On being mobbed

Back in the first days of September, I wrote a blog entry about the ease with which technology abstracts the crime away from the criminal, making for attacks effected from remote positions, attacks that may not be recognized even as they are underway. Esoteric forms of sound including the infrasonic and ultrasonic have been deployed by the military as well as by the hate groups that sometimes include their disaffected. Drones have gained ground on the battlefield, their tactical superiority the platform for an arsenal commanded by artificial intelligence. In war-torn regions civilian populations already run from the maneuvers of dumber “slaughterbots” roaming overhead (https://autonomousweapons.org/); in real estate, the aerial shot is money shot and advertising platform. Drones confer the God’s eye view to industry and to commerce; in the business of war, the retailer who commands the skies takes all.

Was the sonic attack of US diplomats in Cuba a drone or “neighbor” attack included a few paragraphs about the “dangerous sounds” reported to have injured diplomats in the U.S. mission to Cuba. I suggested that the “sonic attack” could have been waged remotely, by drone, or by neighbor. I hoped that an investigation of how sound is being used here in northeast Seattle in what appears to be an organized crime by house-flippers in concert with a corrupt neighborhood watch, would not only give me back my life but would contribute to the information available to investigators of the Cuban “sonic attack” on the design and deployment of “dangerous sound.”

An attack by neighbors, as I’ve found as the victim of a real estate mobbing in northeast Seattle, can be configured as a “sneak attack,” especially when it is conducted from building structures so close to the victim residence that the attack becomes inescapable. The techniques of “neighbor mobbing,” which rely on making use of proximity and all the vulnerabilities it exposes, share common ground with the techniques of hackers whose forays into computer crime rely on close-range attacks using packet sniffers, IMSI catchers, and social engineering. Drones provide mobility with attack vectors long and short. As stationary winged machines, drones can perch on roofs unnoticed, attacking from unfamiliar altitude and using unfamiliar means. They can then take flight or be otherwise transported out of the field of investigation. Skillfully used, drones hide the crime as well as the criminal.

Tonight I noticed the AP article, Dangerous sound? What Americans heard in Cuba…, by Josh Lederman and Michael Weissenstein, (The Denver Post, October 12, 2017, http://www.denverpost.com/2017/10/12/cuba-attacks-sound-sonic-weapon/). Because real estate mobbing as it is done here in northeast Seattle appears to have similarities to the “dangerous sounds” of the Cuban sonic attack, the article has some bearing on my own situation. For example, some of those who are involved in the mobbing seem to have or have had ties with the military, the strong use of radio can indicate military training, and the use of infrasonic and ultrasonic sound—sound whose unfamiliar phenomenology may disguise its meaning—is attractive to hate groups with militaristic underpinnings.

The Associated Press released a recording of what those in the U.S. Embassy in Havana at least heard, explaining that “[s]ound experts and physicians say they know of no sound that can cause physical damage when played for short durations at normal levels through standard equipment like a cellphone or computer.” This statement seems to be very well qualified, essentially meaning that if this recording includes some facsimile of the “dangerous sound,” it will reach your ears through the safe filter of your music player. At any rate, I’m not listening to it. My life as a victim of real estate mobbing in northeast Seattle is lived listening to sound as a form of hatred. I don’t need to listen to more. But, if it interests you, the recording does capture the sound that made investigators begin to look for a sonic weapon.

Analysis of the sound of the sonic attacks reveals it to be highly complex, embedding at least 20 different “frequencies” or “pitches.” This makes me think about the capability of software-defined radio to access virtually all frequencies and bands. The article also cited an earlier AP report that the sounds were “narrowly confined to a room or parts of a room.” This limited range sounds like “focused” sound such as that used by directional speakers or parabolic speakers, where falloff is rapid outside the sound beam or plane and in comparison to that of sound waves spanning the frequencies that are audible to the human ear.

Addressing the difficulty of recording dangerous sound, or any sound that is manufactured and deployed in an attack, embassy workers first had to be taught what they should listen for, and then they were given recording devices to turn on in hopes of capturing some artifact of the sound. This makes clear that hearing alone is not the same thing as understanding the meaning—the danger—of what is heard. It also makes clear that recording sound is not so simple. There are many, many factors in making a useful recording, including not only frequency and falloff of the sound, but the capabilities of the microphone and, in the case of digital sound, the limitations of the file format, for example, compression.

I’ve written numerous pieces on the On being mobbed blog about sound but have been treated with skepticism and mocked by police, investigators, and even attorneys who refuse to believe what they have not themselves experienced and may not technically understand. For some basic information about beam-focused sound and cameras that visualize sound which is difficult to trace, see Beam-focused sound: The Artillery of Property War and Fighting crime with acoustic detection systems. To learn about the power of software-defined radio, start with the Wikipedia page, Software-defined radio, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio. For a table of software-defined radio receivers and their frequency ranges, see Wikipedia’s List of software-defined radios, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software-defined_radios.