A few weeks back, having picked up a few bottles of wine at KL Wines in San Francisco, I swung a wide turn out of the parking lot to the far side of the one-way street, pulled up to the intersection, and waited to make the turn to double back to the Bay Bridge. A beat-up white sedan pulled up on my driver’s side. The passenger window was open; a wiry man who was probably not more than thirty stared stiffly ahead, elbow crooked over the open window.

The car had one of those distinctively round headlamps or speakers mounted off the outside of the passenger-side door, positioned in front of the passenger-side mirror. It was the kind of headlamp you see on the vehicles of police, unmarked detectives, and security vehicles.

What caught my eye was the bulb of a microphone mounted on a metal arm just inside the door; the arm appeared to connect the microphone to the headlamp or whatever it was outside the door. There were no markings on the vehicle, but the emblem on the man’s sleeve made it clear it was a uniform of someone who worked in security.

Vehicles with that equipment are probably ubiquitous, but I’d never thought about them. Nor did I think some crummy, corrupt neighborhood watch would team up with speculators to try to force legal renters out of single-family homes. Traveling around San Francisco and the Bay Area highways, however, I’ve noticed unmarked vehicles with those distinctive headlamps, and when I saw one connected to a microphone inside the passenger compartment, I wanted to know more.

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In at least one On being mobbed entry, I dismissed the notion that I was being followed on my bicycle along Seattle’s Burke-Gilman rail trail by a detective whose shotgun-riding buddy was hanging out of the window with a parabolic microphone. After all, access to the Burke-Gilman from any roadside is limited and not contiguous. And though a tracking drone remains the most likely means by which I’ve been followed on the Burke-Gilman bike trail, and still a good possibility for some other environments, in San Francisco that day I’d seen the shotgun-riding buddy right next to me, microphone at his fingertips. The potential of a malicious agent to not only stalk in an unmarked vehicle, but to use such a microphone to harass his victim was immediately clear.

The light changed, the beat up white sedan drove on. I made the turn to double back to the Bay Bridge and went home to look online for a picture I could use to identify the equipment I’d seen.

This promotional image of a “Police Interceptor” shows the microphone on the driver’s side, right at the door frame and over the vent (Ford Police Interceptor, https://www.ford.com/fordpoliceinterceptor/home/).

This is a police cruiser from another East Bay locale. I wasn’t using a polarizing filter, but you should be able to make out the bulb shape of the microphone on the passenger side of the interior and see that it appears to connect to the circular lamp or speaker outside. According to Ed Grabianowski, “Officers can also route the radio microphone through speakers integrated into the siren, allowing them to use it as a public address system” (“How Police Cars Work,” https://auto.howstuffworks.com/police-car3.htm).

The microphone for the public address (PA) system, as I learned from a friendly Berkeley police officer I happened upon at a local gas station, does not necessarily go to the round headlamp or siren that I saw on the unmarked vehicle in San Francisco. The Berkeley officer told me they’d found that in a similar setup, the PA and siren canceled each other out. So the Berkeley Police switched to a microphone connected to a speaker in the grill.

In such a case, the speaker for the PA system would probably be installed under the flashing lights you see in this image (Ford Police Interceptor, https://www.ford.com/fordpoliceinterceptor/home/).

Not long after that, I was taking the local’s shortcut from the Frontage Road to the last on-ramp to 80 West before the Bay Bridge toll booths, when a large black SUV—probably a Ford Explorer—pulled up behind me. Seeing the telltale strip of lights atop the vehicle, I pulled to the right to allow the large vehicle to continue on the road, and waited for the signal change. A few moments later, an exasperated male voice blared from my radio, and perhaps even my Android, saying something about a “car in front of me.” The accent sounded Russian. The silence that followed was somehow awkward, as though the radio had mistakenly been left on, and then there was the quick blast of a siren. I took the turn against the red, and they moved forward onto the small grassy area that ran between the on-ramp and 80 West.

In a vehicle specially equipped with switches for multiple media sources, like a PA, a siren and a radio, I can see how switches might be forgotten and microphones left on. This image shows an audio control panel in the Police Interceptor.

What was more interesting to me was the effect of the sound from the PA system of the vehicle. According to Wikipedia, RDS radios, that is radios using the Radio Data System (RDS) communications protocol, can be coupled with a short-range FM transmitter (“Radio Data System,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System). The RDS protocol provides a standard for embedding digital information into FM radio broadcasts. The version of RDS used in the United States is called Radio Broadcast Data System (RBDS); the specification of the National Radio Systems Commitee can be found at http://www.nrscstandards.org/SG/nrsc-4-B.pdf. In North America, when the transmitter is set to RDS code 31, corresponding to an Emergency program type, the announcement interrupts the broadcasts of all cars—all radios—within range.

I’m not sure if this was the method of the PA system that was used to get me out of the way that day at the 80W on-ramp. And I’m also not sure if the broadcast announcement overlays the other broadcast or completely disrupts it. Either way, it might be that some type of modulation or diversion by video or radio using nothing more than an antenna is the technique used to overlay the radios and devices of the victim with an unwanted sub-track of mobbing harassment.

