[Note 05/10/21: This post pre-dates my experiments with removing unused infrastructure including conductive copper wires and service boxes installed by Comcast and AT&T from the side of the house. Those experiments showed how mobbers leverage the victim’s household infrastructure for antenna effect as well as for transport. Those experiments also led to others that I believe confirm the mobbers’ use of illicit power line connections to inject rogue data and interference into the environment of the victim. It may be that this creates the effect of infrasound that some call “electronic infrasound,” especially with the use of coaxial as a whole-house antenna. Severing the coaxial cable connection to the pole and removing coaxial from the side of the house and its interior diminished the infrasound although the use of the power line connection appears to provide another avenue for a similar effect. Coaxial is known for good support of lower frequency sound and introducing a radiating antenna into the bowels of a building structure may create the effect of infrasound. This of course, would have to be substantiated by someone with specific expertise. To read later posts that talk about the use of household infrastructure and power line connections to harass, you might start with Mobbing by WiFi range extender, Countermeasure: Shut off the outlet to shut down the inlet and focus on the posts written in 2021.]

Fear not only creates its environment, with its ghettos, gated communities, communitarianism, it has also created its culture, a culture of repulsion. It relates to racism and the rejection of the other: there is always a reason to push out, to expulse the other.

—Paul Virilio (The Administration of Fear, Semiotext[e], 2012)

Dwelling beneath the threshold of human hearing, infrasound infiltrates and spreads, coursing through sodden earth, shocking firmaments, and mounting air currents into the perceptible range. Defined as those frequencies lower than 20Hz, infrasound is literally “below” (Latin infrā; cf under) sound, and commonly referred to as low-frequency sound. Absent significant pressure, infrasound is the noise we believe we cannot hear, likened to the malevolence we cannot see. Unheard and unseen, infrasound is unquelled as our fear. Subterranean and insidious, infrasound is easily characterized with the adjectives we reserve for the phenomena that frighten us most, metastatic as cancer over the physical body, invasive as the “scourge” of communism in the Cold War years.

Real estate mobbing is a crime intended to forcibly evict legal residents and turn their homes over for speculation. Mobbing is constructed as a “white glove” crime, a scam that is intended to make its victims appear to be delusional by its nature as a crime whose origin is neither seen nor heard. It is this sleight of hand that fools those with money and reputations into believing they can commit felony crimes like cyberstalking with impunity. It is this sleight of hand that makes mobbing attractive to corrupt neighborhood watch groups, criminal speculators, and hate groups in their “ministry of fear.”

The crime of mobbing is carried out on the other side of walls—whether the walls that separate adjacent condos or the walls that bound your home. Others see no evil. The harassing sound, the verbal abuse, katzenjammer and dins, are focused into narrow beams, riding pressure waves as they infiltrate your home. Others hear no evil. Yet in mobbing, silence is a lie. The mobbers’ abuse remains shrouded in uncanny sound, but the evil they speak resounds in the lies they spread in the neighborhood, the civil nuisance complaints they make to the city, and the false accusations they report to police.

Ω

Sound is all the more potent because it is inescapable: it saturates a space and can pass through walls.

—Pascal Quignard, The Hatred of Music (2016 trans.)

As a photographer and film-maker, I often refer to the critical theories of Donald M. Lowe on the valorization of the sense of sight over that of hearing. In his History of Bourgeois Perception (University of Chicago Press, 1982), Lowe recontextualizes sound as the necessary complement to the sense of sight, one of five senses that together form our experience of reality. “[S]ound comes to one, surrounds one for the time being with an acoustic space, full of timbre and nuances. It is more proximate and suggestive than sight. Sight is always the perception of a surface, from a particular angle. But sound is that perception able to penetrate beneath the surface.” (p. 6) Sound is located beneath that surface, sequestered from the visible and dwelling with the unseen.

The photograph, bounded by the frame, decontextualizes and abstracts, but still it unfailingly represents. The word autopsy, meaning the act of seeing with one’s own eyes, exhorts us to regard the other to better know ourselves. In 1971, the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage made a filmic study of death of the same name in the Chicago morgue. Brakhage’s film-making is subversively silent; the rhythms in his films resounding in the imagery that passes over the sprockets and through the gate of the projector. Within the context of The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, silence works on multiple levels, among them as signifier of the dead. In narrative film-making, death is signed by the freeze frame; in sound, by its absence. Film theorist Michel Chion suggests that rhythm is a phenomenon belonging to no one sense, that rhythm might be channeled by the ear or by the eye, to the brain where it is understood (Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, 1994). The senses are not isolate. We experience with our whole bodies. Alex Ross, in “When Music Is Violence,” argues that the line between music and violence is arbitrary, that “sound itself can be a form of violence.”

