On being mobbed

Spark gap transmitters became the focus of Nikola Tesla’s work with high-frequency radio waves. Nick Kraakman of waveguide offers a “literature review” of the spark gap in the experiments of Nikola Tesla (“Tesla’s Spark Gaps: A Literature Review,” waveguide (August 20, 2017, https://waveguide.blog/teslas-spark-gaps-literature-review/). “Spark gaps play a central role in many of Nikola Tesla’s devices,” Kraakman observes, “most prominently in the circuits powering his famous Tesla Coils.”

A spark gap is the space traversed from one electrode to another when voltage reaches the required strength. This generation of radio frequency electromagnetic waves was the result of, in Tesla’s words, a “disruptive discharge.” The German physicist Heinrich Hertz built the first spark-gap transmitters in 1887, proving the existence of radio waves. Guglielmo Marconi developed the discovery of the pulsed waves further, creating the transmitters and receivers that by 1896 heralded the era of radiotelegraphy (“Spark-gap transmitter,” Inventions & Experiments of Nikola Tesla, https://teslaresearch.jimdofree.com/invention-of-radio/spark-gap-transmitter/).

The World is on the eve of
an astounding revelation.

—The World Sunday Magazine (March 8, 1896)

Tesla’s ideas synthesized the developing understanding of the radio wave with electricity. The Tesla coil is a power generator, producing high-voltage, high-frequency alternating current. To him, a radio was an oscillator with the potential of converting electricity into high-frequency radio waves that would someday enable the delivery of power over great distances (“Tesla the Car Is a Household Name. Long Ago, So Was Nikola Tesla,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/technology/nikola-tesla.html). “Electricity will be as free as the air,” The World Sunday Magazine declared in a review of Tesla’s experiments:

“The World is on the eve of an astounding revelation. The conditions under which we exist will be changed.  The end has come to telegraph and telephone monopolies with a crash.  Incidentally, all the other monopolies that depend on power of any kind will come to a sudden stop.  The earth currents of electricity are to be harnessed.  Nature supplies them free of charge.  The cost of power and light and heat will be practically nothing.” (“A Way to Harness Free Electric Currents Discovered by Nikola Tesla,” The World Sunday Magazine (March 8, 1896), http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1896-03-08.htm).

Tesla invented the electrical resonant transformer circuit dubbed the Tesla coil in 1891. It developed out of his work to create a wireless lighting system from gas discharge light bulbs and a high-voltage, high-frequency power source that created an oscillating electric field. Even before the turn of the century, Tesla was experimenting with wireless power, successfully transmitting radio frequency power short distances using inductive coupling. In 1901, Tesla commenced the design and construction of the Wardenclyffe Tower, an experimental wireless transmission station, on Long Island, New York. The Wardenclyffe facility would transmit text, graphics and voice to land and to sea. Tesla’s ambition to be the first got the better of him, however, and when he moved to expand the project to the transmission of wireless power, J.P. Morgan refused further funding. The news that Marconi had wirelessly transmitted the Morse code for the letter “S” across the Atlantic did not bode well for the project’s recovery. Tesla’s downfall came even as Wardenclyfee was being built. (“History of the Tesla coil,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Tesla_coil).

Wardenclyffe was to be the first in a worldwide network of 30 plants dedicated to wireless transmission. Built in the style of the Italian Renaissance, Wardenclyffe would serve as a model, housing electrical devices, generators, transmitters, X-ray devices, Tesla coils and more, and surrounded by an industrial “radio city” producing devices based on Tesla’s many patents. The tower was built amid Tesla’s increasingly desperate attempts to recoup funding and stave off financial ruin. By 1904, Tesla was forced to mortgage the abandoned tower. In March 1916, an article headlined “Tesla’s Million Dollar Folly” stated that Wardenclyffe was the “greatest monument to his unfinished dreams” (“Tesla’s Million Dollar Folly,” https://teslaresearch.jimdofree.com/articles-interviews/tesla-s-million-dollar-folly-export-american-industries-march-1-1916/). The World Wireless System Tesla envisioned was not to be.

