In which speaker crimes give way to crimes of infrastructure

It didn’t start all at once. It didn’t start that way for me. I remember picking up the phone to make a call, the voices of the south mobbing house owner and his then-girlfriend popping up. “Oh! It must be a party line!” they exclaimed, giggling and tittering between themselves. I remember the odd way they came on the line. It sounded like a recording on playback.

The opening shots in the mobbing employed the pretext of innocent errors or accidents of technology. The mobbers’ curtain might be pulled back more easily for those with a bit of awareness of how early hackers phone-phreaked Ma Bell, as I mentioned a few years back (Minimize attack surface by inhibiting function, Radiohead: Cell phones are radios; mobbing is radio-based harassment (part 2)). But having some inkling of what mobbers do or how they do what they do doesn’t stop them from doing it, not without a responsive and savvy police department whose officers don’t ignore what they don’t understand. The mobbers took my devices one or two at a time, almost as though they were testing for my response or watching to learn what they’d have to do and how far they’d have to go, as though they sought to mitigate risk while taking it. The cordless phone may have been the easiest way in.

This was one of the first signs that signal hacking was in play. Cordless phones use radios to transmit. Over the years a number of frequencies have been allocated for their use, including the 2.4GHz band extended in 1998. As WiFi took hold and the noise increased on the band, the 5.8GHz band was allocated for the use of cordless phones in 2003. I don’t know what frequency was used by the cordless phone that the south mobbing house owner and his cronies made into a party line; I disconnected it and threw it into a bag in the garage.

The mobbers use any device that will transport a pressure wave. These days since I started sleeping in the concrete-lined basement story, they even seem to play with the water table. Mobbers use devices of many kinds to interfere with property rights and lease rights too, whether implemented in strategy or on the hardware level. But one way or another, in the garden or under the foundation, the goal of these incursions is encroachment. Manspreading is one way to get there.

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Manspreading at the network edge

Protocol capabilities are an important consideration in mobbing strategy and in the selection of a mobbing device. This is true whether the device is mobile, onsite at the enterprise, or installed over the property line. But without connectivity, protocols can’t handshake. You need to handshake to create a communication channel. Even a smartphone requires a connection.

In mobbing, connectivity is access—access to the property to be acquired, to the network of the victim, and to the victim herself. Beamformers shape network packets; you need throughput to get them there. When an adverse possession lawsuit isn’t tenable or the ground war is stalled, mobbers lift-and-shift to the network. This is how they stake their claim.

Mobbers get over the property line with dirty trickery and intimidation; forklifting to the network gives racketeers a long leg-up and modernizes forced eviction into a data-driven network application with programmatic interfaces. A pattern of harassment becomes a system and the system increasingly autonomous. With the use of radio frequency (RF) and RF interference, the mobbers’ shell game is ablated into an abstraction layer that acts as a layer of obfuscation. The mobbers’ black cloud is rendered invisible in a way that physical sabotage of the victim dwelling is not.

Steel used to be king. But times have changed. The scaffolding of property war is built on the network layer. The key to acquisition is WiFi. The mobbing victim may own the soil, but the air is up for grabs. It’s with network infrastructure that mobbers stake their claim. To take the property next door, mobbers lay down the communication lines required to make their criminal demands, they build the infrastructure they need to do their dirty work. They manspread at the network edge.

Grid warfare

When you wage war on the network, data is the ammunition. Network packets—chunked and formatted data on the wire—are the bullets. In mobbing, packets are envelopes containing malicious data or abuse, busy beavers, zip bombs and the like. Mobbing takes a well-provisioned grid with throughput adequate to the barrage. With throughput, the black cloud of mobbing churns like a twister, wrapping the mobbing victim in a whirlwind of radiation and abuse.

Network packets are sent from source to destination using IP addressing. Mobbers are most likely to employ the use of broadcast addressing that includes victim devices rather than explicitly specifying them as destinations. They might even overlay victim networks with their own, band-switching as they fire off jamming beams and abuse. These tactics make it harder to pinpoint the attack vector and ingress of malicious data to the victim’s network and devices. These tactics make it difficult to capture mobbing sound for use as evidence. Proximity—real or simulated—is everything in mobbing. To ensure multiple vectors from which to launch attacks within range, mobbers build black clouds next door.

Network infrastructure forms the supply line of mobbing warfare. The conventional wisdom is that you need boots on the ground to win the ground war; to win an aerial war you need to rule the skies. To wage property war over the wire, you need throughput. No comms, no bombs. It’s as simple as that. But there’s no wireless services until you lay down the wire.

Internet services are provisioned on a per-customer basis and even black clouds are built on copper. When the property to be acquired is detached and air-gapped, mobbers crank up the radio to get across the DMZ. Mobbers extend WiFi signal to create formation and front.

