As I came in from doing an errand tonight, the south mobbing house owner walked smugly down his driveway with a bag of trash for the bin. After I parked, and quite unusually, he spoke directly to me from the mouth of his garage. It was dark enough and there was enough distance between us to defeat casual recording, at least, casual recording by me. Nevertheless, it was informative, if only to illustrate the games that criminals like mobbers play.
I told him the time was over for getting away with crimes like cyber-stalking. He responded, “I think it’s just beginning.” The comment might have been made for show. What it does show is the mentality of these low-end criminals who have harassed me through proceedings in civil and criminal court and continue to harass me almost every moment of every day they can. There’s no reason for them to stop if they think the City of Seattle and the Seattle Police will let them continue until they batter me into leaving my home.
So is this “just the beginning” of what digital criminals can get away with? I think we need to show him, and all those like him, otherwise.
In the next week or two I’ll write a letter to the Seattle City Council about the criminal use of domestic network infrastructure, network technologies and the IoT ecosystem by neighborhood watch groups, real estate scammers and haters in and out of the City of Seattle. If that doesn’t work, I’ll do something else. It’s not like I haven’t been harassed outside of Seattle, or Washington State. It’s easy for digital harassers to follow their victims, even if the harassment starts at home. Other municipalities may possess greater savvy about IoT and other digital crimes than the City of Seattle seems to have. This kind of crime appears to happen elsewhere, and not just in the United States. Perhaps the City of Seattle needs a hand when it comes to handling tech crime. And I have months of data that I’m willing to share with investigators, security researchers or tech manufacturers that may show useful patterns in the criminal use of devices like the Sonos wireless sound system and WiFi network repeaters like the Eero. Identifying these patterns can help to create artificial intelligence and devices that can deflect or prevent digital harassment like what I have suffered in Seattle’s South Cedar Park.
The creation and use of hot spots and unsecured networks to access residential networks and devices is a computer crime that undermines the security of our national infrastructure. Once a network is compromised to allow for the ingress of rogue traffic, it may allow ingress to other bad actors. Based on my unfortunate experiences with a rogue neighborhood watch in South Cedar Park, I believe wireless gateways are fundamentally unsecure and expose us to innumerable vulnerabilities. Your password cannot secure you when network signal is so easily corrupted. Your firewall cannot keep you safe.
There are alternatives to wireless gateways. For example, companies like Sonic, a San Francisco Bay Area reseller, can run a fiber-optic connection all the way to the house. I’m not sure whether such measures will prove more secure in the long run but it’s got to be better than WiFi.
The steps we take first might be the most critical. Until new gateways can be provisioned, AT&T, Comcast, and other providers should simply turn off the open networks and the unadvertised SSIDs that run through the equipment they lease. This equipment makes residential users easy prey for criminals who think digital crime comes with a “Get out of jail free” card. We must demand secure infrastructure. We can still provide free Internet access to those who cannot afford their own services. And we can provide a better solution than public libraries whose poorly secured networks are readymade for hackers looking to siphon off personal information.
It’s time we acknowledge the relationship between residential network infrastructure and the incidence of digital crime. Our domestic security, and even the very integrity of the democratic process, may depend on it.
Leave a Reply