The development of vacuum tube transmitters after the Great War rendered spark transmitters obsolete outside of emergencies. Vacuum tube transmitters had multiple advantages. Not only were they less costly than spark gap transmitters, they produced continuous waves that could travel a greater distance with less interference. Moreover, these transmitters could provide audio.

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The cornerstone of Tesla experiments with electric lighting, X-rays, and wireless power, Tesla coil circuits found use in medical equipment for electrotherapy until World War II wartime demand refocused the production of spark transmitters on communications devices. The core component of the “violet ray” device was a disruptive discharge coil and interrupter assembly that allowed for the application of high-voltage, high-frequency current to the human body. Touted as a cure-all, the Virex violet ray company provided treatment protocols for ailments including brain fog and nasal catarrh; catarrh is old medical terminology for an excess of mucus usually in the nose, throat or sinus cavities (“Violet ray,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_ray; digital scan of Virex manual, Virex violet ray company c. 1920).

In the 1940s the United States government began seizing and destroying the violet ray electrotherapy machines that continued to be produced by companies like Master Electric. Even after the last known seizure of the devices in Indiana, in 1951, there were “off-label” uses like that of Jon Burge of the Chicago Police Department who was suspected of using a violet ray device during interrogations sometime in the 1970s or 1980s. Another use of Tesla innovation that is not off-label is apparently the cattle prod, often repurposed for human torture over the years. In “That Time Tesla Casually Invented The Cattle Prod,” Cedric Voets lampoons Tesla’s 1898 description of an “apparatus” with “two prongs supplying the positive and negative poles” whose disruptive energy might allow an animal to be “shocked, stunned or killed, as required.” The application was animal training wherein, as Tesla put it, “the physical effects of an electric shock are soon gone, only the moral ones remaining” (https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/electricity-tame-wild-beasts-tesla-animal-training-electricity and https://www.cracked.com/article_28703_that-time-tesla-casually-invented-cattle-prod.html). Perhaps that’s how the neighborhood watch thinks about it too.

An electric cattle prod is a copper-clad cylinder with an insulated handle on one end and a pair of electrodes on the “shock end.” The stick delivers a high-voltage low-current shock on contact. In a spark-gap transmitter type of effect, cattle prods of higher voltage interfere with radio reception when the shock is generated. The purpose of the device is to force movement by the infliction of pain. A quick blow inflicts significant pain; a longer contact could kill. In cattle, the purpose is to move the beasts to slaughter; in human beings, the purpose is to punish, to deter, to move away or expel. Stun guns are intended to incapacitate; the cattle prods that in 2017 Australia’s Pauline Hanson of her own right-wing One Nation referred to as “move-along sticks” that should be used on climate protesters are intended to expel (“Pauline Hanson built a political career on white victimhood and brought far-right rhetoric to the mainstream,” The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/pauline-hanson-built-a-political-career-on-white-victimhood-and-brought-far-right-rhetoric-to-the-mainstream-134661). In 2016 Hanson was given a coveted Nationals spot on the highly politicized National Broadband Network (NBN) committee. It is always of note when someone in government whose communications show so little regard for others involves herself in the technologies of communication.

According to the Wikipedia entry, “A stun gun is nothing more than a beefed up cattle prod and both can be used on humans or animals by design… Most are simple designs powered by 9-volt or a combination of other types of batteries…. Another typical design is a box containing a large battery (or battery pack) at the handle end and wires embedded in a fibreglass rod, ending with two electrodes in a rubber tip (“Cattle prod,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_prod). The battery-charged electrodes have a long history of application to the human skin, particularly within the context of torture. Before the cattle prod was reinvented as a police stun baton or taser, it was applied to the human skins of protesters in the 1960s, during the Civil Rights Movement. The picana is an instrument of torture using spark-gapped electrodes. High voltage and low current combine to minimize the marks and maximize the pain. “The electrical picana operates on direct current but it can be plugged into the wall socket of the victim’s home with the aid of a transformer. It is transported in a suitcase and usually powered by an automotive battery” (“History of Electric Torture,” https://www.reed.edu/poli_sci/faculty/rejali/articles/History_of_Electric_Torture.html).