No missile finds its target without the proper trajectory. Like other kinds of signal, WiFi weakens as it travels; this is called path loss. WiFi path loss depends not only on the distance traveled from the source transmitter but on factors including WiFi protocol and physical environment. Broadcasting is a scatter-shot approach. Physical networking ensures data launch within range of the mark. Physical networking helps to control the field.

Extending the grid

Americans are obsessed with WiFi power. Even on the home front where we supposedly let down our devices, the dead spot offends. Unwilling to accept less than complete coverage, unwilling to move a few feet to the left or the right, the problem of the dead spot is one we solve by the addition of yet another device. The use of Ethernet—faster, more reliable and more secure—is unthinkable.

A slew of articles instruct the home WiFi administrator on how to ensure her WiFi is stopped by no wall. “Wifi dead spots can be caused by physical barriers in your house,” Cox Communications helpfully offers (https://www.cox.com/residential/articles/find-wifi-dead-spots-home.html). NerdsOnsite provides instruction: “How to fix dead WiFi spots” (https://www.nerdsonsite.com/blog/how-to-fix-wifi-dead-spots/). The makers of eero network extenders tell you “How to breathe life into your home’s WiFi dead zones” (https://blog.eero.com/how-to-breathe-life-into-your-homes-wifi-dead-zones/).

The density of city living affords great benefits for which we must ultimately compete. WiFi becomes another service whose equitable distribution is problematic. Demand for WiFi power becomes emblematic of a culture focused more on signal than on content.

WiFi is slow and unreliable in comparison to the Ethernet whose cords we’ve been quick to cut. A common estimate is that fifty percent of airtime on a WiFi network is spent detecting and correcting errors (“Measuring the Reliability of 802.11 WiFi Networks,” https://wiki.packets2photons.com/images/2/20/Reliability_of_WiFi.pdf). There’s no longer just a computer on every desktop. Now there are two or three. Instead of a single television in a household or even entertainment centers in multiple rooms, multiple devices stream simultaneously. Devices are designed for WiFi connectivity alone while manufacturers nix IEEE 802.3 NICs (the network interface cards that support cabled Ethernet connections). More than two decades since the introduction of the 802.11 standard, our fascination with mobility and portability has been transformed into an obsession with WiFi power.

A fast router is no longer enough. The desire to defeat the dread dead spot has spawned a market niche for WiFi “boosters” that attempt to compensate for the faults of the standard by strengthening and lengthening the signal. Consumer devices on the market commonly repeat the WiFi signal or extend the range of the WiFi network with satellite devices that plug into household current and sync with the router. Multidimensional feature reviews lure readers with titles like “The Best WiFi and Signal Booster” (https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-wi-fi-extender/) and “The best way to blanket your entire home with WiFi” (https://www.cnet.com/reviews/google-wifi-review/2/). But WiFi signal is not contained in cable, and radio waves are not easily controlled. You can’t “blanket” every inch of a lot without giving your neighbor some coverage.

Popular Mechanics assures us, “You don’t need to live in a large house or sprawling apartment to run into dreaded dead zones that make staying connected to the Wi-Fi a problem. A single router can sometimes struggle to provide complete internet coverage depending on your space’s layout and construction, or if there’s interference from nearby networks or other household devices.” (“The 9 Best WiFi Extenders for Fast Home Internet,” https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gear/a28747578/wifi-extenders/). As WiFi users struggle for access on the crowded 2.4G WiFi band, the drive to WiFi power becomes an arms race.

WiFi extenders provide a range of features. There are extenders that support only the 2.4G band as well as those providing dual-band support. “Desktop” models offer higher speeds with Ethernet ports; plug-in extenders have smaller form factors with push-button sync to the router. Some extenders sport antennas for MU-MIMO and beamforming protocols like 802.11ac and 802.11n, as well as offering legacy support for 802.11a/b/g. The capabilities of the extender are generally limited by those of the router.

The trick to installing a WiFi extender is in finding the optimal location. This is the position from which the extender provides the best coverage to areas affected by path loss or pitted with dead spots. The typical strategy is to install the extender at the midpoint between the router and the area that requires a boost (“How to set up your WiFi extender for the best signal,” https://www.tomsguide.com/us/wifi-extender-setup-guide,review-4133.html). Careless installation and unnecessary redundancy can worsen signal strength.

