On being mobbed

After writing Mobbing, infrasound and leaky feeders (part 2), I remembered details that I hadn’t included, facts that might help someone in a similar situation, and context that might make the difference to a security expert or investigator who is trying to help me and other victims of tech-enabled crimes like this one.

This is often the case in writing, where things fall into place as you write and others come to mind even when you think the writing is done. One thing I omitted was information about some newer utility infrastructure sited in neighborhood utility easements.

We make assumptions about the power grid and infrastructure around us based on what is familiar. We look to connections made at the pole. But infrastructure based on the network of utility poles and wires falls into obsolescence as technologies age. Fiber-optic wire–transporting optical signal over strands of glass–represents a newer, faster physical media, one that is increasingly underground.

A few years ago, when the mobbing was already underway, I watched as fiber-optic lines were buried below ground block by block around my Seattle neighborhood. More recently, I watched the same process in the Berkeley area neighborhood where I stay. In Seattle, the only visible change was the thin fiber line that was installed on the house when I discontinued my Comcast service in favor of AT&T Fiber. At the Berkeley area house, however, a large utility box was installed on the sidewalk next to the neighboring house. It looks like the leftmost utility box shown in the following image on Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia identifies this as a cross-connect box (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video-ready_access_device).

You’d think the undergrounding of utility lines would make them secure. But that’s not necessarily true. It was readily apparent to me when a familiar looking old man in a no-name utility truck climbed the pole across the street from my Seattle home around the time the mobbing began. The placement of utilities atop poles reduces accessibility, making possible acts of tampering visible and providing a reasonable level of security and safety to infrastructure installed in the public right-of-way. Equipment and know-how is required to climb a utility pole. And from what I gather, those who are not utility workers are prohibited from climbing them. [Note 10/16/21: I keep meaning to note that these days I think about two possibilities in particular–that the old man climbing the pole was adding another communications service provisioned for me without my knowing, and that the addition of the service by a no-name company was intended to avoid drawing attention; or, that the service was installed to provision a connection or line used to radiate onto my wires. There does remain the original possibility that the service might have been deployed to feed a guest network on my own router or to connect to the infrastructure on the side of my home in Seattle. At the time the mobbing began, I probably had Comcast though I’ve also tried a converter box or two, including one often used to record the programming that was overlapped by harassment.]

But when these utilities terminate in boxes on the sidewalk, security is an increasing issue. The remainder of the photographs in this entry are mine.

City officials should be concerned about how easy it is to access AT&T fiber management boxes like the one I photographed back in March 2018 next door to where I continue to be harassed with malicious sound via broadcast and multimedia network data near the Albany-Berkeley border. Officials on the state and federal levels should also be alarmed by the ease with which our national infrastructure is available for tampering, sabotage, and acts of terrorism. How can we protect the power grid when we can’t lock a utility box? For criminals with access to utility boxes like the one below, it’s like Plug and Play. Access can probably be arranged or procured on the fly. On the occasion documented in these photographs, the panel door was unlocked and cracked open.

There are many complaints online about AT&T utility boxes that are not secured, that are open and that are damaged. Utility companies must do more besides make phone numbers available for concerned residents to call, often for a lack of response or for the run-around. This infrastructure is key to domestic and national security. I can’t help but wonder how easy it must be for access to these services to be abused by terrorists and organized crime.

Earlier this month I walked by the same utility box. The padlock was open; no utility truck in sight. I snapped the padlock shut; the nights are rough enough when you’re being mobbed. Criminal access to utility boxes like these likely enables exploits beyond the simple theft of utility, including the diversion of signal for purposes of surveillance and harassment. The utility grid maps the terrain that is the American attack surface. Every utility box is a vulnerability.