Halloween is almost upon us, and this early Friday morning I’m back in Seattle for the witching hours. Now that I have roommates on both floors of the house again, the mobbing harassment is quieted, at least when they’re home. It’s quieter than where I stay in the Berkeley area to work in San Francisco, and even more muffled than on most of the Alaska Airlines flights I take between the Bay Area and Seattle, as I continue to maintain my home here while pursuing my livelihood in the Bay Area.
It’s been a while since I’ve written about how the “mobbing” appears on airline flights. I note that “mobbing” is a term that is probably not coincidentally used for those who bully over cell phones. In Flying the friendly skies, I wrote about the experience of hearing the familiar voices of the “mobbers” who moved in around my rental home now more than three years ago, in secured areas of airports as well as on the plane.
With a bit of research, it seemed like there were a few likely vulnerabilities. The first is the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), a radio communications system that aircraft use to transmit status during flight. Standard ACARS transmits on the VHF band, usually 131.550 MHz. Some ACARS messages may also be sent by satellite or on the HF band. The second is the Go-go in-flight entertainment network, which provides WiFi bandwidth to passengers. Another one I’ve considered is the use of the in-flight entertainment network to stream verbal abuse to the seat of a victim, or even, when they expect a mobbing to be of short duration with limited travel, for mobbers to buy tickets that allow them to get close enough to the victim on the flight, in which case they can just open up WiFi to a remote mobber or start a stream of remote verbal abuse on their own. After all, the easiest way to gain access to the WiFi network that exposes the victim, is to patronize the provider. I remember how early in the mobbing, when it was limited to Seattle and when the mobbers no doubt thought they’d do their dirty work of eviction within weeks, one of them boasted that she knew every open WiFi network spanning some Seattle terrain.
But when I wrote Flying the friendly skies, it wasn’t clear to me the degree to which the real estate mobbers may be utilizing the cell phones of other passengers on flights. This despite the fact that when I took steps to abandon my “phreaked” home phone for a smart phone, one of the mobbers threatened, “If you get an iPhone I’ll fuck you up so bad.” But then, who listens to one threat in a litany? At any rate, there is a strong correlation between the number of devices in use around me, and the frequency of the mobbers’ insults.
I had noted in the past that on an older plane that did not offer passengers WiFi, the flight was much quieter. On recent flights I’ve had the experience of sitting close to engine noise that functioned as white noise and obscured much of the on-board mobbing, as well as being asked by flight crew to change seats at the last minute to accommodate another passenger and finding that my new arrangement was very quiet, as though the mobbers’ were unaware of the changed seat. Rows behind me, I faintly heard a familiar mobber’s voice during that flight and wondered if those who had claimed my seat were aware of being mobbed. Mind you, I keep my smart phone off when I fly. This means that cellular and WiFi services are off, and almost always, location services too. Lately, I’ve gone back to using a smart phone enclosure to block the phone from radio signals, just in case. I figure if I’m back-doored, even if the smart phone turns itself on again, there won’t be much it can do without active radios. It might sound extreme, but so is my position.
As of late, the mobbing has been very quiet in the airport, but where circumstances permit, like tonight when the Go-go in-flight WiFi network is activated and being used by passengers, it picks up on the plane. Why don’t those passengers whose devices supply the mobbers with speakers seem to notice? I’ve been trying to think this one out but don’t know enough about hardware design to be sure. Part of it is expectation, to be sure. As I’ve said before, no one expects their devices to talk when they’re not on a call. And then, there’s also the fact that the mobbers protect their crime by overlapping their taunts, and insults with an existing sound track. To hide they stop speaking when the speaker on the soundtrack pauses; to gain your attention, they taunt you during the pauses. And there’s also the fact that they ensure that they familiarize their victims to the sound of their voices. This means that when you’re sitting next to me with your smart phone WiFi wide open and a small electronic voice delivers a barb, to you it sounds like some fragment of conversation by someone you don’t know. But the mobbers’ victim who has been familiarized to the mobbers’ voices to the point of intimacy, knows the barb was meant for her.
But still there’s the question of why people don’t realize that the quick quips and cuts are coming from the speakers of their own phones. In the end, in addition to factors like expectation and attention, and even beyond factors including whether the mobbers activate speakers with spam calls or use sound-enabled applications or even system sound to inject harassment, there is the nature of the device itself. And it’s not even necessarily the sometimes tinny voices or the inability of the small device to amplify a voice that seeks but one listener.
A smart phone used with nothing more than its speaker, is essentially mono. Stereophonic sound, according to Wikipedia, “is a method of sound reproduction that creates an illusion of multi-directional audible perspective” (Stereophonic sound, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereophonic_sound). To “hear” the origin of sound, to experience sound as part of a three-dimensional soundscape, we require the use of both our ears. A likely reason why cell phones are ready-made for criminal harassment is that they deny the directionality that is required to pinpoint the source. In their very manufacture, smart phones provide another example of the mobbers’ use of indirection to thwart detection, investigation, and prosecution. With New York City tenants’ organizations, for example, hearing of instances of the use of cyber-crime used to defame tenants from their legal residences, it would appear that the use of smart phones to harass is another example of mobbers’ making a calculated assessment of how they can use human embodiment to inflict discomfort and cause distress for their victims.
And a final note, what this entry talks about is cyber-bullying or cyber-harassment. This is one component of real estate mobbing as performed by the real estate mobbers of northeast Seattle. The FBI, I’m told, ignores cases of cyber-bullying. But why should they rethink this policy and investigate my situation? Because mine is a case in which the techniques of cyberbullies are deployed to the physical world. These people aren’t just creeps on a phone, or on the phones of those around me, or the landlines, conferencing applications, and VoIP phones in the vicinity of their victim. In this case, those who might use smart phones to harass on a plane are directly connected with a nasty neighborhood watch and its speculator friends in northeast Seattle.
It wouldn’t take much of an investigation to expose the antics of the nasty neighborhood watch and its two-bit speculator friends. You might even be able to get forensic evidence of the cell phone mobbing component of real estate mobbing with some decoy smart phones near the victim that record all system and application sound—anything that is emitted through the speaker. That can probably be combined with monitoring any WiFi networks for traffic or using a scanner to collect certain radio broadcasts when the mobbers deploy their verbal abuse to traditional tuners.
To fail to investigate this matter is to encourage the proliferation of crimes that use technology to openly harm people because the use of technology shields the criminal. The people who are responsible for putting me in this harmful situation live in my neighborhood. They’re known to me. Even if there are remote hackers or mobbers, the key players who provide the mobbers’ position work from next door. Their ties with the nasty neighborhood watch lady and her corrupt neighborhood watch are easily established. And there are others who know what they’ve done. All investigators need to do is to begin to interview them. As soon as their lives are at risk of being damaged, they’ll begin to turn on each other. A Grand Jury can be used to get closer to the whole story of what is likely a real estate scam in which home owners seek to profit by criminally harassing legal tenants from their homes and forcing properties to sale.
If Seattle is truly a liberal city, a sanctuary city, it should not stand back and do nothing while racketeers batter and destroy the lives of the legal residents who have the gumption to report them.
Leave a Reply