In the last week there’s been significant media coverage of ‘Zoombombing’, coordinated “raids” inflicting harassment, abuse and hate speech on users of the Zoom videoconferencing application. Dubbing Zoombombing the “latest development in the story of online abuse,” New York Times writers Taylor Lorenz and Davey Alba remark “[w]hile those incidents may have initially been regarded as pranks or trolling, they have since risen to the level of hate speech and harassment, and even commanded the attention of the F.B.I.” (“‘Zoombombing’ Becomes a Dangerous Organized Effort,” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/technology/zoom-harassment-abuse-racism-fbi-warning.html).
Interest in Zoombombing is heightened due to increases in online activities, including learning and conferencing, with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Like other forms of online and tech-enabled abuse, Zoombombing holds strong appeal for practitioners of hate speech. The targets of Zoombombing have included gatherings of religious groups, trans kids and members of Alcoholics Anonymous. And perhaps because the expression of hate appears not to satisfy the hater, some of those who Zoom-bomb seek further approval by posting videos and live streams of their malignant acts to sites like YouTube and Amazon Twitch. Removing the streamed content does not undo the damage of the real-time intrusion.
The discussion of Zoombombing in the media this past week has almost unfailingly accommodated the excuses of those who Zoombomb or foster Zoombombing by establishing accounts for the distribution of conference information, including passcodes. Sixteen-year-old James blames his posting of private conference information on stress as he explains in the New York Times article: “Part of the reason we do it is a lot of teachers give us a lot of work right now.”
While a distinction is made between the claimed motivations of some minors and those who encourage Zoombombing from sites known to traffic in hatred, this willingness to accept intrusions into private online spaces as prank engenders the same behavior. It’s not much different from the naive thinking that hackers hack for no other purpose than because they can.
I am mystified by the excuses we are willing to accept for hate crime. Blaming bad acts on “stress” or “boredom” is the post-millennial “twinkie defense”—the non-nutritive rationale of diminished capacity that bought killer Dan White a voluntary manslaughter conviction after he murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in cold blood.
After a slew of complaints from Zoombombing victims, the FBI issued a warning about the activity on March 30, 2020 (“FBI Warns of Teleconferencing and Online Classroom Hijacking During COVID-19 Pandemic,” https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/boston/news/press-releases/fbi-warns-of-teleconferencing-and-online-classroom-hijacking-during-covid-19-pandemic). One hopes they can do more to discourage hate crime online than that.
For the years over which I have been harassed and abused in and out of my home and online and off, I have heard no lack of hate speech—hate speech that is constructed as a key component in a strategy of forced eviction, a hate crime that involves a northeast Seattle neighborhood watch group, real estate speculators and some local home owners, a few of whom appear to be skilled in clandestine and criminal tenant “relocation.”
I have been harassed, abused and assaulted in the privacy of my home over television, telephone, music player, conferencing applications and more, in an attempt to, in effect, terrorize me out of my home. This is a technology-based crime in which I cannot turn up the volume of any digital device without hearing abuse—it doesn’t matter whether I am in a call screen for a job or in a conference for a work meeting. And it doesn’t matter whether I turn off my own WiFi or my own router because the neighbors have constructed a fault-tolerant harassing machine.
This is a technology-based crime in which victims are battered into acquiescence by criminal profiteers using technologies of beam-forming and sound, technologies that they’ve taken up precisely for their harassing qualities, technologies that can likely harm when they are used against people instead of by them. The harassment or abuse that appears on devices is effected in a manner that can be heard on my end of any communication interface and I have learned that, to survive, I cannot tell people who fail to believe something that they themselves have not experienced. This is a crime for which my true and honest reports have resulted in the City of Seattle prosecuting me based on the lies of criminal profiteers. And this is a crime that can result in its victims not only being prosecuted based on the lies of criminal profiteers and scammers, but having their competence challenged based on a thin veil of lies, obstructions, and an investigation that never occurs because of the naivete and bias of the police and the attorneys who are supposed to help people who are victims of predatory crimes.
I have endured more than five years of tech-enabled harassment and abuse on a daily basis because I believe in my civil and human rights and because, unfortunately, I alone have been willing to stand up for them. I have endured this because I have known with certainty, that if I capitulate those involved in this hate crime cum real estate scam will not only make good their crime but their success will encourage the same crime to happen in the future as it has undoubtedly happened in the past. I know this based on the clear strategy and practiced approach of those involved in this crime.
Here we are in the midst of worldwide pandemic and those who are involved in this crime are doubling down on me from the north and south sides of my small home—their businesses have closed and they have nowhere to go and nothing to do but to try to finally achieve their ends and force me from my home at a time when no one is moving.
I have relevant data to share. Forensic evidence should be easy to come by. I have license plate numbers collected over time for many of the likely minders who’ve come and gone, minders who’ve harassed me from the other side of the hedge, the other side of the wall, through the night and though the days, months and years of my life as I have continued to hold my legal contract to rent a home in this gentrifying Seattle neighborhood. Those who instigated and organized this crime are easily identified—they live next door or across the way, they are at least supported and perhaps their activities are known by those who live down the street or those who have already flipped their homes and left the neighborhood. At any rate, the names of most of those who are most deeply involved appear in the transcripts of civil proceedings in District Court. Based on their misleading statements to police, prosecutor and in pleadings, a few of these could probably be prosecuted for obstruction, a charge which could provide a means to investigate and expose the entirety of what is undoubtedly a known real estate scam.
Surely the clandestine battering of a woman with IoT devices, technologies of sound and beamformers is of concern. Surely being assaulted nightly in your bed with sound and verbally abused on any available device is of interest to the FBI. Surely I don’t have to be murdered before this hate crime that involves a corrupt neighborhood watch group in northeast Seattle matters.
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