On being Mobbed

I informed my relative of the intrusion after finding the driver’s side door ajar and the contents of the glove box strewn about. Privately, I wondered if the break-in was coincidence or connected to the mobbing. I considered the services programmed into the console and wondered about the location of the entertainment module in her car. Most cars today use battery power when they’re not running; perhaps the tuners can be leveraged in mobbing even when the vehicles are parked. Perhaps it’s even possible to collect personal information or to access a Bluetooth pairing with a victim phone through a parked car. Given the continually unfolding consequences of digitization, it would not surprise.

I didn’t tell anyone about these concerns; the fact that the crime of mobbing is designed to discredit victims makes it risky to do so. And even if a victim’s strange stories of mobbing were believed, they would be disturbing. My relative and I agreed that a report should be made to the Albany Police. I reluctantly made the call.

Ω

By the time I pulled on a sweater and got to the door, the dispatched officers were waiting by my relative’s car. Par for the course in a town little more than a mile square. There were two of them in the common configuration: a younger one who appeared to be the junior and maybe even a rookie, and one a bit older who was probably the senior of the two. I introduced myself but the senior officer interrupted me before I could open the car door to show them what I’d found.

What he wanted to talk about out there on the sidewalk, was an email I’d sent to the Albany Police a week or so earlier. Flapping a piece of card stock about, he raised the issue of a city code I’d discovered that appeared to prohibit recreational vehicles of certain specifications, chiefly among them size, from parking on most city streets. He indicated the large recreational vehicle parked alongside the house to the south, at the AT&T cross-connect box installed along the parking strip. The largest of the RVs and work vehicles that parked within view of my bedroom window most nights, this one had what might have been some kind of satellite receiver on the roof. Did I really want him to tag the vehicle, he pressed me. Because, he said, when he saw my call come in about the break-in, he figured he’d just deal with both issues at once. Didn’t I think people should be able to park their vehicles in front of their homes, he challenged me. If it was him, he flatly stated, that’s what he’d want to do. He’d want to be able to park his RV right in front of his house. What was my problem with that? He walked back and forth in front of me, agitated, flapping the piece of card stock about and repeating that if that’s what I wanted, he’d do it right then. Was it?

It was pretty uncomfortable. I had written the Albany Police to ask about a city code. I said that if the code I’d found was valid, it should be enforced. And though I know well that public disclosure cuts both ways and requests made to the police are generally public record, I hadn’t expected a public discussion on the curb about whether it was appropriate for me to ask that a code be enforced against a neighbor. The officer noted that the code was only enforced when a complaint was made. I had more or less made one. But before we could deal with the disturbing event of my relative’s vehicle being broken into in front of the house, I had to defend my request that a city code be enforced.

So I did. While I typically might not care, I told the officers, I was being harassed in my home with radio. It appeared, I went on, to be connected to real estate speculation in the neighborhood. I noted that the Albany block coordinator who lives across the street also appeared to be involved. Finally, I pointed out that recreational vehicles these days are often equipped with cellular, television, and other communications technologies and can function as low-power mobile broadcast stations.

I remember the look on the officers’ faces and the silence I broke with some off-the-cuff remark. Without further ado, the officer walked over to the RV and stuck the legal notice under the wiper, waving to make sure I saw it there. My relative’s vehicle was inspected, the junior officer handed me a card, and the pair left.

Ω

It wasn’t the interaction I’d expected, but at least the officers weren’t the same two who’d shown up at the door on Easter Sunday, demanding I produce my relative. The balaclavas the police that day wore failed to hide their smirks on their faces or mute the rude remark made in response to the information I gave: “That’s expensive.” Amused by their suspicions, my relative later asked me if they’d demanded to search the closets and cabinets of the house for her.

When I recounted the interaction in Make Albany safe again; dismantle the National Neighborhood Watch, I didn’t mention the inappropriate remarks, nor did I mention that I angrily asked what they might be able to do about the lowlife in the north house who appeared to be tracking me in my own home. One Albany Police officer quickly responded that cyberstalking was above their pay grade. I would have to contact the FBI.