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I’ve been saving the topic of video diversion for an entry on television hacking, but it has come to mind as I’ve written several recent blogs, so let’s talk about it here. Video diversion appears to be little more than that, the displacement of a signal onto a receiver from which no request was made. In short, it’s a rogue signal. This is a digital update to how nasty neighbors and haters have used directional antennas to monkey-wrench their neighbors’ televisions and radios. In the weeks following my failure to get protective orders against the owners of the mobbing houses on either side of me when they ridiculed my claims in court that they appeared to be using radio to put verbal abuse on my television and radios, I found a web page boasting about the use of CB radio and a directional antenna to do just that. In the months that have followed, I came across recipes for other tricks to do the same.

WiFi, and providers like Comcast, extend the possibilities for malicious diversion of signals and streams. Diversion is easily performed with an antenna and sound source or transmitter from a vehicle positioned outside the victim home. Have a look at the Crime Watch Daily spot in which security experts Craig Young (@craigtweets) and Ken Westin (@kwestin) demonstrate how easy it is to obtain control of the systems of a smart home from a vehicle parked nearby (“Crime Watch Daily: Can These Cyber Security Experts Hack Into a ‘Smart House?’,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb23Gwhc9DU). They cap the demonstration by diverting video signal from the vehicle and onto the television of the hacked home; televisions left in standby mode make this an especially attractive technique.

Based on what I’ve seen here in northeast Seattle, diversion is probably a technique that can be deployed to unattended vehicles for remote operation as well as being hidden on adjacent occupied properties. Young explains that for purposes of the Crime Watch Daily demonstration, they are using an antenna that provides a survey of the wireless networks in the vicinity; the antenna looks like the 18dBi Yagi directional antenna pictured on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/USB-Yagi-directional-Antenna-802-11n-2200mW/dp/B003LLS5JI?tag=hackm01-20 and https://www.amazon.com/TECHTOO-Directional-Connector-Wireless-Extension/dp/B00OCJYPCY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1514831264&sr=8-1&keywords=wifi+antenna+18dbi+yagi. HackMethod includes the Turbotenna 802.11n directional Yagi antenna in a shortlist of “Recommended USB Antennas for WiFi Hacking” (https://hackmethod.com/best-usb-wifi-adapter-hacking/).

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Police use of RDS radio means that the capability for a radio to somehow interrupt broadcasts on any other radio, is in the hands, or in the vehicles, of the same North Precinct police who smirked and laughed when I tried to report the radio-based verbal abuse. The mobbing harassment had been introduced into my home about two years before that. It appeared to be an escalation of harassment that had started with an out-of-state developer and the neighborhood watch, and increased after two white male professionals acquired the properties flanking my own. Given their use of RDS radio, the phenomenon of an intruder signal should be a no-brainer for the police or for any private investigator who has studied up on the tricks of the trade or has an understanding of their own tools.

Beginning around the time of the Bay Area detective sightings, I began to notice a similarly equipped detective’s vehicle pulling into the driveway of the house next door late at night. I suppose it’s possible that there are subcontractor detectives or harassers in California who know how to “mob” and that they were hired as I learned to survive the mobbing by working out of state. But I’m not unduly concerned that an irritable Russian guy is following me in a black SUV. What does seem more odd to me, as someone who has lived in a situation of being stalked for purposes of harassment for several years now, is the unusual coincidence of having a detective’s vehicle parked next door to the house I stay at in California, on the side of the house where I sleep, and visible from the window that is the source of acoustic leakage harassment.

Acoustic leakage is not the only kind of harassment I experience at that location. Like here, there’s a strong correlation between the mobbing harassment and the use of WiFi, wired media services, and radio. But just as in Seattle, based on experimentation to see what blunts the harassment, there’s a good possibility of directional speakers or video and radio diversion being in play. There’s also a good possibility that when audio harassment is cleverly deployed, it’s difficult to be sure of its origin, especially when you throw an unfamiliar phenomenology into the mix, like attacks from above using real estate or private investigator drones equipped with directional sound.

So the question is, did the nasty neighborhood watch of northeast Seattle partner with some unlicensed detectives who drive around with police radios and use a technique of harassing people out of their homes called “mobbing”? Could be. Is this one of the techniques used to intimidate residents into leaving their legal homes? Maybe. Are there scumbucket real estate speculators who travel around with hidden police radios, microphones and speakers they can use to harass their victims from a distance? It doesn’t sound that far-fetched to me after what I’ve been through living in this northeast Seattle neighborhood.

After all, before the mobbing started, that is, before the sound began to be obviously deliberately transmitted into or projected onto the surfaces of my quaint 1940s rental home here in northeast Seattle, there was the day when the daughter of a builder pulled up to me as I watered my yard, demanding to know who told me I could park my cars as I did. All the while, a police scanning radio beeped away in her luxury wagon. That was the day I put security cameras I had been intimidated into taking down back up, and as I walked away from her car, having told her that I would get a recorder and return so that we might be better able to converse, I could hear her saying to some guy on the radio who’d been listening all the while, “What do I do now?”

Almost as though there was a playbook.

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Stay tuned for part 4 of Cell phones are radios, in which we’ll talk about the convergence of technologies like phones and radios, dirty detectives, and post-military haters.