“Electricity has long been a favorite tool of torturers,” reads a 2001 Time magazine article called “Weapons Of Torture” (https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,138886,00.html). “In many instances pain is still delivered the old-fashioned way, from cattle prods or wires connected to a car battery. But now human-rights workers are running across more cases in which high-tech devices based on American technology are used.” Stun technology was developed in the United States in the 1970s. According to Brian Wood of Amnesty International, “electroshock stun weapons are ideal for their evil purposes–cheap, easy to conceal, and hard to trace.” The devices are easy to use, allow for the localization of pain and for its administration countless times. Their size is comparable to a cell phone and the batteries that power them can be purchased at any store. A similar principle applies to electric torture involving 12 volt DC automotive batteries. The battery might have the amperage to kill you but 12 volts of direct current do not supply the voltage “pressure” to force lethal amperage through the resistance of your skin (“Can You Be Electrocuted by a 12 Volt Car Battery?” Lifewire: Tech for Humans, https://www.lifewire.com/electrocuted-by-a-12-volt-car-battery-534763). Low voltage, low pressure notwithstanding, automotive batteries can, and do, explode. Other dangers include “bridging” the terminals with, for example, the crescent wrench you’re using to remove the battery for charging.

Electric torture was hand-cranked in the years between 1945 and 1960, and found in the form of what was called a “magneto” or “dynamo.” A magneto is a hand-cranked electric generator, considered a variant of the alternator, that uses permanent magnets to produce pulsed alternating current. Magnetos have been used to provide current to ring the bells of telephones sharing the same party line and to supply high voltage to start automotive ignition; they continue to be used in engines lacking low-voltage electrical systems. They are examples of Faraday’s law of induction. A dynamo is also an electrical generator. Unlike the magneto, the dynamo uses a commutator, a rotary switch, to create direct current. Hand-cranked dynamos are used in human-powered equipment to charge batteries. (“History of Electric Torture,” https://www.reed.edu/poli_sci/faculty/rejali/articles/History_of_Electric_Torture.html). Hand-cranked generators of electric current would allow for the administration of electric torture in the absence of electric outlets. “In Algeria in the 1950s, cars and field telephones were wired for electric torture. Two electric leads are connected to the dynamo and their bare wires are wound around each ear or one around each ankle or one around a finger and the other around the penis.” The Tucker Telephone was a torture device created from an old-fashioned hand-cranked telephone whose generator was wired to a sequence of two dry-cell batteries. The device was invented in the 1960s by Dr. A. E. Rollins, resident physician at Tucker State Prison Farm in Arkansas. Reading these sources on telephones and torture reminds me of a passage in Elaine Scarry’s “The Body in Pain” that I cannot reference at this moment because the volume is on my bookshelf in Seattle and I am writing from the Bay Area.

The appeal of electric torture is in the ease with which it can be denied. By its nature, electric torture is difficult to prove. “Torturers favor electric torture because it leaves no marks other than small burns that, one can allege, were simply self-inflicted.” In authoritarian states, electric torture is rarely seen. There is little to answer for, and no need to hide. Within the context of war fought by the American military, electric torture serves a purpose. U.S. Marines in Vietnam reported being trained in the French method of punishment: “[t]ake a field telephone, the TP 3-12, and put the connecting wire to it, then take the other end of the wire and attach it to a person’s testicles and crank it–this causes a high-voltage shock, there is no amperage behind it, just voltage, but it is extremely painful” (“History of Electric Torture”). The TP-312 was a US Field Phone, used for off-grid communication. Field telephones are typically powered by an internal battery, an external battery, or an external power source. The insipid prattle of mobbers notwithstanding, the implication of smart phones in torture based on their lithium-ion batteries and antennas alone makes sense, particularly when you consider the mounting reports of charging injuries.

