion of some nefarious corner of the Internet called the “Dark Web” seems not only romantic but counterproductive hype. In the digital world, technology girds commerce, education, social life, and warfare. Technology is the frisson of discourse, and depending on your proclivities, the lubrication for intercourse.

Crime has become digital, and through the spread of cheap hardware and software, radio waves that make platforms of soft wares and hard, and the widening spectrum of bands transporting their signals, digital crimes are proliferating, and the tools used to commit them are miniaturized, light in footprint, and difficult to trace.

How can we make acts effected in the virtual world yield to the concepts of materality that are codified in the law? Perhaps we can find the answer in the electronic impulses coursing over copper, moving over undulating wave forms, and slotted into binary representations in code. The gathering of evidence may be well on the way to becoming the task of computer systems analysts with the tools to digest Big Data. Perhaps we need software that can analyze systems for malicious activity, for “rogue behavior.” This kind of behavorial analysis is what IoT security devices like the “smart” RATtrap firewall (RATtrap, https://www.myrattrap.com/) are moving toward, though their scope remains restricted to certain bands, certain signals, and certain “machines.” Like some other IoT firewalls, RATtrap secures wired and wireless devices on a residential network. It goes further, however, performing “behavioral monitoring” and putting machine learning to work detecting anomalies that may represent malicious activity.

Most of the devices that analyze “behavior,” gather their data from machines, their software and the protocols that govern their communication; not from the world at large. Most of these devices do not span the Rube Goldberg-like causal chain of mobbing or the “kitchen-sink” methodology of those scumbucket speculators who continue in their attempt to force me out of my northeast Seattle home. If only there were a device that could make sense of the rampant house flipping in my neighborhood, cross it with the civil nuisance complaints of the nasty neighborhood watch and their speculator friends, and intercept and integrate into the data model the anomalous utterances and rogue signals of the tenant relocators who ply their trade from behind the walls of the homes that flank my own.

But perhaps software that analyzed systems extending beyond a subset of machines, software that could aggregate and analyze behavior both human and mechanistic, is what we need to become more than helpless in the face of digital crimes that escape notice by targeting small numbers of individuals or even just against the one who lacks a security force, an enterprise endpoint security system, or a secret service. Perhaps a crime systems analysis software would at least avoid the worst biases that seem to compromise the work of police, even if the software must be architected and coded by human beings. Because being a victim of real estate mobbing in northeast Seattle has taught me that when the police don’t understand, and especially when they are victims of their own bias, they laugh at victims and they turn a deaf ear to victim reports. When faced with crimes that challenge their competence, the police ignore them. Most importantly, the police, at least those I’ve tried to get help from in northeast Seattle, appear to assiduously refuse to learn about crime from those who at least claim to be its victims.

Ω

This morning I was listening to the NPR radio show Wait, Wait Tell Me and weeding my garden at my Seattle home. I was not listening to the verbal abuse of the mobbers from the houses on both sides of my own and the concurrent attempt to “rattle” me by slamming doors and windows.

I heard an update about the American diplomats who were subjected to a “sonic attack” in Cuba. The attack, the report stated, took place not at the consulate, but in the homes of the diplomats. The US continues to look for the “weapon,” but has found none.

I’m only surprised that the Cuba hasn’t said that the claims of hearing loss and the State Department accusations of a “sonic attack” represent a case of mass hysteria in the U.S. diplomatic corps. After all, the real estate mobbers of northeast Seattle have had great success with simply deflecting the reports of their victims by using innuendo and defamation, including statements that the only possible explanation for the victims’ strange reports of harassment is that the victim must be “hearing voices,” and must therefore be “paranoid schizophrenic.” Perhaps similar deflection would allay the concerns of the Trump administration, whose spokesperson Kellyanne Conway has already sought to deflect suspicions of collusion with the Putin regime by her simpleton explanation that there is no “collusion,” only “delusion.”

Notably, the attacks occurred when the diplomats were in their homes. Has the State Department considered that the sonic assault could have been a fly-by-night attack from a drone? Perhaps even a drone positioned atop a nearby structure? Perhaps the “weapon” flew away.

I recall noticing, while doing some research on parabolic speakers last year, that some of them come equipped with GPS for precision aiming of the directional sound stream. This would probably make it simple to isolate and target a single individual through an open window, to transmit sound for acoustic leakage onto even the small pane of a closed window, or to target and shoot a “missile” of sound down a chimney or into a venting pipe in the roof of a private residence. As I mentioned in at least one other blog over the past few years, the mobbers of northeast Seattle bragged they had every inch of my home mapped out in GPS coordinates. Whether or not the braggadocio was another hoax attempting to scare me out of my home here in Seattle on the part of these criminal real estate speculators, from the perspective of a sonic attack by drone on U.S. diplomats in Cuba, the pinpoint mapping of private space could make it possible for the diplomats to be targeted even as they lay sleeping in their beds.

LRADs (long-range acoustic devices) and other beam- and planar-focused directional sound are probably appropriate weapons for mobile deployment by drone. A creepy article called “Could a Sonic Weapon Make Your Head Explode” in Popular Science (http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-11/acoustic-weapons-book-excerpt) speculates on the impact of “vibroacoustic syndrone” on the “fluid-filled parts” of the human body. The damage that infrasonic sound could wreak on the human body, according to the research of Vladimir Gavreau, a French researcher of Russian origin, includes organs “converted to jelly” by the sounding of an infrasonic whistle. The Popular Science article notes, “[b]y the time 166 dB is reached, people start noticing problems breathing.

Ryan Littlefield’s less dramatic work, originally published by the University of Portsmouth, is entitled, The psychoacoustic effect of infrasonic, sonic and ultrasonic frequencies within non-lethal military warefare techniques (https://littlefield.co/the-psychoacoustic-effect-of-infrasonic-sonic-and-ultrasonic-frequencies-within-non-lethal-cf05e1fd8673, courtesy of http://Littlefield.co). Littlefield contextualizes the use of sound as weapon as part of an effort to create “war’s without death.” However benign the intention, the application of sound to weaponry appears to have expanded the ways human beings can be tortured short of death and its inevitable sequelae, both diplomatic and corporeal. Littlefield provides a summary table of sound sources, effects, and targets that gives some idea of the range of damaging effects caused by the malicious use of sound, including disorientation, vertigo, and resonance in the heart and other organs. Citing the work of Harding, Bohne, Lee, & Salt (2007), Littlefield goes on to discuss the lasting damage to the ear drum that can result through “vibrational movement created by the infrasonic frequency.” Even localized earthquakes can result from the enlistment of destructive sound; this is certainly relevant to the real estate mobbing of residents from their homes in geographically fragile areas like my own slide-prone lakeside neighborhood.

Moreover, if you consider the possibility of the attack on the diplomats originating from a neighboring dwelling or by way of a line-of-sight positioning from flanking residences, there may be other opportunities for infiltration of the lines that feed entertainment and communications systems or for the deployment of infrasonic sound or other forms shortwave or software-defined radio attack using linear antennas.

Perhaps the Secret Service and the FBI could learn something useful to the investigation of the sonic attack on the American diplomats, by investigating my case of real estate mobbing in Seattle.