Given that the visit was a case of harassment-by-police, a fact that the officers themselves appeared to understand, they might have misrepresented the options available to them to investigate a woman’s claim that she was being tracked in her home by neighbors. But even if what the officer said was true, you don’t have to be McKayla Maroney to know that the FBI invites but appears to ignore citizen reports of felony crimes. Going to the FBI website and writing up a complaint appears to have the same effect as adding one to the FCC’s slush-pile. This is the run-around that makes predatory schemes like mobbing attractive to criminal investors and profiteers and makes victims wonder what it is that they pay the police to do.

Rest assured, if turnabout was indeed fair play and I had positioned motion-detectors to track the white male owners of the north and south mobbing houses in Seattle, the Seattle Police would have been responsive. In Seattle, dishonesty and defamation obviated the need for any actual bad acts on my part. In Albany that day, the police were suddenly distracted from my relative’s welfare by a radio call. I watched as they walked across the street to the Albany Police motorcycle that was parked in front of the block coordinator’s house. I’d often seen one parked there on social calls, one time attempting a figure-8 on the lawn with a hooting officer astride.

Within minutes of their departure, the Albany block coordinator crossed the street, approaching the lowlife to the north who stood at the rear of his car. “That should get her out of there,” she said; the two exchanged a smile. With this, my growing suspicion was confirmed. There did indeed appear to be cooperation between the scheming neighborhood watch group of my Seattle neighborhood and at least one block coordinator in Albany, in an apparent attempt to turn over not one, but two residences that I should legally be able to call home.

Calling the police is dangerous. In “A Tenant’s Procedural Due Process Right in Chronic Nuisance Ordinance Jurisdictions” ( Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 43:875), Salim Katach describes how tenant victims of domestic abuse in jurisdictions using Chronic Nuisance Ordinances (CNOs) can end up evicted and on the street when police indiscriminately issue citations. The cashier at the liquor store George Floyd last visited wished he had not called the police. When women cannot report cyberstalking without being asked if they’re “on meds,” when women can’t report IoT abuse without being held for a mental exam, when people cannot ask for help from the police because of police bias or corruption, and when people are forced to face violence in their homes or neighborhoods because they will suffer worse at the hands of police, their civil rights have been attacked. When block coordinators with close relationships to police, emergency or other city services harass their neighbors and racketeer in their neighborhoods under cover of a role afforded by the city, the city must act to protect the community–the city is responsible for all those it appoints.

Ω

In July of 2010, the Albany City Council approved an ordinance prohibiting recreational vehicles (RVs) from parking on city streets. The ordinance, drafted with multiple exceptions, couldn’t come soon enough for residents of Masonic Avenue across from the elevated tracks of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system and the recreational path below that had replaced the homes demolished to complete the short run between Berkeley and El Cerrito. An article in the East Bay Times noted the history of complaints about the oversized vehicles (“Albany to ban RV parking on streets,” East Bay Times (July 15, 2010), https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2010/07/15/albany-to-ban-rv-parking-on-streets-2/). “No. 1, they are a huge traffic hazard,” said resident Jan Hitchcock. “No. 2 they are a huge eyesore. Nobody wants them around the corner from their house. And environmentally these things are a problem.”

The ordinance itself, at least the one that prompted me to email the Albany Police, is titled 9-10.21 Parking of Oversized Vehicles Prohibited and can be found at https://www.albanyca.org/home/showdocument?id=10412. Having become accustomed to searching the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) for information on Washington State law, this lone page seems out-of-context for me. But citing it proved adequate for my purposes. [Note 10/17/21: The better comparison here would have been the Seattle Municipal Code, which I have also searched.]

I was only marginally familiar with the issue of recreational vehicle parking when I found the ordinance online, and it was more or less within the context of the increasing numbers of broken down and inoperable RVs housing the homeless in Seattle neighborhoods that didn’t want them. The notion that residents object to them because they are traffic hazards or considered an eyesore was not something I’d given much thought. As a woman whose network surveys increasingly show phones paired with WiFi extenders that bound, intrude into, or bisect my home or intersect with and overlap other WiFi extenders, what concerned me was the proximity and potential of a low-power radio or TV station. Perhaps what should also have concerned me was the potential of a mobile power store. More on that later.

The rogue sound often sounds as though it’s coming from a device tuning to find the right frequency; at other times it has the quality of a cellular signal. The nights when the cellular signal effect is strongest and the most difficult to evade have often coincided with the comings and goings of the recreational vehicle I had finally reported, and its proximity and line-of-sight position to my bedroom windows.

