Baby your mind is a radio
Got a receiver inside my head
Baby I’m tuned to your wavelength
Lemme tell you what it says:

Transmitter!
Oh! Picking up something good
Hey, radio head!
The sound…of a brand-new world.

—The Talking Heads, “Radio Head” (1986)

A dictum of mobbing is that everything is a radio. I’ve written about mobbers and radio in the past, albeit with a superficial understanding of radio. I’ve also written about the mobbers’ use of telephone technologies, about how the mobbing moved from street-side games of rousting the renter to the explicitly criminal as verbal abuse crept into the infrastructure of my modest 1940s home. Even before the mobbers marshaled the systems of my home and flooded them with verbal abuse, they made exploratory forays into  the communications systems that tied my interior world to the exterior world, those binding the individual to society. At the onset of the mob it was indeed a brand new world as the robo-calls mounted to my unsecure cordless phone, as an unused intercom for the phone in my bedroom lit up, and as I began to hear the voices of my “neighbors” tittering about a “party line” when I picked up the phone. In an earlier blog about mobbing, I wrote that everything that isn’t a radio is a phone. That statement, however, doesn’t help to tell the story of real estate mobbing. The technical reality of phones and cell phones is pretty much the same. When it comes to mobbing, a phone is just another radio.

When I began working out of state after the first few years of being mobbed, I bought a tidy little commuter car. It’s attributes were modest; connectivity was not its strongest selling point. Being a later model car than those I use in Seattle, it was outfitted with a recent radio system that came with an auxiliary port on its face. It provided what is probably a baseline system of speakers with speed-volume controls that I learned to disable. And it came with a year of free satellite radio.

I bought the car in California primarily for use in California, but I don’t recall now if I was able to use the radio without the mobbers’ verbal abuse even that first windy night as I drove it from Sacramento to the East Bay. Its modest radio system was rapidly overrun by the same mobbing verbal abuse that I experienced driving cars without passengers, and even faintly with passengers clutching and fingering smart phones, in Seattle.

It’s been a while since I played with the radios in the vehicles I drive, but when I recently took my California commuter car for service at a dealership, I asked if the antenna could be removed or disabled. The service agent responded by walking over to the car and unscrewing it from the roof.

Ω

As time has passed, it appears that the cocksure real estate mobbers of northeast Seattle, with their upper-middle class white front men and their high-end professions, might not only have taken in the Seattle North Precinct police and perhaps even some officials of the courtroom, but perhaps they’ve been taken in by their own con. Because it appears that they’ve been so utterly convinced that no one would could ever put two and two together, that they brag to their victims, at least to this one, about the screws they’ve put to her. But then, that’s part of their con: To convince the victim that it’s useless to fight. Mobbing, this crime I’ve called a hoax-inside-a-con-inside-a-scam might be more like a house of cards than the mobbers might want you to think: Pull one out of the deck, and they all fall down.

Taunting me in bedtime harassment in the earlier months of the mobbing, the mobbers had made claims that I chose to remember without allowing them to influence my actions. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in the On being mobbed blogs, they claimed to have access to some Google Earth backend that provided a real-time aerial view of my home. Even before the Christmastime scramble to buy drones and the ill-fated FAA bid to mandate their registration, the mobbers teased, “We might have a drone.” Another time, they claimed to have a satellite, and then, a “timeshare” on a satellite.

In the months and years since the mobbing began, claims that had seemed science fiction began to seem plausible. A drone began to seem a reasonable possibility as I considered how it was that the verbal abuse followed me on the Burke-Gilman bike trail in such a manner that it was always just at my back, as though directed to my rear rack (see Get off the phone, we might have a drone and We might have a drone: Drones and other flybys, among others), not to mention when I saw a drone being launched from the driveway of a home built by a developer whose breaking ground across from me had coincided with the beginning of the onslaught of complaints about my legally parked vehicles to Seattle Parking Enforcement. This was an aging developer who had, I was told, threatened my landlord that there were “ways to get [me] out” of this house. The drone that I’d seen hovering over the street as I came down the hill in my vehicle, appeared to be managed by a woman who frequented the north mobbing house. Another time as I walked my bike down the hill, I saw a drone hovering over the spot where I was about to begin my ride on the Burke-Gilman rail trail.

The eyeball-rolling claim of a satellite merited a second look upon the sight of a satellite phone contractor’s truck working on the telephone lines of the south mobbing house. When I learned about how satellite phone networks could hide caller origin and encrypt the illegal utterances of cell phone “mobbers,” the mobbers’ claims to have a “satellite” began to seem even more reasonable. [Note 04/09/23: A mesh network like the Eero system includes a “source router” and additional supporting “nodes” that are called “satellites.” Mesh networks evolved in the military as tactical networks and may be preferred by those who use WiFi to attack neighbors.]

And when I became aware of how IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) catchers make quick work of intercepting nearby phone calls I wondered whether a call intercepted by IMSI catcher could be easily “crossed” with a “call” or stream of verbal abuse. A quick search revealed that IMSI catchers were available as residential cellular service extenders on Amazon.com. Having reported to the Seattle police an event in my neighborhood where the daughter of a builder pulled up to me in her expensive car as I watered the front yard, demanding to know who told me I could park my vehicles as I did with a radio scanner on and beeping from the dash, it seemed reasonable that other radios used for call interception could be present in my neighborhood.

