Back in December of 2016, I wrote a quick post about the case of a Florida woman named Peggy Westby who was harassed in her home by remote control. Westby was forced to endure three months of what The Orlando Sentinel described as “ear-pounding, house-rumbling music,” with whatever relief she could get from wearing noise-canceling headphones (“Deputies: Woman blasted neighbor with loud music,” https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-marianna-seachrist-stalking-arrest-20150709-story.html).

Sheriff’s deputies were able to witness the harassment on several occasions, describing the sound as low-bass noise that could be heard in every corner of Westby’s condo. After a search warrant was obtained, deputies broke down Marianna Seachrist’s front door and found a daisy-chain of low-frequency speakers face-down on the floor, “weighted down by dumbbells and cinder blocks.” The player was a Blackberry tablet wired to the amplifier; a second device that was also wired to the amplifier allowed the system to be operated remotely, by smartphone. A sound loop of some workout music created the monotonous noise.

Seachrist had created a remotely controlled harassing machine that would allow her to torment her neighbor in her absence. Perhaps the reason for the remote control was to escape the thundering vibrations more so than to create an alibi for herself. In a different scheme employing directional (parametric) speakers and perhaps a different range of sound, the use of beam-focused sound would not only help to control sound spillage that would create witnesses. The use of directional sound would help to ensure that the harassers who monitor the victim and the perimeter for police and potential witnesses can live as normally as possible without suffering the harassment they inflict on the victim.

Based on the sound harassment, a temporary injunction was filed against Seachrist for stalking. Monitoring is considered a subset of stalking, and had Seachrist obsessively monitored as well as harassed her neighbor in her home, she might have known when potential witnesses entered the dwelling. Then she could not only have claimed to not be there, but by shutting off the sound when potential witnesses approached, she could have made Westby look like she was crazy when the deputies who responded to her calls heard nothing. And she could have made up some colorful stories about Westby being paranoid or suggested she was mentally ill. Seachrist could even have told police that Westby was in fact harassing her by making false complaints about her.

Every day, “A case of neighbor harassment using infrasonic sound” gets hits on the On being mobbed blog. For some reason, people come to On being mobbed to read about this case of neighbor harassment using infrasound applied by remote control. I can only imagine that there are others who are being neighbor-mobbed using forms of sound that are difficult to defeat, like infrasound or ultrasonic sound, and they’re trying to figure out how it works, and what to do about it.

Neighbor mobbing, one manifestation of real estate mobbing, offers unique possibilities to hide or disguise harassment. For example, a few years ago, whenever my roommate and I left our front porch, or as we crossed the wooden deck that led to the front porch, we were illuminated by the blinding spotlight of a motion-detecting light that was affixed to the exterior of the mobbing house that stood some twelve feet to the north and on the other side of an eight-foot hedge. The stunt got my roommate’s attention, though she had no idea of the worst of what I’d already been through as I was “triangulated” by the north and south mobbing house owners and the nasty neighborhood watch lady across the street.

It was clear to me from reading city codes on lighting, that this was something for which I not only had a witness, but about which I could make a complaint. I photographed the position of the light, as well as its intensity and reach to my front door. I submitted the complaint to the appropriate department using the City of Seattle website. It took weeks, but a City of Seattle inspector came out, wrote up a report, and, in his words, “worked with” the owner of the north mobbing house. Eventually the owner of the north mobbing house removed the light from the side of his house, the electrical box left open to the elements. [Note 11/07/22: The electrical box remained for some time and I wondered if any of the motion-detecting capability remained with it. Eventually another light was replaced on the mount and I complained to the City of Seattle about that too. I began blocking the path of light that nightly illuminated the front deck and doorstep with audible abuse and features of electrical interference, first with a tarp strung along the hedge that the north mobbing house owner had chopped into and thinned, and then adding a 4′ x 8′ sheet of plywood to an area not sufficiently covered by the tarp. Yesterday the lowlife in Albany said something to me that bears repeating since it shows the mindset of the criminals who expect to get away with sabotaging the utilities and environments of their neighbors. How could he be stalking me or my elderly relative went the lie: “I live here.” This is the mobbers’ con game–“I live next-door; therefore I cannot be stalking you”–certainly a legal misnomer. Monitoring is a legal subset of stalking, and there are other good labels for how mobbers stalk as well as how they automate this stalking with IoT. Neighbor mobbing allows criminals to isolate and access the infrastructure and inhabitants of a single dwelling while feigning innocence and defaming honest reporters as delusional, child sex abusers, or both. How QAnon of them. But unfamiliar crimes don’t remain unfamiliar, especially not those that involve city-appointed block captains and coordinators. Mobbing can be exposed, prosecuted, and discouraged. Local municipalities may also be able to enhance security and protect the local grid by adding codes on signal boosting and the use of WiFi and other radio signal boosting extenders and repeaters.]

