This morning I woke early, to the sting of some radiating device with female and male voices demanding me to “Move on!” and “Get out!”. “Get your device off me!” I retorted, moving to protect myself. As of late, since doing some research on electromagnetic interference and devices like directional antennas, I’ve become worried about what the mobbers have exposed me to with their unremitting harassment. Can they see me or hear me? Who knows. I don’t waste my time worrying about it any longer. I know that to harass me in the middle of the night, they have to know where I am. With a directional microphone within range, they should be able to hear breath sounds. And with unscrupulous medical professionals in the mobbing, inexperienced mobbers can be taught to listen for the physiological signs of interest. Perhaps there is a biometrics of mobbing. Early on a mobber matter-of-factly said, “We know where you put your head on the bed.” Disinclined to believe they were actually tracking me in my own home, I figured they’d seen the pillow when the drapes were open. Knowing where you sleep is not uncommon in the privileged relationship between neighbors.

Unable to find a safe space between the windows on the north and west walls of my bedroom despite the acoustic board, I went to the living room and tried to sleep on the couch. There’s been an unfamiliar voice in the harassment the last day or two, and a red Lexus parked at the south mobbing house tonight. Like when the north mobbing house owner complained that he had “people coming in from all over the state” to mob me, the north and south mobbing house owners appear to be importing new or at least onsite talent in their continuing quest to vanquish me from my home. It’s obvious that they’re trying to keep up the intensity—the likely smart speaker or access point hidden by the exhaust fan opposite my south side door has been the non-stop source of prattle and cooking fumes these last days with a continuous wind of propane or some other noxious gas coming from the backyards of one or both mobbing houses. I note that some smart speakers listen as well as talk, something that could make their deployment useful at the architectural openings of mobbing houses well provisioned with WiFi, IoT sensors, and malice for the legal contracts of others.

Across the street, the house built by the developer who told my landlord that there were “ways to get [me] out” of here is up for sale once again. Sometimes this neighborhood seems like some sort of investment club where the well-to-do buy onto the street for a few years and then sell and pocket the difference.

Down the street, a crane working one lot has been replaced with heavy machinery on another to drill and sink piles into the soft soil on this landslide-prone slope above Lake Washington. It’s summer, and COVID-19 or not, the mobbers make the most of it as they fire up smokers in unison to smoke me out if I open my windows and splatter the panes with acoustic leakage harassment if I don’t. [07/18/20 note: As of late, there’s an uptick in the use of directional sound by Sonos or compatible speakers at least partially from outdoor installed speakers whose sound seems to batter some part of the exterior walls when I don’t have a sound stream on Roku or computer to allow harassment. You’d have to erect screening of the parts of the house that were targeted, most likely, to mitigate the disturbance. I did install a tarp between my front deck and a long hedge that runs between this property and that of the north mobbing house with the hope that it might interrupt motion-detecting lights or other sensors or simply add another obstacle between sound waves—including what has appeared to be airborne infrasound—and my home but haven’t had the energy to extend the tarping, erect a plywood divider or install dense foliage of the twelve or more feet in height that would likely be required to begin to make a difference. Installing physical dividers would not, however, exclude the possibility of attacks directed onto the roof of this house from the upper stories of the mobbing houses.] It’s difficult to comprehend that lack of belief by those who should have helped me left me with little recourse than to live more than five years of my life being victimized in this way. Criminals shouldn’t be able to get away with predatory crimes by saying that their female victims are delusional. We shouldn’t let them.

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At the outset of my mobbing here in northeast Seattle, I was startled to hear the nasty neighborhood watch lady tell a regular walker “we” had positioned “very sensitive microphones” to detect when I moved my cars. She was referring to two old cars I’d taken to parking in front of my home. The fact that the nasty neighborhood watch lady had once driven her van at me while her daughter braced herself against the dash only made it clear that in this Seattle neighborhood, a buffer zone is a good thing.

The notion that microphones had been deployed for surveillance wasn’t something I took seriously. I still lived in a world where no one bothers to mount a surveillance effort against a neighbor, or anyone else. But in the years since, my emerging awareness that the “surround-sound” method of harassment was in fact a system developed side by side with the rise of IoT and the enlargement of the personal attack surface that it represents. As a society, we’ve struggled with privacy issues that result from traffic cameras and police use of drones and IMSI catchers. Now in pandemic, new privacy issues come to the fore as we confront the use of contact tracing to mitigate disease spread. All the while, on the home front we cede our privacy rights out of fear as we cut cables and connect baby-cams, video doorbells, and smart refrigerators to WiFi networks that serve as the hacker’s point of entry. Big Brother is no longer out there; he’s “kicking it” on your couch. IoT makes it that much easier for criminals who practice surveillance to get inside. If the brilliant filmmaker Michael Haneke remade the film Caché, the surveillance videos left on the doorstep to creep out Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche would turn out to have been made by their doorbell (“Caché,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cach%C3%A9_(film). With IoT, it’s even easier for neighbors to stalk. This fact is demonstrated by the phenomenon of neighborhood watch or “community watch” stalkers who use security cameras as a means of social control, by sociopathic ex-husbands in tech enclaves (The New York Times on the digital tools of abuse), and in the “shadow service” of real estate mobbing. I’m writing a bit more about IoT in Mobbing with interference; eviction by heat (part 4); hopefully I’ll finish that up in the next week.