This is apparent in numerous of the cases of “digital/physical” attacks cited by cybersecurity researcher Matt Wixey in his 2019 DefCon presentation, “Sound Effects: Exploring acoustic cyberweapons.” Wixey recounts the targeted attack on members of a forum on epilepsy in which flashing animated GIFs were posted with the intended effect of triggering seizures. Similar attacks, Wixey noted, were carried out using hacked photosensitive light bulbs. It’s difficult not to think of Paul Sharits’ visually aggressive flicker film, “T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G”, whose projection is often preceded by a warning of physical effects (T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G” in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G). The soundtrack to this visceral piece of structuralist film-making, consisting of the jackhammer repetition of the word “destroy,” is as jarring as the image. “Beauty,” said the surrealist André Breton, “shall be convulsive.”

Ω

Death alone is silent.

—Jacques Attali (Noise: The Political Economy of Music)

Whereas the visual field is exterior, the field of sound cannot be separated from the interior. “Hearing is not like seeing,” says Pascal Quignard, in The Hatred of Music, his discourse on the tyranny of music.

What is seen can be abolished by the eyelids, can be stopped by partitions or curtains, can be rendered immediately inaccessible by walls. What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions, neither curtains, nor walls. . . . Sound rushes in. It violates.

(The Hatred of Music, 2016 trans.) Even the acoustic anechoic chamber in which the reflected sounds of the world are absorbed into silence remains an example of “inescapable” sound. The cacophony of the exterior world may be quieted in the chamber, but the sounds within you cannot be. The longer you remain in the chamber, the louder the sounds of your breath, the ringing in your ears, the pounding of your heart, and the grinding of your bones (“Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes,” in Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/earths-quietest-place-will-drive-you-crazy-in-45-minutes-180948160/).

Even as I live in an environment where I am made the victim of sound that is intended to hurt me emotionally, and perhaps even to cause me what cybersecurity researcher Matt Wixey terms “acoustic harm” or to make me fear that harm, I can accept Qugnard’s elevation of the horrors of sound over those of sight no more than I can accept the sense of sight as more than a subjectivity that is culturally bound, a moment in an ever-shifting historical time. Search for “Hearing is not like seeing.” The results will likely begin with pages titled “Seeing is not like hearing,” pages recounting visits to Auschwitz and other death camps by those who refuse to forget what we should “Never forget.” Hearing is not like seeing. In the moment, sound is deafening. But shutting my eyes cannot stop me from remembering a graveyard pit of human debris in Mexico, the fall of a man onto the rails at the Montparnasse Metro station, or the springtime carnage of wild rabbits on the road. Our minds have “eyes”; sound fades. The faces of those we love are held in memory longer than their voices. Sound lacks an afterimage (“Our memory for sounds is significantly worse than our memory for visual or tactile things,” in Science Daily, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140226174439.htm).

Ω

No matter how sight fascinates, sound precedes sight. Vision is the last of the human senses to develop. And in the case of twins in the womb, the visual recognition of the other is followed by tactile recognition—touch; twins in the womb recognize one another and may hold hands (“Can my baby see before she’s born?” in Parents magazine at https://www.parents.com/pregnancy/stages/can-my-baby-see-before-shes-born/).

Sound precedes image.  In the era of silent film, sound existed as radio. The live reproduction of sound effects in the radio studio, like the knock on a door or the approach of footsteps, evolved as a narrative device. The studio technique was adapted to the use of film by Jack Foley during the years of silent film, eventually becoming known as Foley art. The “pictures” that the sound effects technique evoked in the radio listener were in the mind’s eye. When they were incorporated into studio film processes, including post-production, the technique of Foley art contributed to the first sync sound tracks, among them, the 1928 animated short Steamboat Willie (“Steamboat Willie,” in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie). Within the context of narrative film, sound is the mimesis of the real.

Cinema turned to realism early in its evolution. But sound remains a construction used to heighten tension and increase the drama of the narrative arc. Sound comes before picture to foreshadow the ominous or signal the entrance of an associated character. Synchronized sound is intrinsic to realism, whether the footage is animated or documentary, whether we are watching a video game or footage from a drone.