Ω

About a month back in Albany, the lowlife living in the house to the north or his buddy down the street pulled a vintage pickup truck into his driveway and opened the hood. The old blue truck often parks in the same line-of-sight position proximate to my bedroom window, a location shared at times by the RV I reported. Other frequent parkers there include an old El Camino or similar vehicle shared by the owner of the blue truck and the Prius that belongs to the owner of the RV, a senior I’ve often seen standing on a ladder in her driveway to position some camera or perhaps the sensor that triggers lights to come on when I am on the other side of the street. Given my acculturation to neighbor surveillance in Seattle, this is a familiar experience. Perhaps it’s only because this is a typical block in the flatlands of Albany that the inappropriate range of the sensing lights, the WiFi lights, and the video doorbells, is hard to hide.

Within a few days that the blue pickup pulled into the lowlife’s driveway, I woke to the sound of an electrical contact being made–first one, and then two. I heard it as though I were enclosed in the mains panel or slept in an engine compartment next to a battery being jumped. I felt around in the darkness to shut off the battery powering the one device in my bedroom and tried to go back to sleep. That same week, if not the same morning, I woke to the amplified voice of a woman–probably carried by a phone with an open microphone and some WiFi repeater or cellular extender. “They hear it better that way,” she explained. Perhaps she was explaining how they could speak to me in my bedroom when they weren’t in the house.

After realizing that the copper wiring that brought communications services to the house was involved in the harassment, I had removed old phone jacks and cut the low-voltage wires. I pulled nearly all the coaxial cable from the house and removed it from the exterior. As usual, the interfaces on my cell phone were off, Airport was engaged, the volume muted, and the phone itself powered down and folded into a Faraday pocket. No fans, save for the low-voltage circulating fans of the refrigerator, were enabled in the house. Power was shut down on nearly all the circuit breakers. I don’t know if “they” was a reference to the victims selected by these predatory criminals, to side sleepers who are more vulnerable to the rogue sound based on bone conduction, or the over-fifty population who might possess a criminally attractive combination of features that includes the title to a property, health issues, and vulnerability to the right range of sound.

Shortly thereafter, the blue truck pulled away from the curb and drove off.

Ω

Last week or the week before, I installed radio-frequency blocking window film on a few windows. Soon after that, the lowlife to the north stood to the side as his buddy–probably the one who drives the blue truck and the El Camino-like vehicle–gunned the engine to keep it running ’til the vehicle mounted the driveway. Their young children stood around, knee-high to the grille, as the engine compartment was opened. This was the day I heard the lowlife estimate the range of a likely device put into the engine compartment as 15 yards.

The harassment was severe that night. When the harassment quieted in the wee hours of the next night as the lowlife probably slept, I looked out the window at the bright light shining through the right headlight of the old vehicle, some five feet from my electric meter and the Sonic fiber box near the northwest corner of my family home.

I heard the lowlife gunning his engines a few days afterward, telling the chuckling husband of the Albany block coordinator that he was “all charged up.” The seldom driven vintage car with the ablated interior that left smears, pools and puddles of oil on the street since my childhood, remains in the driveway. It was one of several vehicles owned by the father or grandfather of the lowlife’s spouse, probably the grandfather who at one time owned a local repair shop for stereos and TVs and likely installed the massive Yagi-Uda television antenna on their roof that a few months back was finally taken down. When the family business was shut down decades back, a heap of consumer grade electronics remained in their backyard, probably including the stereo of mine we’d asked the man to repair.

Ω

After the garbage trucks came through last week, I spotted a torn envelope that hadn’t made the transition from the recycling bin to the truck and left the door open to pick it up from the asphalt. The contractor working at the house to the south called my name. This is the house with the driveway mentioned in Radiohead: Cell phones are radios (part 3), where a few years back and for days at a time, a vehicle that appeared to be equipped with a radio microphone and exterior side speaker parked nightly in the driveway at the south boundary of our yard, angled to put the headlights in direct line-of-sight position to my bedroom window about ten yards away. With mobbing underway in Seattle and Albany, I had grown increasingly uncomfortable with those who frequented that house, parking in that driveway close to the AT&T fiber cross-connect box (Infrastructure crimes: When fiber is less secure than WiFi). The house to the south changed hands and was sold to relatives of the contractor about a year ago, before I started spending more time in Albany again. Upon leaving, the primary occupant told my relative she had to go “clear out [her] grandma’s house.” As in Seattle, I hoped the change of hands would improve my situation.