Occasionally I’ve made a reference to real estate mobbing in Australia using a sound system like the Sonos (Sound crimes: Are Australian speculators using low-frequency noise to turn over houses?). Based on observation of those who’ve come and gone during the course of being mobbed in Seattle, I suspect that the same methodologies that are being used on the West Coast are used in other countries, including Australia, where the infrastructure and technology can be similarly exploited to force people out of their homes and that the practices are taught as trade knowledge among those who are so inclined. If that is the case, investigating real estate mobbing in one country effectively means investigating it on behalf of those affected in other countries as well. It would behoove investigators who are not involved in this criminal real estate scam enabled by corrupt neighborhood watch captains, block coordinators, and even those on city payrolls including police and emergency personnel, to exchange information with other countries on tech-enabled crimes involving critical infrastructure. In cases where a criminal network is allowed to operate freely in one country because it has ingratiated itself into local government, the interest in and exposure of a similar criminal network in an allied country might be the “move-along-stick” that ends the practice. If the government of my own country is not true enough to the constitutional principles instilled in me to take an interest in this predatory crime, I hope the government of some other country will. Given that likely radio-frequency attacks have been observed in embassy personnel stationed in multiple countries, there is much to be learned about national security from the domestic use of infrastructure and technology to evict.

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Escapology is the art of escape, often as performance. Those who practice it “escape”–sometimes nightly or thrice nightly–from entrapments most of us avoid (“Escapology,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escapology). In Houdini’s “Escape or Die” variant, the failure to escape meant death. For Houdini, this was death by drowning. Other failed escapes meant death by suffocation, or death by falling. For Mark Nelson “Markini The Worlds Youngest Professional Escape Artist,” it was death by electrocution if he failed to escape his “Electrified Mummy Lid Torture Board” before the chains binding him delivered a fatal charge of electricity. Nelson was one of a number of escape artists who “amped up” the thrill of spectacle with “Full View” performances that left none of the risk to the imagination of the audience. Escapology is considered a facet of illusionism–magic–and Houdini is considered its greatest master. But performers who play with electricity are few.

David Blaine’s performance of “Electrified” was the spectacle of a million volts of electricity. Blaine, considered to be a magician and endurance artist, warmed up to the feat over years of acts that included a week in a coffin and 63 hours in a block of ice. In the highly choreographed show, clad in chain-mail, his powers of endurance may have been most tested by remaining standing for 72 hours without sleep or food. The risk of the electricity was carefully managed. The chain-mail acted as a Faraday suit, protecting him from the high-voltage current of an array of Tesla coils. (“If He Starts Nodding Off, Try Another Million Volts,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/science/million-volts-for-david-blaine-in-electrified-endurance-test.html) The nature of the event was spectacle, a fact acknowledged by the performer: “My goal is to create a visual image that everyone will always remember….” The review in Hyperallergic makes a visual comparison of the staging of “Electrified” and imagery from Fritz Lang’s classic “Metropolis” (“David Blaine – Performance Artist or Poseur?” Hyperallergic, https://hyperallergic.com/58201/david-blaine-performance-artist-or-posuer/). Tesla coils have been incorporated into other performance art although perhaps without the same extravagance of staging. Sound performers use “singing tesla coils”; these are types of plasma speakers. The thoramin is a familiar example. In solid state singing coils, the high-frequency signal is the carrier wave for the tone that results from the movement of the spark (“Singing Tesla coil,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Tesla_coil).