Ω

“There is a longstanding intimacy between air power and the visual field,” writes Nasser Hussain in his brief phenomenology of a drone strike, “The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike” (Boston Review: A political and literary forum, October 16, 2013). In War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Verso, 2009), Paul Virilio maps the optics of twentieth century warfare to cinematic vision. The god’s eye view of flight exceeded the battle field to be idealized as the ultimate way of seeing. The theater of war that Virilio describes opens before the portability of sound, before the cameras of cinéma-vérité, and well before the impacts of digitization and miniaturization on culture and technology, including the means of recording. Hussain extends Virilio’s perspectival studies of warfare to the “visual regime of the drone.”

Hussain argues that the comparison between video game and drone footage extends no further than the detachment shared by the media. The drone footage does not capture sound, a failure that irrevocably alters the visual artifact. The scene is rendered “a ghostly world in which the figures seem unalive, even before they are killed.” Michael Chion comments, “[I]f you alter or remove these sounds, the image is no longer the same” (The Voice in Cinema, 1999).  There is no sound and no reaction shot. The sequence of images anticipates the explosion that is its silent climax. From drone perspective, the narrative shows nothing more than the destructive force of a bomb, the perfunctory exercise of power by remote control. The meaning of the image is occluded by the failure to site a flesh-and-blood pilot over enemy terrain; drone perspective represents only the oculus of the machine.

Hussain contrasts the sterility of footage captured from a drone in flight with the terror below. For those who fail to command the skies in drone war, life on the ground is lived beneath the oppressive buzz of ever-hovering drones. This is the aural regime lived by those under drone skies. The positions of the drones may be unseen but their presence cannot be forgotten. For those on the ground, the lack of knowing is traumatic. The sound of the drones is terror.

“Sound has been used throughout history as a way of exerting power and control.” Lawrence English’s comment is relevant to real estate mobbing in which the victim is made captive to acoustic harm. In “The Sound of Fear,” Lawrence English discusses the history of noise as a weapon in FACT Magazine (“The Sound of Fear: Room40 boss Lawrence English on the history of noise as a weapon,” in FACT Magazine, 09.10.16, https://www.factmag.com/2016/10/09/sound-fear-room40-boss-lawrence-english-history-noise-weapon/).

Those who use these “no-touch” tortures to harm, whether they are of the state or haters, mobbers, or speculators in real estate, make use of the inlets and outlets, the channels of structures—human or otherwise. In building structures, the ducting, the venting, these wires and cables are the systems that connect your home to the environment. The inlets and outlets are the ports through which flows of all kinds pass, from currents of water and air, to electrical impulses, to data packets on the wire. These inlets and outlets—these apertures—hold the inside from the out, like the bodily orifices, the sensory channels and afferent fibers that gate the physical interior from the exterior, the viscerality of cilia, mucous and membranes that the torturers harness to their idiom. Elaine Scarry describes how torture turns the body against itself:

The political prisoner is, of course, reminded of this at every moment. Each source of strength and delight, each means of moving out into the world or moving the world in to oneself, becomes a means of turning the body back in on itself, forcing the body to feed on the body: the eyes are only access points for scorching light, the ears for brutal noises…

(The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 48)

Wikipedia defines torture (in Latin tortus: to twist, to torment), as the deliberate infliction of suffering—physical or psychological—to punish or achieve an end (“Torture,” in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture). Those who torture, whether they are of the state or the haters and mobbers who remain unseen while impersonating the police and other figures of authority and influence, seek your subjugation. And though they are illicit and their assault covert, though they hide in digitization and data, they seek your subjugation in the most effective manner available to them—through your body.

Ω

In “The Sound of Fear,” Lawrence English describes the intensity of his two year-old son’s reaction to the overwhelming sound of an unseen pair of FA-18 Super Hornets: “I saw him hurtling up our driveway, tears streaming down his cheeks.”

The term acousmatic describes sound that appears to be sourceless, sound “that is heard without an originating cause being seen” (Acousmatic sound, in Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acousmatic_sound). As used by French film sound theorist Michel Chion, “acousmatic” is a phenomenological elaboration on the interaction between sound and image. I have written in On being mobbed about “unmotivated sound” that has no visual explanation.

