An old entry on the potential use of community radio stations to discourage mobbing came up in the On being mobbed site stats this morning. The note I added to the entry, Citizens Band neighborhood networks, bears repeating.

Don’t spend your valuable resources purchasing and learning radio technology because you are the victim of a predatory crime. It should never be necessary to do such things to defend yourself against criminals who should be turned in for being domestic terrorists instead of brokered to commit acts of domestic terrorism for profit in the neighborhoods of Seattle or any other city.

Years after writing that blog entry, it’s clear now that mobbing is a criminal activity that involves the utilization of any and all radio bands—any and all radios—that are available in the environment of the mobbing victim. Mobbers conduct their campaigns of terror using tools that communicate on all bands and may use all of them simultaneously to ensure coverage no matter the target device, that is, the devices that are active in your environment. Your life is their attack surface; your environment maps their network. A well-defined network and short-range technologies of harassment allow them to reach you by broadcast. If you shut down the radios in your environment or, as I do, mute the sound on any radio you’re not actively using and even unplug it, haters like these can always find another way, whether by the use of infrasound from smart speakers hidden on the other side of the fence, the use of baffled fans as speakers on the other side of the hedge, the deployment of motion-sensing triggers so they can follow you outside and beat their tin drums, the installation of dash-cams in their vehicles to surveille and harass you from the driveway, or drones launched to stalk you with their mobile radio station when you ride your bike. It’s like living between Josef Mengele and Herman Pook.

Mobbing is not so much about exfiltration—the extraction of data—but it is very much a hack against the assumption that data is what the felons who commit computer and technology crimes are after. Mobbers want access to your network less for the extraction of data than for its injection. These “noisy neighbors” inject disruptive and destructive sound.

Mobbing may rely far more on augmentation—augmenting with infrastructure and data. I’ll elaborate on this in the promised entry on mobbing with interference. My apologies for not publishing that entry yet. Between job hunting, spring gardening, bearing criminal harassment and surviving a pandemic (or, perhaps, surviving the “lethal ineptitude” of Trump’s administration), things have been busy. What does a woman have to do to get a pack of criminals arrested?

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For the source of the apt description of Trump’s administration, see Timothy Egan’s opinion piece in The New York Times, “The World is Taking Pity on Us” at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/coronavirus-trump.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage.