On being mobbed

I am increasingly confident that mobbing, at least as practiced in Seattle, Washington and Albany, California, is heavily dependent on the use of carrier current communication over household electrical wires and that with skillful data collection or a bit of programming, the tampering with the victim household electrical service should be clear. Network surveys, including heat maps and frame captures (Stop mobbing crimes with data: Airtool for wireless capture), can already map the rogue networks and access points that those mobbing me use for transport and antenna effect in combination with whatever communications infrastructure they can leverage on the victim house (Mobbing, infrasound and leaky feeders (part 1) and Mobbing, infrasound and leaky feeders (part 2)). Some heat map applications might also help to visualize the flow of rogue traffic into the victim house from the rogue networks and access points (Stop mobbing crimes with data: Visualize nearby networks with NetSpot). Drone services can also be hired and equipped with acoustic cameras like CAE Software & Systems’ SoundCam to try to generally visualize and map sound and show its direction into the victim home (http://www.cae-systems.de/en/applications.html).

On return to Seattle, a new home nears completion down the street. Within two doors of that, the home that once belonged to an elderly man appears to be at least semi-occupied and undergoing incremental changes. The lot owned by a developer who was sued by the City of Seattle for damaging the foothill supporting the lots on two sides of him shows few signs of work. The dirt driveway and grounds of the home belonging to an erstwhile neighborhood watch captain and her former City of Seattle manager spouse have been paved with asphalt. Slow “improvements” continue on numerous houses as others continue to change hands, likely to be flipped again.

Some six or more years back, at the outset of the mobbing when the nasty neighborhood watch lady across the street dragged fellow co-captains of the not-so-good neighborhood watch into court with her as she tried to get an anti-harassment order against a tenant couple down the street in her malicious drive to run them out of the neighborhood, in courtroom proceedings she claimed to represent others and made references to the new housing that would be built in the neighborhood. I’m not much in the mood to thumb through the transcript of the proceeding that I paid for as I tried to show the City of Seattle what was happening to legal tenants in this neighborhood, but her comments and the Judge’s observation that it sounded like the “neighborhood” was trying to do something to them and to me is plainly stated in the transcript of that Shoreline District Court proceeding. It sounds like, even then, the not-so-good neighbors of South Cedar Park had a plan. And with no one listening as I faithfully tried to alert the North Seattle Police, the North Seattle Community Police, the Washington State Attorney General, the City Attorney of Seattle, and various City of Seattle departments and officials, they have been executing on their plan for years and ensured that, as the mobbers warned me I would be early on if I did not leave, I am harassed every day in this house that I do not own, with the nasty neighborhood watch lady an avid participant in deploying apparent transmitting devices in her vehicle that target the exterior wall of my house to which infrastructure devices and wires are affixed and along which run the Eero and other WiFi extenders deployed by the owners of the mobbing homes on either side of me.

Especially with the finding that household electrical wire may furnish the carrier current for much mobbing traffic, I’ve done something that should help home owners and legal residents whose homes are targeted in the same manner by other criminal speculators and nasty neighborhood watches. And yet I have come to learn this much about how mobbing is done only because I have been left by the City of Seattle to be battered in the home I legally rent. And as I refused to abandon my rights, the City of Seattle prosecuted me for two years after the owners of the mobbing houses insinuated and outright defamed me as delusional in court when I tried to get an order of protection, a fate that women who report white men with money seem all too often to meet. And when I refused to capitulate and be painted as a criminal harasser of those who were battering me with radiation, electrical interference and sound, the City of Seattle ignored the information I presented on how female victims of IoT abuse were being forced to have mental exams in Silicon Valley and forced me to do the same (The New York Times on the digital tools of abuse).