In an August 2011 article on Wired.com, DIY Spy Drone Sniffs Wi-Fi, Intercepts Phone Calls, Kim Zetter describes  Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins’ Black Hat security conference presentation on how, for a mere $6,000 at the time, they built their own remote-controlled spy plane “complete with Wi-Fi and hacking tools, such as an IMSI catcher and antenna to spoof a GSM cell tower and intercept calls” (https://www.wired.com/2011/08/blackhat-drone/).

The DIY IMSI catcher was based on a Def Con 18 presentation by Chris Paget, Practical Cellphone Spying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQSu9cBaojc; see Catching IMSI Catchers, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eivHO1OzF5E for a presentation by Geoffrey Vaughan of Security Innovation, focused on the police Stingray).

In her introduction to the brief article, “Rise of the IMSI Catcher,” in Media Fields Journal: Critical Explorations in Media and Space (March 12, 2016, http://mediafieldsjournal.squarespace.com/rise-of-the-imsi-catcher/), Lisa Parks observes:

As billions of people around the world are becoming digitally connected, the Kool-Aid is beginning to wear off. Networked office workers are revolting against the constant scrutiny of their online activities. Social media users are upset that Twitter and Facebook are in cahoots with the National Security Agency (NSA). And GPS-equipped smartphones seem more and more like electronic ankle bracelets. The utopian allure of connectivity is cracking and totalitarian tendencies are alive and kicking, especially in the world’s democracies.

We may in fact be increasingly “tethered,” given IMSI catchers as invasive as DRTBOX (“dirtbox”) manufactured by the Boeing subsidiary Digital Receiver Technology, which is installed on planes and can scan phones on the ground, or the VME Dominator made by Meganet Corporation, which as quoted in Parks’ article, and interestingly from the vantage point of mobile tracking and harassment, offers “voice manipulation, up or down channel blocking, text intercept and modification, calling & sending text on behalf of the user, and directional finding of a user during random monitoring of calls” (“VME – Cell Phone Interceptors,” Meganet Corporation, 2011, http://www.meganet.com/meganet-products-cellphoneinterceptors.html). While the sales information on the VME Dominator expressly claims the device is available only to the U.S. Government, the features it advertises are revealing of the capabilities that were within reach for the technology even six years ago in 2011. Parks cites the words of a security expert that we are seeing the “democratization of Stingray” and states that “cellphone interception could become as common as cellphone use.”

Indeed, the IMSI catcher may soon be as ubiquitous as, well, a common radio. But this shouldn’t surprise us when not only is an IMSI catcher to the GSM network like a police scanning radio to the cordless phone, but the smart phone itself is like a radio. You might even say, that the power of a radio, is in the sensitivity of the antenna.

Take, for example, the “direction finding” capabilities of the artfully named VME Dominator. According to Wikipedia, directing finding (DF), also called radio direction finding (RDF), “is the measurement of the direction from which a received signal was transmitted.” The aggregation of direction information “from two or more suitably spaced receivers (or a single mobile receiver) allows for the user to be located via triangulation” ( “Direction finding,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_finding).

It was direction finding that helped Britain to fight off the Germans in World War II; in the Battle of the Atlantic, according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Atlantic) the British Air Ministry used RDF “to locate its own fighter groups and vector them to detected German raids.”

The technologies of the maker of the VME Dominator, Digital Receiver Company, include a number of powerful antennas and antenna arrays (https://www.drti.com/catalog/software-defined-radio/antennas/). In the same way, the arrays of microphones used by sound cameras visualize the origin of sound based on triangulation. Signal processing experts at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland pioneered a technique of “echolocation” making it possible for ordinary microphones to visualize the shape of a room by listening to sound of the cell phone speaker echoing off the walls (“Your Cellphone Could Be a Sonar Device,” http://www.nbcnews.com/id/52232878/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/your-cellphone-could-be-sonar-device/#.WfX9BoZrz9R).

A cell phone is an instrument of triangulation, in and of itself. With two microphones—a directional one that is active during a phone call, and another that performs noise cancellation—there is the possibility of using the two microphones to triangulate a sound source. With a cell phone, the distance between the microphones that form the base of the triangle makes it difficult; echolocation relies on a calculation of the echo at each point of the base. More accurate triangulation might be possible by the user extending the base of the triangle if he carries the device.

In the case of the products of DRT, Inc. like any company that is on the bleeding edge of radio, the antennas support software-defined radio (SDR). I’ve touched on SDR and the benefits that radio on the application layer would supply to real estate mobbers; hackers are apparently, very interested in SDR. On July 25, 2017, RTL-SDR.COM posted the article “Using an RTL-SDR as a Simple IMSI Catcher” (RTL-SDR.COM, https://www.rtl-sdr.com/using-an-rtl-sdr-as-a-simple-imsi-catcher/), all about how nothing more than a $20 SDR dongle and a Python script can be used to create a simple IMSI catcher.

I found the link this morning; David Marugán (@RadioHacking), a security consultant, HAM radio operator, and SDR device enthusiast from Spain, found it too (https://twitter.com/RadioHacking/status/889797205778890752). Spain is acknowledged to have a problem with real estate mobbing. I don’t know its configuration and whether it relies heavily on radio in the manner that my own mobbing here in northeast Seattle does, but coming across Marugán’s Twitter page makes me wonder whether radio is a foundational technology in this human rights crime as it is expressed in Spain.

To be continued….