The contractor asked if I’d “dropped” an item onto their driveway. He was referring to a heavy item, perhaps a countertop of some kind left leaning on the low fence my family had built decades back along the boundary of the front yard. I told him that I had not dropped it but had laid it down and that I had done so to prevent damage to the fence. His response was that the fence was on their property. I guess that was supposed to mean that they were entitled to damage it. He said he’d been trying to “be nice” but that he’d told the city about his concerns three months back and intended to hire a surveyor. We might have paid for the fence, he said, but it was on their property. I let him know that I’d also moved the heavy utility rack for a truck that I’d seen resting on the fence when it was first left in the driveway and that I had nothing further to say to him.

It wasn’t long after I went inside that there was a knock at the door. I peered out the peephole to see two figures standing on the porch. In a continuing pandemic during which virtually everyone who comes to the door knocks and then retreats down a few steps, I was disinclined to open the door; we spoke through the closed door. Identifying themselves as the new owners of the house to the south, they said their relative—the contractor—told them about our exchange. They said they didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot. Then they told me that our flowers were on their property. [Note 03/30/22: One of the couple’s comments that I didn’t include when I wrote this was how they prefaced their claim by announcing they had children and didn’t want trouble. Deliberate references to children to intimate that legal residents are dangerous appears to be a tool in “clearing-by-smearing” scenarios. Mobbers and their speculator cronies use their children as tools to defame victim property owners and legal residents. Defamation was core to McCarthyism in the 1950s. These days groups like QAnon use similar comments invoke conspiracy theories, inducing panic and fear and advancing the political aims of the far-right. The “Wenatchee witch hunt” of the mid-1990s stands as a reference to the use of child abuse as a political tool in Washington State and should be taken as a cautionary tale. I note that early on, the nasty neighborhood watch lady of northeast Seattle who is no doubt pivotal to my being mobbed wrote hysterical email to my landlords falsely claiming that I was a “professional maker of pornographic film.” I was later told I’d also been accused of soliciting at least one neighborhood child for photographs. This kind of defamation should be understood for the threat it is. The willingness of self-styled residential “clearers” to “smear” their victims with lurid and damaging claims is illustrative of the base mentality of these “investors” who dress themselves up as “leaders.” If we value civility, civil law, and democracy, we must not reward their crimes. There should be no tolerance for hate.]

Ω

The fact that turnabout is not fair play indicates the bias at work at the police station. With the murder of George Floyd, communities across the nation began to call for police reform. Unelected and little trained community members may have disproportionate access to the police by virtue of their involvement with watch groups. This alone can increase the likelihood of poor police outcomes when neighborhood watch captains and coordinators use their access against their neighbors.

In Springfield, Missouri, a Ku Klux Klan recruitment poster depicted a Klansman in full regalia atop the headline “Neighborhood Watch” (https://www.salon.com/2013/07/26/missouri_ku_klux_klan_wants_you_to_join_their_neighborhood_watch/). The “Neighborhood Watch” tagline and flyer appeared in Winchester, Indiana a year later, casting watch groups as tools of white male supremacy (https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2014/10/10/ku-klux-klan-winchester-indiana-recruiting/17028771/). In places like Seattle, Washington and Albany, California, developers and real estate speculators may well use these locally and nationally funded programs to identify properties to turn over and perhaps even to socially engineer would-be “reluctant sellers” to make a deal. Whether it’s the Klan or real estate speculators, the purpose is exclusion. In the case of the Klan, the traditional victim of exclusion is Black. In the case of neighborhood watch groups in Seattle that try to maintain appearances while pursuing their exclusionary politics, the victim rents. “We like the neighborhood watch,” one of the mobbers told me. “They keep the renters in line.”

