The mobbers of northeast Seattle—apparent real estate scammers or tenant relocators in cahoots with at least some members of a nasty neighborhood watch group—have been hammering me pretty hard as of late. I’d like to hope it’s a sign that the information I’ve been posting recently means trouble for them, but maybe the current intensity of their campaign of criminal harassment and eviction stems from the advent of summer, always a harbinger of construction in Seattle and no less the case in this neighborhood judging from the heavy equipment that trundled by last week. So, I’m going to go ahead and post this segment tonight. I may make minor changes to it later for reasons of editing or technical accuracy. Look for the final part of this blog entry within a couple of days. Writing is hard. It’s even harder when you’re being criminally harassed.

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Back in 2016, I suggested that directional WiFi could be involved in criminal attempts to force legal residents from their homes by mobbing (Short-range technologies of mobbing: Directional WiFi). The information I shared, apart from the recognition that directional WiFi was relevant to mobbing, is not particularly helpful to the victims or the investigators of mobbing today. I knew less about the technologies of mobbing at the time. Not to mention the fact that I’d been criminally harassed for a shorter duration of time.

Things have changed. In the few years since, the incidence of residential crimes like harassment and surveillance has increased with the rise of the increasingly crowded ecosystem of IoT (Internet of Things) devices, advances in router technologies, and support for fast WiFi. The most common implementation of directional WiFi on the consumer market is probably based on the 802.11ac network communication protocol, not 802.11ad as I mentioned in the 2016 blog. I am not a protocol expert and attempting to cultivate an understanding of the protocols that are being used to harass you in your home while harassment is ongoing is perhaps not the best way to learn. This blog entry is more generally focused on the 802.11ac protocol; we’ll be talking more specifically about mobbing applications making use of the 802.11n standard in the final part of Infrastructure crimes: Mobbing with interference; extraction by heat.

Real estate mobbers use a mash-up of techniques to force you from your home. They strip you of the quiet enjoyment of your legal home, they interfere with basic household services and tamper with infrastructure owned and operated by municipalities and providers of the communications services that keep us safe. They commit out-and-out “computer crimes” or “digital crimes” for which they should be prosecuted. They commit crimes of civil and human rights. And they do so because they don’t think you, the city, or local and federal investigators can figure it out. They use their relations with local developers, corrupt neighborhood watch groups and shady speculators to misrepresent who they are and to lie about you. As cyber-criminals do, they turn the tables on you, indemnifying themselves with scams and lies that paint you as a criminal, a lunatic, or both. And they get away with it because we lack the protocols and processes we need to recognize and rein in those who use digital crime to effect their bad ends. Real estate mobbers commit digital crimes because it’s the easiest way to run circles around your city, and around you. If we want to stop them from scamming local, state and even federal agencies while good people are assaulted in their homes as corrupt neighborhood watch groups look approvingly on, we need to understand how mobbers use technology to get away with crime.

The crime of mobbing, especially residential mobbing, is enabled by the widespread use of wireless technologies. This means that this blog will be most useful to the victims, investigators and prosecutors of mobbing if it includes some background on the communications protocols that have made it easy and attractive for neighborhood watch groups gone wrong, haters and racketeers, to incorporate mobbing into their “business” plans.

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Communication protocols are the foundation of computing. A protocol establishes a set of rules that govern communication and data exchange between software and hardware components. Protocols allow devices to communicate and interoperate. The Internet protocol suite provides the architecture of the Internet, including its conceptual model and the communications protocols that brought us the World Wide Web (WWW). Technologies for wired and wireless communication like Ethernet and IEEE 802 provide guidelines for the interaction between networked computers and network architecture. IEEE 802 refers to a family of standards for communication over the Internet. One of these is the 802.11 wireless protocol commonly referred to as “WiFi.”

Criminals benefit from the rollout of new features like anyone else. WiFi gets better with each generation and the 802.11ac protocol was a game changer. Dubbed WiFi AC, 802.11ac was introduced in 2013, the year before I became aware of being mobbed. Given its increasing use in consumer devices, those who practice criminal and clandestine forms of tech-enabled harassment that require the discreet transport of multimedia files over the wire are no doubt keenly interested in 802.11ac. One reason for this is likely to be the efficiency of the beamforming protocol.

Directional WiFi increases the scalability of the mobbing platform

The proliferation of beamforming technologies makes mobbing easier. The improved directional capabilities of the 802.11ac protocol boost WiFi speed. Signal that is focused is higher quality signal that reaches its destination with higher speed. The result is faster information transfer with fewer errors. The upshot is better performance without additional power, something that becomes important when you’re provisioning infrastructure and throughput for the property next door.

The opportunistic use of any and all radios in the victim environment is a pronounced feature of mobbing. Mobbers use devices with antennas not simply for purposes of sound displacement by video or audio onto victim devices but to monitor their victims.