English explains how we attempt to make sense of acousmatic sounds with mythology. For example, in Japanese mythology the word Yanari is the spirit sounds of a house groaning and creaking in the night (“The Sound of Fear: Room 40 boss Lawrence English on the history of noise as a weapon,” in Factmag.com at https://www.factmag.com/2016/10/09/sound-fear-room40-boss-lawrence-english-history-noise-weapon/).

Mobbing sound is acousmatic for the victim who is certain of what he heard but cannot be certain of its origins. This inability to identify the source of the sound is a common phenomenon for the victims of cyber-harassment. Mobbing sound is not acousmatic for the mobber who creates the sound and knows well its origins. For all others who have not heard the sound, the sound is neither acousmatic nor is it certain. For these others, who lack the ontological imperative to explain a sound they do not perceive, the sound is imaginary, its site localized to the tormented psyche of the mobbing victim. Difficult to navigate as seppuku, reality requires a second. That second must be accorded by another who is not the subject seeking its own extinguishing; the second must be accorded by the other. No matter the gender, the subject who hears what the other cannot see is suspected to be delusional, to suffer from a schizophrenic mind that is severed from the body. If she is a woman, she may be regarded as the victim of her own frail and faulty mind, the site of Freudian hysteria.

On a side note, when nasty neighborhood watch ladies take up mobbing as a clandestine method of evicting other women from their legal homes, they play to the gender bias of those to whom the victim may try to report crimes that result in physical and emotional harm—crimes against the human and civil rights of women. Nasty neighborhood watch ladies count on bias to ensure that their crimes remain hidden. When they use bias against their victim they perpetuate bias against women as a class. The enlistment of bias, in and of itself, should cause mobbing to be regarded as a crime of bias. And from the perspective of feminism, when women mob other women, mobbing is a gender crime—a crime against one’s own gender. What kind of woman would want this for another woman? What kind of person would want this for another human being? Mobbing is a hate crime. It is a pity that, at least in northeast Seattle, the crime of mobbing is committed by those who would align themselves with Seattle government and law enforcement. The City of Seattle must shake itself free.

Recording may be a means of lifting the veil of mystery from mobbing sound, of breaking the death grip of the apprehender on the apprehended. But science does not necessarily represent “truth.”  In the same way that digital audio can be argued to lack the verity of the analog, the tools that are used to capture that sound cannot wholly contain it. Instead there are discards, renderings, compressions and, in the end, sound is transformed, changed. (Note 02/15/20: See the New York Times article, “Activate This ‘Bracelet of Silence’ and Alexa Can’t Eavesdrop,” for a look at the effect of ultrasonic sound on recording.) And mobbing sound may not use the same interfaces that your recording devices attempt to capture. The reality of mobbing sound may not be audio. Instead, if mobbing sound is delivered over networks, wireless or otherwise, perhaps the reality of mobbing sound is data—data on the wire.

Ω

Sound is implicated in torture, it is weaponized for war. Yet the weaponized use of infrasound—the silent sound—is not so clear. In Dangerous sounds in Seattle and abroad, I wrote about the confusion surrounding the suspected sonic attacks at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. These attacks remain the subject of controversy. In her article examining the possible use of weaponized sound in Cuba, Rachel Becker observes, “Silence would be unusual for a weapon that uses sound energy to disorient, incapacitate, or deter people.” Despite Associated Press speculation that the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Cuba could have involved a covert sound weapon that “operated outside the range of audible sound,” Becker explains that weapons that use sound “are loud, obvious, and have immediate effects” (“Weaponizing sound: could sonic devices have injured diplomats in Cuba?” The Verge, https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/16/16316048/sonic-weapon-cuba-us-canadian-diplomats-ultrasound-infrasound-science).

Perhaps infrasound speaks too softly. Weapons that are infrasonic, like the long range acoustic devices (LRADs) that are used for crowd control, are said to induce physical sickness, to be capable of making you nauseous, or hitting you like a “punch in the guts” (“Sonic attacks in China and Cuba: how sound can be a weapon,” http://theconversation.com/sonic-attacks-in-china-and-cuba-how-sound-can-be-a-weapon-97380).

U.K. cyber-researcher Matt Wixey takes a different view based on his experiments with acoustic harm. Addressing a growing attack surface, the Wixey and fellow researchers considered scenarios in which an attacker seeks to affect the performance of an organization or those who work for it, as well as targeted campaigns of harassment and low-grade cyber-weapons. Any of these scenarios, which are easily applicable to mobbing, could involve the deployment of sound outside the human audible range. So too, could the additional studies cited in Wixey’s August 2019 presentation at DefCon on the use of covert communications channels for high-frequency noise and ultrasonic tracking beacons.

