On being mobbed

The promised entry, “Smart meters, carrier current transmission and the mobber’s radio,” is taking shape and I hope to publish it in the next week. For now, I’ve been busy with the day-to-day things one does to survive. In the course of trying to survive, I’ve been experimenting around the likelihood that when mobbing is delivered by infiltrating household systems, the mobbing harassment relies on tampering with your power and leveraging household electric wires to make escape impossible and to make certain, literally, that you feel the heat.

Here’s this morning’s NetSpot survey from the Bay Area house. This screenshot shows the rendering of WiFi signal strength in the house. My WiFi is disabled today, as it is almost all the time, and was disabled when I did this updated survey some weeks back.

In writing earlier posts about how the speaker crimes of mobbing are effected by mobbing infrastructure, I noted the deployment of a likely malicious access point associated with a printer both at the Bay Area house and in Seattle. All-in-one printers that make phone connections without an on-premises phone line could allow ingress of rogue sound onto household wiring and HomePNA and might be useful for transmissions onto Cat5 or twisted pair phone lines. Some of this clatter was eliminated when I had the AT&T NID (network interface device) removed from the side of the Bay Area house, for example. Whereas the sound that leaks from coaxial tends to be low-frequency, phone wiring is likely to carry sound of a higher range. Printers and other electronic devices emit sound in the ultrasonic range.

The embassy attacks in China and Cuba focused attention on the potential harmful effects of sound we humans do not hear. In “Can Ultrasonic Noise Make You Sick?” writer Robert Lee Hotz observes, “Ultrasonic sound is the workhorse of electronics” (“Can Ultrasonic Noise Make You Sick?” The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-ultrasonic-noise-make-you-sick-1529147100). Not only are ultrasonic tones embedded into commercials and ads to track consumer behavior from device to device, and not only do parametric speakers use ultrasonic beams to shape sound. Ultrasonic noise is intrinsic to the electronic devices we use at home, including printers.

“Can what you don’t hear hurt you?” Hotz asks. Researchers into ultrasonic sound’s effects on the human body believe it can. Matt Wixey, a UK security researcher I’ve referenced elsewhere on the On being mobbed blog joined with researchers Shane Johnson and Emiliano De Cristofaro of the University College London in the writing of a research paper about the deployment of acoustic cyber-weapers through smart devices (“On the Feasibility of Acoustic Attacks Using Commodity Smart Devices,” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.07157.pdf).

Veterinarians have gathered increasing evidence that ultrasonic sound can harm the cats and dogs we keep as our most constant companions. In 2015, a survey of veterinary groups in the United Kingdom found links between high-frequency sounds and feline audiogenic reflex seizures. The contributing noise makers included phones ringing and computer printers. The article makes the point that manufacturers work to eliminate only the sounds that we hear. Dogs, however, hear sounds of up to 45,000Hz. Cats can hear sounds of up to 64,000Hz. This means that when criminal haters and the corrupt mob your home, they mob your cats and your dogs. Not only was it without regard for my own health that the nasty neighborhood watch of Seattle’s South Cedar Park and the speculators and home owners in bed with them mobbed my home. It was without regard for the health and well being of my beloved cat (“Is technology driving your pet insane?” c|net, April 4, 2018, https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/is-technology-driving-your-pet-insane/). And this is why once we begin to recognize the crime of mobbing, those criminals who deploy mobbing to environments that are inhabited by animals should be charged with cruelty to animals.

Within the scope of mobbing, as well as providing the ammunition for a stealth attack more subtle than infrasonic pressure waves, ultrasound may be a useful way to disrupt human lives by disturbing their pets. At the Bay Area house, for example, a dog in a neighboring yard often starts to bark during times when harassment is audible to me in a room with good proximity. This is probably a side effect. In Seattle, one of the complaints made about a renting couple down the street from me by one of the co-captains of the nasty neighborhood watch who lived next to them and, ironically, used some sort of ultrasonic fencing to keep his dogs from venturing off the lot, was that the tenants’ dogs barked too much. It wouldn’t surprise me if haters and real estate speculators or neighborhood watch groups who use the tactics of hate employ ultrasonic sound to disturb dogs and to thereby create a pretense for civil complaints to harass their victims from their homes.

And as I write this, I cannot help but think of the female partner of the not-so-noble owner of the north mobbing house who was present even at the start of the mobbing when my cat began to have the harrowing asthma attacks that soon led to her death (My neighborhood has a problem with bullying). I remember how the north mobbing house owner told me, without my asking, that she owned or was otherwise involved with a local veterinary practice.