The performance art of Chris Burden (1946 – 2015) had little to do with illusion. Where escapology is risk performance, or maybe not so much, Burden’s performances were subversive, physical and often painfully visceral displays of loss. The works for which Burden is most noted include his 1971 Shoot, in which he had himself shot in the arm with a .22 rifle, and the 1974 Trans-Fixed, in which he had himself nailed to the top of a Volkswagen Beetle as though he were being crucified. In his performances, which were not repeated and often presented solely as photographic or filmic artifacts, there was no illusion of escaping this mortal coil. (Chris Burden, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Burden). Perhaps the formative artistic experience for Burden was the emergency surgery he was forced to undergo without anesthesia after a motor-scooter crash on the Mediterranean island of Elba at the age of 12 (Excerpt from “Body of Art,” https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2016/april/11/how-a-horrific-childhood-accident-led-chris-burden-to-employ-extreme-personal-danger-in-his-artworks/). Burden dispassionately recorded his Doorway to Heaven performance as follows: “At 6 p.m. I stood in the doorway of my studio facing the Venice boardwalk. A few spectators watched as I pushed two live electric wires into my chest. The wires crossed and exploded, burning me but saving me from electrocution” (Digitally scanned image of the artist’s electrocution shown here, and the articles “A documentary tribute to Chris Burden’s extreme oeuvre” Hyperallergic.com, https://hyperallergic.com/291700/a-documentary-tribute-to-chris-burdens-extreme-oeuvre/, and “Then and There: The Art of Chris Burden,” Artforum, https://www.artforum.com/print/201108/then-and-there-the-art-of-chris-burden-29040).

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The spark gap transmitter is a “noisy” transmitter. They transmit signal over a wide bandwidth, creating radio frequency interference that significantly disrupts other transmissions. It’s the electrical noise of the spark gap that led to their prohibition under international law since 1934. Despite the lack of the continuous waves required to carry voice communications, the noise could make a spark gap a useful tool for criminals who want to harass their neighbors out of their homes. I started thinking about whether a spark generator could produce the kind of “disruption” that could be responsible for my constantly erring Technicolor router after coming across a vendor OUI something like “Spark” in some Seattle Airtool capture a year or two back. Spark-gap radios have a history of being used in radio jamming; spark gap generators continue to have applications in industry and infrastructure. The errors on the router increased in pace, coming every few seconds or colliding and truncating in the logging as the nasty neighborhood watch lady would pull away from her parking strip, the more vehicles packed the driveway of the south mobbing house owner, sometimes with traffic on the roadside, and when I started up the television and Roku to watch the evening news.

This is the kind of project that would appeal to a mobber who takes pleasure in mounting clandestine operations of a technical nature in an undeclared property war. Fabricating weapons out of everyday materials perceived to be benign is camouflage for the kind of haters who harass their neighbors under the aegis of the neighborhood watch. Rope is for tying down the Christmas tree you bring home from the mountains, until you use it to string up a noose. Telegraphy is a compelling example of the simplicity of radio and the fascination of communicating over little more than a few wires and some thin pieces of metal. The Sparks Telegraph Key Review catalogs the distinguishing features of spark-gap transmitters in their heyday. Instructional sites on spark-gap radio are not difficult to find and they are of great interest to radio hams and engineers as well as to those interested interested in the military, militia, or survivalist gear.

“How to Build a Radio/Drone Jammer” (https://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/how-to-build-a-radiodrone-jammer/34089) describes basic design principles governing range and power and provides a short list of the required parts, which include a high voltage source, batteries, a piece of wood to mount the parts on, a small motor, nails or screws, and wire. The writer gives the example of an automotive ignition coil as a high-voltage source that increases the output of a battery or output to the point of Tesla’s “disruptive discharge” of energy across the electrodes of a spark plug. The battery should be appropriate to the high-voltage source. If an automotive ignition coil, a motorcycle battery would suffice but the typical automotive battery will supply increased capacity. Based on my own situation of being harassed by audio that is usually interjected or injected into an existing audio stream and which can have a jamming effect that probably causes, for example, a streaming broadcast stream to lose sync until I detune and retune the programming, the technical details related to Single Sideband (SSB) modulation and jamming digital systems are interesting. “FM can flip back and forth quickly between two stations that have a nearly equal signal strength at the receivers [sic] antenna an make it appear like it is mixing the two stations, the reality is that it is not. [SSB] will mix the two signals, while you may hear noise in with the desired audio you can still hear the desired audio.” The technical details are beyond my limited knowledge of radio but I am curious whether they relate to the “obvious jamming” described in a United States Army handbook on electronic counter-countermeasures (Mobbing, infrasound and leaky feeders (part 2)). According to the listing of jamming signals in the manual, “The spark signal is easily produced and is one of the most effective for jamming. Bursts are of short duration and high intensity. They are repeated at a rapid rate. This signal is effective in disrupting all types of radio communications” (https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm24-33/fm243_4.htm).