You don’t have to be a radio ham or a military man to know you need an antenna to use a radio. Mobbers are all about antennas. Using radioed devices to mob your neighbors in plain sight probably means having some understanding of how to make or discreetly position an antenna and how to select and use transmitters to monkey-wrench victim devices and the victim. Criminals who provision and orchestrate mobbings must understand the behavior and application of directional or “beam” antennas in comparison to omni-directional antennas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_antenna). Mobbers must locate victim devices, if not the victim, with their powered transmitters—whether these are Yagi directional antennas that are used to transfer malicious abuse onto the victim television or the “noisy” walkie-talkies that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) might deem a danger when they’re used in the way that mobbers do. Mobbers have to understand how antennas are used to shape a transmission, and to receive one. I remember a night when I was staying with an elderly relative while working in the Bay Area and the mobber who may have been harassing me by drone crowed, “There’s a little antenna harassment for you!” The mobbing platform is built on the skilled use of antennas to inflict abuse. Network standards that promote the use of antennas and directionality in the environment of the mobbing victim are by design highly useful in the clandestine, criminal harassment that is mobbing.

Devices and technologies that transport data and other matter over directed beams have been around since the 1940s. But the idea of beam-focused transport remains the stuff of rayguns, Star Trek and those science fictions bound within paper covers. Terms like directed energy weapon (DEW) raise eyebrows; we don’t expect to encounter them  beyond the websites of crackpots and conspiracy theorists.

DEWs include lasers, microwaves and particle beams. But in the same way that concepts of probable cause fail to consider the immaterial or the virtual, the unusual physics of DEWs makes conspiracy theorists of those who report crimes involving beamformers. At least, those who mob appear to use references to ideas commonly regarded as conspiracy theories to make their victims appear paranoid. They name-drop references to phenomena that is culturally suspect in the mobbing prattle you’re forced to listen to, if your mobbing includes verbal abuse as well as “the mobbers’ Foley” anyway, in hopes that you’ll make yourself look paranoid by repeating them. I remember the voice of the north mobbing house owner who was likely using a directional speaker, taunting me that he worked in “black-ops” or “psy-ops” when he was in the military and then chortling a reference to the CIA mind control program MKUltra almost as an afterthought. It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t run to the Seattle Police and exclaim, “They’re mobbing me with beamformers!” I would have been committed before the mobbers moved to make the Seattle Police fall for the scam on their own.

Grasping beamformers in both hands and inimitably convinced of the genius of their scam, the mobbers can’t resist hinting at the tools of their trade—from WiFi extending “satellites” to drones—while making the victims who truthfully report appear to be delusional. Tech criminals like these, who get by on scams and trickery, convince themselves of their superiority by “getting one over” on their less cynical victims, and on anyone else they can. Such hubris is likely to be short-lived. The proliferation of any technology over the marketplace and into our awareness soon undermines its hidden use in crime. A few years ago beamformers weren’t on the market. Jump forward to 2020 and there’s a beamformer in every room, even if we don’t know it yet. Well, maybe not quite, but with the increasing rollout of beamformees, that is, devices that support the exchange of information over beam-focused WiFi, we’re getting there.

MU-MIMO serves more mobbing victims more quickly

Bursting over the wire at up to gigabyte speed, 802.11ac measures some three times faster than its predecessor 802.11n (“8 Things You Didn’t Know About 802.11ac,” https://www.securedgenetworks.com/blog/8-things-you-didn-t-know-about-802-11ac). This speed comes with the increased efficiency of multi-user, multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO) for wireless routers and devices. This means that a wireless access point (AP) that supports 802.11ac can send data to multiple devices that support the standard simultaneously.

MU-MIMO provides core beamforming capabilities in 802.11 directional WiFi protocols. Before MIMO, 802.11 devices were limited to sending one transmission to one device at a time. With multi-user MIMO, multiple antennas shape the transmission to a device into a beam or spatial stream. This narrows the domain of collision, that is, the area in which collisions degrade performance, and makes it possible to send more than one spatial stream at a time.  The 802.11n-2009 standard amended 802.11n to add MU-MIMO capabilities.

Regardless of MU-MIMO’s capabilities to increase WiFi speed, however, devices that do not support MU-MIMO remain a bottleneck. At least they might for WiFi traffic that is transmitted in accord with the  802.11 standard. A Forbes article written the year my mobbing began, observed that the promised 802.11ac support for eight antennas per router was not matched by the antenna capabilities of common devices. Laptops commonly had only two antennas, USB adapters one and sometimes two (“802.11ac vs 802.11n WiFi: What’s The Difference,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/12/30/802-11ac-vs-802-11n-wifi-whats-the-difference/#3ac6a8fb3957). While 802.11ac can support up to eight spatial streams, at least at the time of the O’Reilly writing, transport using MU-MIMO is limited to four spatial streams per device (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/80211ac-a-survival/9781449357702/ch04.html). Either way, for mobbing traffic whose goal appears to be to flood a network, pummel your electronics with interference and perhaps even generate broadcast radiation or network storms, devices with inadequate throughput are not a showstopper.