Microphones are central to surveillance. WiFi and short-range protocols like Bluetooth are tailor-made for neighbor surveillance. I’ve been wondering as of late, if the mobbers’ WiFi network is deployed into my home, does my keeping WiFi off even matter? Can they effect eavesdropping exploits that combine their own WiFi with my Bluetooth when I enable it? (“Wireless ‘BlueBorne’ Attacks Target Billions of Bluetooth Devices,” Threatpost, https://threatpost.com/wireless-blueborne-attacks-target-billions-of-bluetooth-devices/127921/) WiFi devices, like so many products, are put on the market and into the field before we understand their implications for our lives.

Where microphones might make privacy invasion obvious, mobbers like my “neighbors” can use two-way radios and smartphones with microphones left open. Outside the workplace, we assume radios play and do not record. Two-way radios like walkie-talkies offer increased portability with the kind of radiating capabilities that mobbers prefer when eavesdropping must be deployed from exterior areas like decks and back yards on a day-to-day basis. I can confirm the frequent use of walkie-talkies in my own mobbing, for example, and have read about privacy concerns over their use in the workplace. Apparently, private conversations are not infrequently overheard by others using the same frequency, a mishap that results in disputes and the untimely release of more than a few employees. Such incidents are likely to increase in the age of COVID-19 when employers are encouraged to support social distancing in the workplace with two-way radios (“COVID-19 and social distancing with two-way radios,” Emits Communications, https://www.eemits.co.uk/articles/covid19-and-social-distancing-with-two-way-radios). On the other hand, outing managers who utter racist slurs over walkie-talkie in the workplaces of Mobile, Alabama or anywhere else is a very good thing (“Despite legal protections, most workers who face discrimination are on their own,” The Center for Public Integrity, https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/workers-rights/workplace-inequities/injustice-at-work/workplace-discrimination-cases/). In a related strategy, the use of one device to detect and another device to harass—for example, a radio left open to detect sound that then triggers a Sonos subwoofer to emit infrasound—contributes to making mobbing a complex of crime that only the patient investigator is likely to decipher. At least, that is probably the case in the absence of AI (artificial intelligence) applications capable of traversing IoT systems that include devices which communicate outside the WiFi bands. Those mobbing me also appear to use smartphones in a strategy of pretending to be listening to a caller when, it turns out, they are waiting with microphone open for you to say something—anything—so they can use it against you in their drive to evict you from your home. As I’ve noted before, people like these can make you wish you lived next to a comparatively honest drug house.

Picking up sound is key to mobbing. In earlier posts, I noted the attempts of the mobbers to control uncooperative victims like me by threatening to put the sounds of any sexual activity “in the street” as well as their threats to “mic up” ambient sound (Infrastructure crimes: Mobbing with interference; extraction by heat (part 1)). “Don’t let her have any quiet,” the north mobbing house owner said for me to hear one day when I was out in the yard. In such a strategy, picking up and amplifying sound and then transmitting that sound into the victim home is a prominent method used to deny the mobbing victim the quiet enjoyment that is fundamental to a leasehold. And it’s a devious one that you might not notice until you begin to realize that the sounds you’re hearing are amplified, that it’s louder inside than outside, or that the sound that you can see being made at the property line to your south is resounding just as loudly on the north side of your home. This week, with excavation a few doors down, the amplification of sound from the mobbers’ listening devices into the front of my home made it seem like I had bedded down on the asphalt next to the throbbing piling rig. Mobbers are all about putting the screws to you without being seen with the screwdriver.

More importantly, this use of microphones, dash-cams, and similar devices from next door is a shifty way to detect the movements of the mobbing victim and capture her within an IoT system of surveillance and harassment. Unbounded signal and overlapping networks make it even easier, and with beamforming WiFi protocols like 802.11ac, signal deployed from a WiFi extender can be shaped for the intrusion and the WiFi extender removed from service afterward. Microphones that listen can easily be linked to notification systems and used as triggers for malicious behavior. Even vehicle alarm systems that are enabled when someone passes close by can be strategically used to monitor. In a world full of devices and radios, bad actors in neighboring locations with easy range can surveille with common devices they just happen to leave around, and no one will be the wiser.