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In military jargon, a “dancer” is a highly skilled telegrapher. “Wiretapping the Viet Cong” provides an account of wartime wiretapping based on telegraphy.

“[T]here are two major distinctions in the implementing of wiretapping itself. It has to do with how, what, when, where, and why. Quietly tapping wires on the side for intelligence gathering is quite different than tapping wires to clandestinely modify or change the content of a message during real time, especially if the message involves voice or Morse code. As well, there are big differences in wiretapping depending on the physical environment. If it is in friendly territory or requires secret infiltration into hostile territory requires highly different approaches. So too, if its urban areas and buildings is one thing, if its a remote jungle-like wilderness or a highly exposed barren desert area its another.”

(“The Dancer,” The Wanderling, http://the-wanderling.com/dancer.html). Members of the 1964 Special Ops mission to China were skilled in Morse code and possessed the “non-conventional” expertise necessary to construct spark-gap transmitters on the fly, including building their own induction coils. You can find an example of the improvised transmitter at the bottom of the article. You can find other discussions and how-to on the use of spark-gap radios in jamming in the following articles. The common logic appears to be that it’s okay to build it, but using it is criminal.

• “How to Make a Radio Frequency Jammer–Detailed Instructions,” https://windupradio.com/how-to-make-a-radio-frequency-jammer/

• “Broadband Radio Jammer,” https://www.instructables.com/Simple-broadband-jammer/

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New York City’s Pearl Street Station was the first central power plant in the United States. Built by the Edison Illuminating Company, the plant opened in 1882. The United States is powered by the North American power transmission grid, a grid combining regional grids that stretch from the southern borders across the Canadian territories on the east and west coasts. These include the Eastern, Western, Texas, Quebec, and Alaska Interconnections.

The interconnecting regional grids in the North American grid are joined by electrical interconnectors called DC ties in the United States. Interconnectors link synchronous grids or connect alternating current (AC) power networks to create transport channels for the distribution of energy between AC networks. The connections are made over submarine power cables, overhead power lines, or underground cables. In the United States, power crosses the interconnectors as direct current (DC). In this case, the use of direct current is not historical but is based on efficacy. By 1967, the East and West interconnections were joined over AC ties. The AC ties did not deliver adequate capacity, however, and oscillation was a problem. DC ties were restored in 1975. The configuration of the North American grid into interconnected regional grids increases the resiliency of the macrogrid by ensuring that a regional failure does not become a national failure. Alternating current is transmitted regionally in the appropriate scenario and direct current boosts power transfer from one interconnector to the next. The principle is long-distance power transmission over AC; local transmission over DC.

Pearl Street Station was the first utility-scale electric power plant and the first of what was estimated in 2020 to be 23,417 utility-scale electric power plants in the United States (Frequently Asked Questions, U.S. Energy Information Administration, https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=65&t=2). Pearl Street Station delivered DC power and was built to the scale of what is now commonly called a microgrid. Conforming to the constraints for DC power transmissions, the station served a limited radius of a few blocks and was the sole location for the coal-fired steam engines that powered the six massive generators, each of which produced 1,100 kW DC. Edison had the foresight to create energy storage capabilities within the facility in the form of batteries (https://www.tdworld.com/digital-innovations/article/20970388/a-short-history-the-microgrid). Microgrids help to ensure local energy demands are met. They also offer redundancy and increase reliability when the macrogrid fails to meet the demands of consumers outside the bulk power network. The microgrid ensures the local control of utilities (“Microgrid,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgrid).