Ω

When the young, unseasoned investigator my attorney hired finally managed to obtain an interview with the owner of the south mobbing house, he was regaled with a slew of colorful defamations about me. Some of these, like the story about the tinfoil I purportedly put on my windows or the one about the time I reportedly accused the south mobbing house owner of sending me evil spirits in my microwave, I recounted in blog entries including “Why don’t you let us give you a nice tin hat?” and other mobbing scams (part 2). One that hardly seemed worth bothering with was the bizarre statement that I had told potential buyers the neighborhood was haunted. None of the bewildering statements were true. All of them seemed to be baldfaced attempts to discredit me and perhaps to deflect useful investigation. [Note 04/12/20: How many ways there are to ensure that the voice of a woman is not heard.] But the attribution of a perceived haunting did fit the mobbing narrative in which the victim is constructed as paranoid. It wasn’t until my research into infrasound yielded some useful information, however, that I learned that a haunting is the experience that someone exposed to infrasound is expected to have. But “haunting” is not a word that springs to mind when I articulate my experiences and perceptions of the world. And when it came to my neighbors in this rarefied Seattle enclave, I knew better. The “evil” afoot in my neighborhood was decidedly human.

One of the oft-cited scientific writings on the eerie effects of infrasound, is based on the mysterious events that unfolded in a laboratory. The laboratory was said to be haunted; there were sightings of apparitions as well as the creepy perception of being watched, hair standing on end, and other ghoulish physiology. This was a case of “indirect infrasound”—infrasound transmitted through the air. The source of the haunting was found to be an extractor fan that was generating vibrations at 18.98 Hz (Vic Tandy and Tony R. Lawrence, “The Ghost in the Machine,” in Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol.62, No. 851, April 1998, http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/ghost-in-machine.pdf). As it turned out, the laboratory was haunted by a low-frequency standing wave. What’s a standing wave? For those of you who, like me, have limited knowledge of the physics of sound:

The energy in the wave peaked in the centre of the room indicating that there was half a complete cycle. It is important to understand that what we call sound is caused by variation in the pressure of the air around us. It is represented graphically as a wave. If someone were to shout at you the sound wave will travel from them to you transmitted by the air between you both, i.e. it is a travelling wave. However, the wave sharing our lab was of just the right frequency to be completely reflected back by the walls at each end, so it was not going anywhere, hence it was a standing wave.

The standing wave was located and measured at 19 Hz in a crude experiment that Tandy conducted. He then located the source of the disturbance when he learned that a new fan had been installed in the extraction system. The findings were confirmed by simply turning off the fan. Even without knowledge of the physics of sound, turning off fanned devices one by one, for example, could help to locate the source of unintentional infrasound release. Similarly, when you’re being neighbor-mobbed with infrasound, shutting down air cleaners or blocking air currents that originate from a vent fan on a mobbing house may help to mitigate the volume of targeted audible harassment.

Infrasound can be objectively associated with our experience of the paranormal. Phenomena that are considered to be paranormal do not conform to convention and may not be scientifically explainable. For purposes of this writing, a good example would of course be apparitions or the supernatural. In some circumstances, apparently including the hostile acquisition of property, the capability to induce a paranormal experience is a highly beneficial trait.

In an All Hallows Eve article, EngineerJobs.com explains several methods that can be used to create a haunted house, all of them using infrasound. “Haunt Your House with Infrasound” describes three ways to create an infrasound generator (Engineer.com, October 31, 2013, https://magazine.engineerjobs.com/2013/haunt-house-infrasound.htm). So far as I can see, any of these could be deployed from the house next door.

• To create a limited range haunting, a sine wave generator with a self-amplified subwoofer will suffice.
• The mid-range option is a bit more complex, but could have its appeal for mobbers making the most of household venting and piping. This generator employed a “six-meter length of corrugated drain conduit” performing as an “open cylinder resonator” and sounding at a low-range frequency of 17.4 Hz. The flow was produced through the use of a sine wave generator, the sound modulated with a long-stroke subwoofer and a power amp that could reliably emit sound at 10 Hz.
• For a longer range haunting of, say, five kilometers, read the academic article “A portable infrasound generator” by Joseph Park and James Robertson on the use of a rotary subwoofer to generate infrasound (http://jpark.us/pubs/JASA_125(4)_PortableInfrasound_2009.pdf). The centerpiece of the application was a Thigpen rotary woofer (TRW) (Eminent Technologies, 2008),  modified to be “a baffled fan with blades that have dynamically controlled pitch.” The photograph of the TRW shown in Figure 1 depicts a motored fan in metal housing that is as familiar as the externally located air-conditioning unit next door.