It’s hard to imagine people who would go so far out of their way to force their neighbors to move. Yet this seems to be what neighbor-mobbing, and real estate mobbing, is all about. The use of a motion-detecting light was yet another way to leverage common and supposedly benign household technology in mobbing. Intentionally directing light at a neighbor’s front porch is a means of harassing in plain sight. Using the proximity of a neighboring house to host the harassing light minimizes the risk that the act is viewed as anything but accidental, at least not by the city. The motion-detecting light becomes a short-range method of attack that is not simply remote but fully automated. The motion-sensing component of a motion-controlled fixture may not even need the bulb to be triggered and hence to trigger a notification system or some malicious process. The network-connected world of IoT and the “smart home” represents an enlargement of the household “attack surface.”

At the time of this “blindsiding” and since, I viewed this as a means of harassment intended to make us uncomfortable or to provoke. But it could also provide a means to passively monitor a victim of mobbing, in which the illumination of the floodlight alerts the mobbers that the “mouse” is in the house. Such motion-detection devices could easily be wired to devices that send explicit notifications to computer or phone, and if the exterior light is a “smart” light, it may already be on the network (“Want smarter outdoor lighting at home? Here are your options,” C|NET, https://www.cnet.com/news/smart-outdoor-lighting-options/). Even better, no monitoring is required to prevent witnesses to the light spillage since it would not be assumed to be malicious.

τ

Digital crimes are expressed by blurred boundaries and the lack of a clear point of origin. (“Police Practice Must Change to Protect Us From Mobbing and IoT Crimes,” On being mobbed, https://onbeingmobbed.com/2017/01/17/police-practice-must-change-to-protect-us-from-mobbing-and-iot-crimes/). In recent cases of “smart” home spousal abuse that led to reporting victims being held for mental health evaluations when they were not believed, household devices and objects assumed a malevolence that their makers did not intend (“The New York Times on the Digital Tools of Abuse,” https://onbeingmobbed.com/2018/06/25/the-new-york-times-on-the-digital-tools-of-abuse/. These are cases where ordinary household technologies and appliances are exploited for purposes of stalking and harassment. These can include doorbells, remote control, smart lights, security cameras, and the like. In the same way that the camera on your phone can be used by a hacker to spy, the “smart” devices in and around your home, and extending to your neighbors’ properties as well as the street, can be used to silently monitor your presence and activities.

Hackers who lurk and camfect monitor. It’s all part of the same package. Criminals who use neighbor mobbing take advantage of proximity to monitor the comings and goings of a “target” from next door. If you’re being neighbor-mobbed, your WiFi security cameras can be hacked so that your neighbors know without opening a curtain, who is coming and going from your home. If your neighbors are monitoring your WiFi access point, they’ll know whose devices are online and active. If your neighbors use “smart” floodlights that fall on your property, they can be alerted to your arrival without you even realizing you’re being watched. And neighbors who are acting maliciously can be alerted to the status of a “smart” floodlight by an app on their phone.

The crux of the matter, is that technology-enabled crimes are commonly remote-controlled. The increasing incidence of drone crime provides an example of crimes that are abstracted from the perpetrator by means of remote control. Drones weaponized with infrared and other surveillance technologies are also well equipped to monitor without being detected. In the case of predatory crimes that use remote control in combination with monitoring the victim, how can the police find probable cause? And how can the police make an arrest? Especially when the police don’t believe the victim, or when the police think it’s all in her head.

Seachrist created a harassing machine that allowed her to harass her neighbor from a distance. This is the “I wasn’t there” method of remote harassment. She could have controlled her harassing machine by drone. She could also have used harassment by substitution—for example, using a “roommate” or an unethical private investigator to insulate her from detection. Had she made use of any vulnerable security cameras in the hallways of the condominium that housed her and her victim, she might have seen the police coming to the apartment and been able to turn off the device before they witnessed the noise. Or perhaps all she would have needed to do was to replace a common flood light with a “smart” bulb on the grounds outside her victim’s home to know when the victim was home alone and available for harassment. Then catching her and prosecuting her would have been—well, a lot more like catching and prosecuting the real estate mobbers of northeast Seattle.