The desire to signal boost is the source of online discussion about how many extenders a single router can power, whether you can daisy-chain them, and when it might be better to add a second router. But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of discussion about how boosting your signal affects neighboring networks. Some companies do advise caution, however. Eye Networks, for example, a Norwegian reseller of network solutions explains the difference between amplifying a signal and extending one, warning that WiFi signal amplification can sabotage neighboring networks (“Why Boosting Your WiFi Signal is a Bad Idea,” https://eyenetworks.no/en/no-wifi-boosting/). Australia’s Southern Phone Company suggests foregoing signal boosting with the use of a directional antenna for routers with insufficient reach: “Simply point the antenna in the direction of the weak spot and voilà, better Wi-Fi” (“Objects That Interfere with Your WiFi Signal: How to Identify Them and How to Fix Them,” https://www.southernphone.com.au/Blog/2018/Mar/objects-that-interfere-with-wifi). But what happens when the antenna is pointed at a neighbor?

Whoever owns the soil, it is theirs up to Heaven and down to Hell.

— Accursius (c. 1182 – 1262)

The emergence of drones on the consumer market reawakened our awareness of “air rights,” that is, our interest in the space above the platted land. Accursius’ grant of those rights, despite commemoration in William Blackstone’s influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1766),  lost meaning with the 20th century rise of air travel and with the rollout of the wireless router. (Commentaries on the Laws of England, in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Laws_of_England). Radio waves are “in the air” like the mobbers, or so they told me, invisible and unencumbered by common law. When a flood next door affects us, we expect remediation. When a radio ham disturbs our reception with his antenna, we complain. But when neighboring WiFi networks encroach upon ours, the solution is often to get a WiFi extender of our own.

An alternate strategy of fighting neighbor interference is to add “base stations” to the coverage area of the network experiencing interference. According to Wikipedia, interference can be fought through the deployment of additional base stations around the coverage of a network. “Deploying additional base stations around the coverage area of a network, particularly in existing areas of poor or no coverage, reduces the average distance between a wireless device and its nearest access point and increases the average speed. The same amount of data takes less time to send, reduces, channel occupancy, and gives more idle time to neighboring networks, improving the performance of all networks concerned.” (“2.4GHz radio use,” in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.4_GHz_radio_use). The downside of this is the diminishing returns that accrue when too many base stations take too much time relaying control traffic on the network.

Wikipedia describes yet another approach, that of adding a radio-frequency power amplifier to a single base station. This measure improves conditions because it increases the signal-to-noise ratio of the client device. However, if the amplifier is not sufficiently linear, this strategy can result in addition of noise to the signal. And depending on local rules, as cited by Australia’s Southern Phone Company, signal amplification may be illegal over the level built into the device by the manufacturer.

Such strategies are suggested with the awareness of deliberate interference, which is the case when you are being mobbed. The consumer who complains of radio-frequency interference is advised that fire ought to be fought with fire. Perhaps this is because when bad actors define malicious WiFi networks hosting black clouds next door, there are few legal options to beat back their signal. At least, this seems to be the case given the laws governing the ownership of air space. Not to mention the fact that the bad actors may be deploying the illegal options to criminally harass you.

Any way you look at it, the strategy to fighting off interference, is to strengthen WiFi signal. The result is a WiFi arms race for the strongest signal, the fastest speed, and the most complete coverage.

This approach is useless when the interference is not only deliberate but when bad actors deploy extenders to ensure access to their victims. When you are being victimized by criminals who hack WiFi signal, the maintenance of a WiFi signal is an invitation. When you are being victimized by criminals who are determined enough to provision for you the WiFi service that you decline, a WiFi extender is not going to help you.

Nor should anyone be forced to rely on WiFi. Some of us prefer Ethernet, especially those of us who work at home and provision our own networks to protect intellectual property and work product. For others, Ethernet makes it possible to maintain a home network and a healthier environment while minimizing exposure to radio-frequency signal. In a world of waves, it should be your right not to have an active radio in your home. It should be your right to pull the plug. The quiet we nostalgically talk about having lost amid the hub-bub of the city is at an even greater remove as the numbers of radios increase and as they are left always on.

With the same selfishness with which we refuse to cover our faces in pandemic, we insist on extending our interfering WiFi networks into other private spaces knowing that those we carelessly affect have the burden of complaining with little recourse under the law. The onus is on the victim. Mobbers use the assumption that interference is accidental to great advantage. Civil law fails when there is no civility.

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The final part of what’s become an Infrastructure crimes blog series will come out in yet a few more days or perhaps a few more after that. Sorry the writing is taking so long. It’s spring, real estate is in the air, and the nasty neighborhood watch captains and their criminal speculator friends continue to subject me to systematic sleep deprivation and to assault me with weapons including dash-cams, walkie-talkies, a Sonos sound system and WiFi-transported abuse as well as their stock-in-trade exhortations to “Move on!” and “Zip it!” If there wasn’t a pandemic, perhaps I could more easily get a break from them, and for my health, outside the house. Stay tuned to read more about haters, tactical networks, mobbing with interference and eviction by heat.