You can find a table comparing passive isolators, complete with the natural frequencies of the isolators, on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_isolation. For discussion of the effects of vibration on the air handler of a heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system, see the “Vibration isolators” section of the Wikipedia page on air handlers at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_handler#Vibration_isolators.

So do I think my neighbors have built a haunted house around me? Maybe. Mobbing as the mobbers of northeast Seattle have executed it, relies on the constant and relatively reliable distribution of clandestine communication that is focused on harassment. To avoid exposure, the communication must be quiet or must blend in with ambient or electronic sound as the mobbing victim traverses environments. But a haunted house, like mobbing harassment, usually depends on the distribution of sound that remains audible to humans. Infrasound falls generally outside of the human-audible range, although there is variance in its audibility based on individual factors or the distribution of pressure across the sound wave. (Note 03/03/20: I omitted a link to the piece I wrote on bone conduction, which in this scenario is probably associated with the presence of infrasound. See Mobbing close to the bone: Bone conduction. Though I was reluctant to assume the presence of infrasound, On being mobbed includes numerous posts that refer to bone conduction or acoustic leakage.)

The reliable production of infrasound may call for a signal generator, a machine that generates the right kind of signal, at the right frequency. For purposes of infrasound, that would be low-frequency sound, that is, sound that is less than 20 Hz, which is the normal lower limit of human hearing. I found a couple of infrasound generators online, although I don’t know if they would satisfy the requirements of the scenario. This, in and of itself, might be enough to put people out of their homes. As I found when I read the complaints on an Australian noise forum (Sound crimes: Are Australian speculators using low-frequency noise to turn over houses), there were numerous cases of those describing what appeared to be infrasound without any vocalization in their environments. Given the loud crashes, bangs, the ringing of clock alarms that cannot be terminated, knocks on the door and footsteps that the mobbers’ “surround-sound” system of harassment has introduced into my environment over the years, however—such noise has frequently been used to wake me—it is possible that a more subtle approach might involve the playback of rumbling sound loops or other sound that might evict without being readily identified as overt harassment. This use of sound is in keeping with other games that mobbers play. It’s the “mobbers’ Foley,” except in harassment, the heightening of tension is meant to trigger the acute stress reaction commonly referred to as  the “fight-or-flight” response.

In cases like mine, however, cases that involve corrupt neighborhood watch groups, when the goal of mobbing is to discredit the victim by making them appear to be paranoid or delusional, or perhaps in cases where the injection of infrasound alone might not get the eviction done or might not sate the psychopathology of the neighborhood watch, it could be desirable to transmit sound for purposes of communicating hoaxes, threats, or verbal abuse at the same time, over the top of the infrasound. The victim must know she is being harassed. “Over the top of the infrasound,” if I understand correctly, means that an audible sound source is broadcast at the same time as the infrasound. The infrasound then acts as a “carrier wave,” allowing the audible sound, which in mobbing is likely to be threats, hoaxes or verbal abuse, to travel further or in a manner different than the audible sound source typically could.

On the same Australian forum, one of the posters mentioned a group of people like a “family” with experience in the setup and use of “commercial sound equipment.” Sound systems that are professionally installed, like the Sonos system, would likely provide sound that was in the traditional range for a haunted house scenario as well as ultrasonic, or beam-formed, sound that is highly directional and would therefore be less likely either to create witnesses or to make it impossible for the mobbers to occupy the home from which they work to evict the victim from the property they seek to turn over. Delivery of sound by ultrasonics also helps to hide the criminal utterances of the mobbers and to make reporting victims appear to be delusional or to have had a psychotic break. The covert nature of the sonic attack by infrasound and ultrasound also paves the way for the mobbers to play the “What? Who? Me?” game and convince the police and the courts, if need be, that they are being harassed by their purported victims. Deploy a network of motion-detecting and other IoT sensing devices around the victim house to trigger the transmission of infrasound or ultrasound and you’ve got an autonomous “surround-sound” system of harassment.