Antenna arrays are the subject of extensive research, for example, in radar. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar applies an architecture of multiple, spatially distributed transmitters and receivers (IEEE Signal Processing Journal, “MIMO Radar with Widely Separated Antennas,” https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4408448). If the haters who mob can’t already “see” you in your home with infrared drones or night-vision goggles, with a platform that abuses radio-frequency signal, radar is a distinct possibility.

MU-MIMO increases the reliability of the mobbers’ malicious stream

Before MIMO, access points transmitted to users over omnidirectional antennas. Omnidirectional antennas radiate in all directions. The older technology was implemented based on the assumption that users within range would receive the signal. Beamforming technology allows transmissions to be directed in a manner that strengthens the power and extends the range of the individual stream.

MU-MIMO was a marked improvement on the single-user multiple input, multiple output standard of 802.11n that was introduced in 2007, but there was a catch. MU-MIMO­­ is supported only for downlink wireless connections. That’s also not a problem for mobbers, however, who are interested in accessing your network to give you sound, and not much to retriev­e it. Mobbers prefer to avoid intrusions into your network that leave behind “artifacts of intrusion” to be collected as forensic evidence or make you realize that forensic evidence is there to be found. They’re more likely to wait until your devices indiscriminately join their open hotspots so they can threaten to tell the police that you’re cyberstalking them, to lurk on your phone or hang out in the backyard next door with a directional antenna and Bluetooth receiver. By the time they put you on your guard, they’ve probably collected all the information they need from social media, by joining your online groups, or by observing you in public. In the interim, the benefits of directional WiFi help them to keep you close.

MU-MIMO affords privacy to the mobbers’ malicious stream

The power of address is all mobbers need to make you believe they can see you in your home. When someone speaks to you in your home, you’re likely to think they can see you. At least, that’s what the mobbers want you to think. For mobbers, MU-MIMO is useful because it provides the capability for the simultaneous download of malicious sound streams to multiple connected devices at one time. Beamforming capabilities enable WiFi access points to detect the location of connected devices and ensure they have coverage by increasing signal strength in their direction (802.11ac: A Survival Guide, by Matthew S. Gast, O’Reilly 2013, http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/resources/elibrary/auto/802dot11ac_A_Survival_Guide.pdf). When those devices belong to you or even if you’re offline in an environment where those around you are connected, the increased performance that MU-MIMO provides can make the “surround-sound” system of mobbing harassment all the more compelling, and the more you believe, the faster the mobbers can evict you.

Directional WiFi capabilities are well supported by enterprise access points. Mobbers use enterprise access points as well as those in your home. In addition to using the speakers of any device they’ve laid claim to, mobbers’ deployment of speakers to mob you in your home from across the property line may extend to architectural speakers or speaker-enabled access points that pass as benign components in a household intercom system. On the road they can use transmitters with directional antennas like the Yagi directional antenna that is considered a baseline tool in WiFi “cracking” or other “beamformers” to stay connected to you. In the enterprise, video- and speaker-enabled access points, like other components of building infrastructure, may be excluded from corporate tenant leases and controlled by building security rather than those with network security expertise who work on behalf of the lessee company. This vulnerability can make it easy for organized crime, including mobbers, to follow their targets into the enterprise. Even if the mobbing victim leaves her smartphone off, mobbers have learned from experience that they can do whatever it takes to get to their victims and get away with it. If the mobbing victim leaves her smartphone off, they’ll get to her if she opens up a sound stream. If she doesn’t make sound available, they’ll use the accessible speaker-enabled access points or the smartphones of users within range. Those of us who routinely travel with WiFi on make this easy.

Any speaker that broadcasts public announcements or music can be used to mob. When devices combine motion-sensing with speaker capabilities, autonomous mobbing is part of the platform. [08/18/20 Note: Motion-detecting would be the starting point for a whole-house mobbing. Proximity likely enables the use of sensors and other IoT devices installed at the mobbing houses as triggers to detect and harass the mobbing victim. In my case, it has seemed as though the mobbers are aware when I open a window, for example, as well as when I open my front door.] When MU-MIMO keeps connected users within range, the mobbers can do the same. Access points that are excluded from corporate security plans do not only enlarge the corporate attack surface; directional capabilities that alter traffic patterns may increase the difficulty of detecting intrusions and malicious activity.

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Read more on mobber monkeywrenching in Infrastructure crimes: Mobbing with interference; extraction by heat (part 3), where we take a look at topics including mobbing with interference and manspreading at the network edge.