The military grid is a DC microgrid. A recent United States Department of Defense (DOD) press release reports on the prototype of an intelligent vehicle-centric microgrid (VCM) to power “next-generation warfighting capabilities” (“DOD Demonstrates Mobile Microgrid Technology,” U.S. Department of Defense, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2677877/dod-demonstrates-mobile-microgrid-technol/). The high-mobility laser system shown as it is being loaded onto a C-17 aircraft can host a vehicle-centric microgrid. The vehicle-centric microgrid of the mobbers lacks the transmission power of the laser system. On the other hand, the army vehicle probably lacks the capabilities of the Sonos sound system and its tactical purpose in what the mobbers declared to be “property war” would be obvious. A VCM contributes 100 kilowatts in static or mobile operation, enhancing “lethality and survivability,” according to Army Futures Command project lead Dean McGrew. With a centralized controller that can spin VCMs up or down on demand, the tactical microgrid is scalable and smart.

“The military prepares for grid cyber attacks with microgrids,” reads a heading in “Microgrid Cybersecurity: Protecting and Building the Grid of the Future” (https://www.sandc.com/globalassets/sac-electric/documents/sharepoint/documents—all-documents/technical-paper-100-t116.pdf?dt=637720343135020077), a brochure of S&C Electric Company. A designer of award-winning microgrid systems, S&C specializes in solutions for the switching, protection, and control of electric power systems. In a world in which American infrastructure is vulnerable, the microgrid can provide just-in-time energy “should hackers disrupt our power systems at the generation, distribution, or transmission levels.” Prevention is, after all, the first strategy in warfare. In this approach, the microgrid makes us safe. “These islands of power are created by using utility-disconnectable and standalone power sources, such as backup generators, spot generation, renewables, and batteries to power out-of-service utility lines. Microgrids take over power distribution during grid outages or voltage instability, or they can be set up as temporary or mobile power distribution in emergency scenarios.” A secure microgrid is, first and foremost, a distributed architecture that cannot be taken down by a single point of failure. A microgrid offers inherent redundancy. If the software used to manage solar panels is compromised, the microgrid can generate electricity out of energy storage or by combining heat and power. Most importantly, a microgrid that is cybersecure has redundant intelligent systems so that if one controller is attacked, another takes over its duties.

“As vulnerable as the grid is in its current state, it is becoming more susceptible to attack as we expand our energy-related network with smarter homes and cities that incorporate distributed energy, electric vehicles, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) appliances that include everything from laptops and cameras to cell phones, street lights, and thumb drives. A world of interconnected devices makes life more convenient, but these devices all rely on a rapidly growing number of interconnected digital interfaces. Those interfaces offer potential entry points for cyber attacks of all kinds.”

S&C recommends microgrid islanding with a Defense in Depth (DiD) approach that begins at the perimeter of the microgrid with sensors to detect tampering with microgrid assets, firewalls and intrusion detection systems to thwart penetration attempts, hardening hardware by removing unneeded software and disabling unnecessary communications and USB data ports. The DiD approach does not stop there; successful penetration of the perimeter must be met with hardened systems, encryption of data and communications, and authorization challenges.

Microgrids also create the opportunity for robust power systems that provide multiple solutions for power generation, from the intelligent networking and management of generators in the field, to combining renewable power sources with the fossil-fueled generators. This is another area where the U.S. military is designing “power solutions for combat.” According to Christopher Wildmann, an electrical engineer with U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, “Technologies on the forefront of the battlefield have to be very small and lightweight, which raises new challenges to the microgrid market” (“Army engineers spur development of tactical microgrids,” https://www.army.mil/article/81123/army_engineers_spur_development_of_tactical_microgrids). Lightweight energy solutions often include combining renewable energy with DC microgrids. Efficiency is another draw of the DC microgrid.