To make experiential sense to the victim, and to ensure the harassment cannot be escaped, the haunted house is probably deployed on all sides of the victim house, or on as many sides as possible. I don’t know whether the deployment of haunted house technology would result in the acoustic leakage I experience—this is the leakage of sound into my environment through seams between walls and windows, for example, although if sound was deployed in this manner and intended to affect the interior of the victim space, it might be that a constant level of infrasound must be maintained in the victim environment. Perhaps a sound researcher would be able to theorize on this point. Perhaps the need for a constant supply of “pressure waves” (sound waves) would account for the buildup of fans and motors that generate current at the property lines north and south of this property. You’d probably want to make sure that the level of infrasound-based harassment in the vicinity of the victim’s bedroom was adequate to reach her in sleep. The requirement to flood an exterior area with infrasound could also explain the constant accumulation of boxes, scrap wood and other debris in addition to refuse containers along the sides of the mobbing houses that flank the target house—they’ll want to make sure that the harassing sound they blow over to you doesn’t crawl up the sides of their own homes. Proximity and weather conditions would also be critical in the deployment of what is essentially an exterior haunted house.

A condo mobbing where the victim is separated from the mobbers by a single shared wall might be an easier scenario to manage and require only the use of subwoofers or perhaps feonic speakers. But the deployment of a haunted house might just work for the deployment of ambient sound.  It’s important to note that it does not explain the harassment on any active victim device; that is another matter. Nor does this entry discuss how you might be able to detect the components of a haunted house deployed around you. Based on the experience of living in this situation, however, as well as on the near-universality of wireless devices, the use of WiFi likely figures prominently in this scenario.

Note that in a condo mobbing, the wall of the condo from which the mobbers work could be opened to mount speakers close to the wall facing the victim residence. While some find this scenario a dubious possibility, it’s worth mentioning, especially for the sake of investigations that could be stymied by the lack of a visible speaker. Mobbing is dirty trickery and, in my own case, there have been numerous renovations affecting the walls facing my home in the mobbing houses north and south. Mobbers would likely want to position feonic or “vibration” speakers on or close to the interior walls of the victim unit.

On that same Australian forum, there were numerous complaints about “smart meters.” It’s been a while since I looked at them, but since the meters in at least some parts of Seattle have become “smart” (though perhaps “more vulnerable” is a better way to put it) and since this type of WiFi-based harassment seems to have a decided electrical component, it’s worth noting that Australians are complaining about both harassment by infrasound and harassment by smart meter. Perhaps utility companies like Seattle City Light should not only be concerned with the security of the wireless technologies that the devices use, but the vulnerabilities of these devices to other signal hacks. In my case, the owner of the south mobbing house and whoever else is minding me from that side make a point of noisily tending refuse cans or walking close to my windows along the side of the house where my router and electrical service boxes are installed. The ground wire for this house is also there. I’ve often wondered whether the goal is to disrupt with noise, unnerve by proximity, or whether their walking around in that area triggers motion detectors that result in the pickup that invariably occurs in their “surround-sound” system of harassment. All these are possible, and so are other forms of tampering. There is usually a vehicle positioned along the property line and within ten feet or so from my cable service box by the time I power up the Roku and television at night as well as when I regularly tune in to NPR for streaming broadcasts on the weekend. The nasty neighborhood watch lady across the street is obsessively involved in this aspect of the monitoring and harassing behavior; her comings and goings and the positions of the vehicles on her parking strip appear to be tightly coordinated with those of the mobbing houses on either side of me. But, as I recall, she did say in the course of one civil proceeding in U.S. District Court that she was trying to “help” the owner of the south mobbing house, though she did not say with what. And it usually appears that the vehicles that are parked closest to the property line or within line of sight of my cable service box likely contain active devices. This becomes more obvious given the positioning and repositioning of the vehicles as well as how the devices in the vehicles appear to be tended. Whatever is happening, it tends to be physically uncomfortable to sit or work near the dining room windows or the south wall of the house when the usual vehicles are in their usual positions during my broadcasts.

At any rate, perhaps siting the service box for internet and television within feet of the electrical meter isn’t such a great idea. One way or another, customers pay for the vulnerabilities that are provisioned with their utilities. Crooks who are trying to turn over properties will use anything they can. This is another reason why it’s important for law enforcement to heed complaints about this kind of harassment, to understand why people are physically affected by it, and to prosecute those who would do it. In the digital era, there appears to be little difference between civil harassment and physical torture.