Left to their own nasty devices, many neighborhood watch groups do not prevent crime, they are the crime. With their mudslinging and defamation, with their ill will and the bad intentions that their roles enable, with their false reports to police and their courtroom lies, the captains and coordinators of the National Neighborhood Watch constitute an end run around democracy and the rule of law in the neighborhoods. The program should be terminated as we seek to reform the police in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. The National Neighborhood Watch program owes its existence to the police department. Its captains and coordinators have no loyalty to or oversight by the community groups that advocate for the welfare of all—be they home owners, tenants, or the homeless. It’s time to end the National Neighborhood Watch program, to ensure that everyone on the same block is on the same footing. We don’t need block watch captains to be the “eyes and ears” of the police, like some American Stasi. People who care about others should be the “good citizens” who alert community agencies and city departments to problems in their neighborhoods. No neighborhood watch should create a “plan” to build on lots that others own; no neighbor should be rewarded with a finder’s fee for “clearing” a property by acts of domestic terrorism that include tampering with electrical and communications services, no one should receive free rent or discounted prices on a new roof for terrorizing their neighbors out of their homes.

Moreover, no city should look the other way while its citizens are criminally harassed out of their homes by neighborhood watch groups and criminal speculators. The crime of mobbing appears to be constructed not only to discredit reporting victims but with acute knowledge of the near futility of reporting targeted criminal harassment and domestic terrorism. I have tried again and again to make complaints to city departments and officials as well as state officials and regulatory agencies. The result is the run-around. For example, the City of Seattle has codes in place governing the fall of light onto others’ properties so I recently asked whether they had considered lights that double as WiFi extenders and extend signal. I received a one-line response saying it would be necessary to complain to the FCC about that. Despite the relationship between the FCC and the FBI, writing the FCC seems only to add to the great slush pile of FCC complaints. Terrorists use radios to detonate bombs but we don’t blow off their victims by telling them they have to write the FCC. Mobbing is a dirty data bomb. Attacking people with radiation and electricity is assault and our security is increasingly hindered by the inability of the police to respond to the changed nature of crime to include digital components (Police practice must change to protect us from mobbing and IoT crimes).

One of the enabling factors in mobbing is the dichotomy between the aspirations of a city—sometimes expressed by the declarations of sanctuary made by cities like Seattle, Washington and Albany, California—and the reality of living there. This declaration, in the United States, does not offer haven but instead limits cooperation with immigration authorities. In the United Kingdom, the declaration of sanctuary extends an offer of home befitting the New Colossus, American poet Emma Lazarus’ sonnet for the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The City of Albany, California, in its 2017 resolution “[affirmed] a ‘commitment to protect the rights of all people in our community’.” With these words, the City of Albany expressed the political aspiration that all within the bounds of the small township enjoy its protection (“Albany declares itself a sanctuary city,” The East Bay Times, April 19, 2017, https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/04/19/immigration-albany-makes-sanctuary-city-declaration/). These are the words offered by the Albany City Council, the small East Bay township adjacent to Berkeley, California, in which at least one block watch coordinator who appears to be involved in harassment to turn over at least one of her neighbors’ homes entertains a close relationship with members of the Albany Police Department. These are the words of the political branch of the City of Albany and its elected officials who make resolutions about the aspirations of the township and not statements that reflect the goals of all those employed by the City of Albany or those they appoint or hire, including the police and the block watch coordinators. And in the same manner that in the days after the January 6th attack on the Capitol we learned about police officers sworn to uphold the law who supported the violent attack on the Capitol that sought to overturn Biden’s election, there is a dichotomy in cities like Seattle, Washington and Albany, California between their aspirations as expressed by elected officials, and the realities they offer when City employees and officials who do not share those aspirations ignore them, refuse to enforce them, or systematically work against them.