In Seattle, the neighborhood watch group in my northeast neighborhood has been infiltrated by the interests of real estate speculation. In Albany, the co-opting of the community good by at least one block coordinator of bad intention supports a similar drive to turn over, “rehabilitate,” and resell houses. There’s no money to be made when home owners hold their properties. In both cases, the ejection of legal residents is aided by vigilantism and covert criminal harassment plotted against against a false “blame-the-victim” narrative common in cyber-crime that the victim is decomposed, dangerous, demented, and quite likely depraved. Whether these community groups are used by real estate speculators and criminal harassers or by the Ku Klux Klan, the fact of their utility to private, profit-making and even criminal interests indicates a dubious charter.

Ω

When I realized electric power was involved in the mobbing harassment months back, I took steps that I hoped would ameliorate the ill effects of electrical and radio-frequency interference. I shut down circuit breakers. I limited my use of household services that drew electric current and created other currents. I tried to keep what seemed to be radio-frequency interference (RFI) away from my body. I bought a power bank.

Battery in hand, I set up to sleep one night in the bedroom in the farthest corner of the house, with windows on three sides. I soon found that a battery wouldn’t solve the problem.

I woke in the early morning to the feeling of a magnetic pull on the battery that was near my head. Panicked, I yanked the adapter from the battery and shut it down. I don’t remember if the usual harassment was audible.

Without a better choice, I continued to use the battery for the mitigation it provided. But because the tampering with electricity now extended to the creation of what must be electromagnetism, perhaps to induce fear, I would have to consider the possibility of similar events when I considered where to sleep. In addition to having significant wall space to create carrier current communication by power-line connection, some of the circuitry for major household systems ran along the wall and perhaps in the attic as well as through the crawl space. Moreover, that room falls along a direct line from the backyard of the lowlife where he keeps an extension cord plugged in and draped over a collection of metal objects, to another neighboring yard more than amply provisioned with an access point that used to overlap the Comcast router I abandoned in addition to some equipment that seemed to have a red sensor on it and something of a serious CrossFit training course complete with a pull-up bar and hefty weight set that made me wonder about magnetic weights. Even before this odd and upsetting experience with magnetism, I was being woken up in the early morning hours by what was probably the extender-amplified sounds of weight-lifting accompanied by undercurrents of verbal abuse.

When you’re the target of guerilla warfare in the neighborhood, you learn not to jump to conclusions. CrossFit is trendy these days. But it’s hard not to consider the four or more involved in the Seattle side of the mobbing early on, the stickers advertising the gym they frequented, and the likelihood that practices of a military bent might appeal to those who enjoy bullying, or at least that their training equipment or practice might do double “duty” in mobbing. While the mobbing house owners on both sides seemed to arrange wood or other excess materials or debris around their homes in what seemed to be a strategy to minimize bounce-back, after the pandemic started the south mobbing house owner took to doing his CrossFit routine at the exterior corner of his house closest to my Seattle City Light smart meter and the side of my home where the communications infrastructure was installed, leaving a large weight outside, exposed to the Seattle rain. It was difficult to tell whether the outside activities were intended to intimidate me into staying inside or whether the activities were used to trigger an uptick in the harassment. If I wasn’t moving in the area targeted by the sensors that would trigger the emitting of harassing sound, the mobbers would have to. But there have also been a lot of “noisy” tools or wireless tools and appliances undoubtedly used not only to create exterior noise but to create noise on a wireless extension from the exterior over conductive copper wires and into the interior of my home.

At one time, prompted by the sighting of a US Marine Corps bumper sticker and other signifiers of the military, not to mention the military background that the north mobbing house owner made sure I knew about, I considered writing a blog entry on the origins and culture of CrossFit. Last year I read about the resignation of CrossFit founder Greg Glassman after the leaked recording of a Zoom conference with CrossFit gym owners in which he said: “We’re not mourning for George Floyd, I don’t think me or any of my staff are… Can you tell me why I should mourn for him? Other than it’s the ‘white’ thing to do. I get that pressure but give me another reason” (“CrossFit Gym C.E.O. Greg Glassman Steps Down in Chaos,” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/style/crossfit-gyms-founder-protests.html).

It wasn’t until after I removed the Blue&Me module from my small car and noted the USB interfaces that remained vulnerable to the radio-frequency abuse that I started to consider the use of direct current with high-frequency sound in mobbing.

Stay tuned for part 2 of The mobbers’ “World Wireless System” and hate culture in Albany, California.”