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Trick or treat. If you’re being mobbed, it’s possible that your mobbers have built a haunted house around you. Except instead of saying “Boo,” they may be using it to harass you and deliver the hoaxes and scams on which they expect to make good their crime. It’s possible that the construction of a haunted house sounds somehow “safer” and even less “criminal” to nasty neighborhood watches and speculators who cannot get around the fact of civil rights and property rights and like the idea of tricking their hapless victims out of their homes—especially if bias means that victim reports are ignored.

The use of multiple kinds of sound does not only ensure coverage of victim environments. It confuses the victim experience and thereby confounds reporting. In the end, reporting a stream of sounds that cannot be pieced together into a single source and that are distributed across multiple environments is likely to discredit the victim and to make female victims sound, to be sexist about it, like hysterics. The mobbing victim runs around in a “tizzy,” describing one type of sound and then another, none of them making any sense to those who have not experienced the same assault. Certain countermeasures only make the mobbing victim look crazier, especially if, realizing that radio is somehow involved, the mobbing victim associates himself with groups like the tin-hatters or papers the windows of his home with tinfoil. Not to mention the fact that the nasty neighbors or other social engineers likely assist in the effort to associate the mobbing victim with such fringe groups since it is an effective way to defeat victim reports.

This entry is unfinished and may undergo minor edits with a later rereading. I intend to write an addendum entry that provides some discussion of speakers, as well as more on the research into “acoustic harm” by researcher Matt Wixey and perhaps the views of Timothy Leighton of the University of Southampton on ultrasonic weapons.

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People who are victims of crimes shouldn’t have to solve them. The FBI is interested in real estate scams, even if the City of Seattle is not. The FBI is interested in cyber-crime, even if the City of Seattle is not. The FBI is interested in crimes in which victims are stalked and falsely imprisoned, which is arguably true in my case, even if the City is not. The FBI is interested in corruption, even if the City of Seattle is not. Or maybe, in a Trumpian twist of the criminal code, if the members of a neighborhood watch group are involved, or if the scam is run by real estate speculators, it’s not a crime at all.

It’s one thing for the Seattle Police Department to have a web page that says that if they can’t do anything about a cyber-crime, the victim may have to file a civil suit. It’s quite another to refuse to intervene in an organized bullying crime of years duration, when the City of Seattle has compounded the crime by, among other things, prosecuting the victim on behalf of the criminals. What happened to me reveals Seattle’s Mental Health Court to be a sham court with state psychologists who are quick to rubber-stamp the assumption that the victim’s honest reports of a sound crime are markers of a delusional state. In my case, the prosecutor went so far as to attempt to excuse his dismissal of the case by citing the bogus finding of the Washington State psychologist even as he indicated that the reason for the dismissal was evidentiary.  This occurred after I motioned to challenge the finding. My understanding is that prosecutors usually fight any finding of a psychologist that could lead to the dismissal of a case for reasons of mental health. For this reason, one might draw the conclusion that the Court sought to avoid what I was given to believe would be a rare challenge. The dismissal ensured that I was unable to challenge the finding of the State psychologist based on an assessment that I had quietly procured on my own, without the knowledge of the attorney who so poorly represented me. This chain of events brings into question the validity of the assessments that are performed in at least Seattle’s Mental Health Court.

I do not know of a similar case, although given the apparent ignorance and unpreparedness of defense lawyers, the Seattle Police Department, Seattle Municipal Court and city officials to deal with technology-based crime and even with crimes that rely on false accusations, defamation and neighborhood bullying situations, it is likely that other cases like mine exist. It is also likely that gender bias is involved in such cases when they do occur. Of those women in Silicon Valley whose reports of IoT abuse brought their mental health status into question, to the best of my knowledge, their victimization by criminal harassment—not mental illness—came to light before they were irrevocably stigmatized and their reputations as competent individuals ruined (“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). At least in the case of the Florida woman who was harassed by infrasound, the police found the means used to commit the crime by searching the perpetrator’s condo.

If cities are going to prosecute the victims of crimes, it is their ethical responsibility to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of those crimes they might otherwise call civil, especially when the prosecution of the victim was based on the claims of the perpetrators and, in and of itself, is evidence of obstruction.