The result is cities like Seattle, Washington where increasingly stringent protections are being passed to protect those who rent while the City ignores neighborhood watch captains and speculators in northeast Seattle who, in complete contravention of civil, criminal and constitutional law, put a legal tenant under siege, tamper with her electricity to establish an illicit powerline connection based on WiFi extenders, damage her health by the deliberate introduction of radio frequency interference into her home, lie in court and to City prosecutors and seek to have her prosecuted out of her home in an apparent drive to force it onto the market. The result is cities like Albany, California where single women find that the harassment that followed them from another state is not remotely performed but instead involves neighbors working in concert once more, to flip houses with the collusion of the block watch captain. The result is false complaints by unelected block watch captains to police departments that may not share the aspirations of the city, biased policing by officers who may not share the aspirations of the City in which they took an oath to uphold the law. The result is a great dichotomy between elected government and the city officials and employees responsible to enforce the laws and codes. Political fortunes change, after all, and the terms of these elected officials may be short-lived, while the careers of city workers span decades and changing administrations. The result is the advancement of the agenda of development without regard for the laws and values of the cities undergoing change. The result is a culture of graft and lawlessness in which the apparatus of government is corrupted by the interests of real estate speculation and leveraged via the police-connected neighborhood watch to forcibly evict legal residents—tenants and home owners alike—by a criminal scam that relies on clandestine domestic terror while the values of racism and sexism that remain dominant in the trades continue to be played out. When I emailed one affluent East Bay city and asked if they had codes on the use of WiFi extenders, I was told that those victimized by their neighbors’ use of extenders would have to file a civil suit. The requirement to file a civil lawsuit to stop criminal harassment, surveillance or harassment that is tantamount to torture means that only those with money will have the benefit of quiet enjoyment or reasonable privacy. Only those with money will be able to exercise their rights to hold on to their homes once they acquire them. Civil suits are a poor substitute for the codes and laws that must be written or rewritten to serve the digital world. The appropriate codes should at least help to make us equal under the law despite social and economic inequities.

The purpose of this blog is to make public a call to cities whose elected and appointed officials care about the property rights and the security and safety of their residents—home owners and tenants alike—to adopt and support codes limiting or altogether banning the use of WiFi extenders and repeaters, especially those that use powerline technology and can deliberately or inadvertently be used to tamper with others’ electrical services. An adjunct to restrictions on the use of WiFi extenders should force bandwidth providers like Comcast and AT&T to abandon creating their infrastructure from public access points on leased routers. It is also critical for cities to clean up the miles and miles of unused conductive copper wire that makes each and every house vulnerable to digital crimes like mobbing. As a nation, we must have a coherent strategy for a secure network infrastructure and it may be necessary to isolate that infrastructure to better secure the power grid. As for Amazon and its new Amazon Sidewalk WiFi supporting their IoT devices on the Amazon smart devices we purchase, just say no. Don’t opt out; just don’t buy. These companies are selling us out with their unsecure infrastructure and the regulatory agencies that let companies like Amazon, the maker of Eero WiFi extenders, foist more and more unsecure devices onto consumers who may not understand their implications are selling out our security and our safety (“Amazon Sidewalk Mesh Network Raises Security, Privacy Concerns,” Security Week (June 9, 2021), https://www.securityweek.com/amazon-sidewalk-mesh-network-raises-security-privacy-concerns). And given the current state of affairs, even if you don’t purchase and deploy these extenders and IoT devices in your own home, someone else may purchase and deploy them over the property line and into your home without your knowing. A person should be able to turn off the radios in her own home. It shouldn’t be necessary to be a security expert to protect your home from your neighbors.

Part 2 of this blog will be a letter I’m sending to the officials and elected representatives of the City of Albany, California and the City of Seattle, Washington because I know that in both these places, speculators team up with block watch captains and coordinators to “turn over” properties with digital and technology-enabled crime that obviates the constitutional and civil rights of its victims and does us irrevocable harm. If you’re being mobbed, have concerns about the security and privacy of your home given the threat by WiFi extenders and access points or are being harassed by your neighborhood watch group using technology, you might want to consider sending a similar letter to your own city. It’s only a matter of time before the technical underpinnings of this hate crime and real estate scam are entirely exposed and individual cases of the scam traced back to the perpetrators. Minorities, women, and other victims of such crimes should not have to sue their cities and states to make them act when criminals put them under siege in their own homes. Since learning that household wiring provides the carrier current for the rogue communication that is mobbing, I’ve been keeping about 90 percent of my electricity shut down at the electrical panel. Others who are able to confirm that carrier current communication is involved in their own in-home harassment might also be. What will we do in winter?