The difficulty of any distributed network is protecting the endpoints that are isolated from centralized control and security systems. In a power grid, a home–especially these days where solar panels are integrated into the household power supply and redundancy is provided on a house-by-house basis by battery “power stations” and Tesla power walls–is a network node and entry point to the national grid. Every home can be seen as a microgrid–and microgrid is indeed a term of art in the sales of residential power systems–possessing microgrid assets and vulnerabilities. Inherent in any microgrid is not only the restriction on the transmission of power, but on the ease with which anomalous behavior is detected. The restriction of range protects the privacy of the transmission. This is as true in property war as it is on the islanded grid or the military microgrid. A local grid has a reduced attack surface but detection of anomalous behavior can be hampered over a distribution of grids with insufficient centralized monitoring. This is the fundamental problem of laissez-faire network administration and simple home networking where only the rare household includes a network administrator. Every American home with an electric meter is one node in the North American power grid. Every American home is vulnerable to attack, sometimes from the spiteful neighborhood watch in northeast Seattle or the block coordinator gone rogue in Albany, and sometimes when the neighbor you gave the benefit of the doubt turns out to be a crook trying to make a profit off of flipping your home.

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“There is an epidemic of white supremacists in police departments.” So begins Vida B. Johnson’s 2019 article in the Lewis & Clark Law School journal provocatively titled: “KKK in the PD: White Supremecist Police and What To Do About It.” Johnson reports on a nationwide problem in policing that extends to high-ranking officers of more than 100 police departments whose members’ explicitly racist sentiments became known after being expressed in email, texts, and over social media. The article reveals the problem of departments where hate has taken hold and where officers are recruited into hate groups by other officers during their tenure in the department if not on payrolled time.

Johnson notes that officers become “so immersed in the culture of the police department that they may not even know that the views being expressed are ones based on white supremacy” (https://law.lclark.edu/live/files/28080-lcb231article2johnsonpdf). The remark is disturbing. This lack of awareness of, or perhaps a lack of concern for, the class-bound, anti-other and hateful origins of everyday views is a common theme in this country in which pitched battles are fought over removal of statues to the racist Confederate glory and “renter” is a euphemism for the black, single, or poor ostensibly protected by housing law.

The rise of white supremecism within the American police department was noted by a 2006 FBI warning and emphasized by the 2009 disclosure, after the election of President Obama, of the Department of Homeland Security warning of a resurgence of white supremacist groups. The belief was that white supremacists targeted angry former members of the military. Hate groups swelled during the Trump presidency as did hate crime; recruitment surged on college campuses. The continuing crisis of hate in American culture is reported in the October 12, 2021 article of the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Extremism Among Active-Duty Military and Veterans Remains a Clear and Present Danger” in which Marine veteran Kyle Bibby affirms an “active effort” by hate groups to recruit in the military. Hypermasculinity is a keynote trait found in the military and in the far-right, making male supremacism part of the hater’s daily diet. “It’s that familiarity that people are often so comfortable with and are looking for,” says Dr. Pete Simi, a Chapman University professor of sociology who researches right-wing extremism (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/10/12/extremism-among-active-duty-military-and-veterans-remains-clear-and-present-danger). Because haters always have enough hate to go around and because the expression of hate does not sate the hater, there is a widening circle of victims; hence the Southern Poverty Law Center classification of “general-purpose hate groups.” Haters hate the other.

Hate fills a need and serves a purpose. Some researchers attribute hate to personal insecurity (Chabra, Smrithi, Devdas Rai, Balachandra A. Shetty, Joseph Shibu, and V. Meghashree. “The emotional and psychological aspects of hate and enmity.” Journal of Evolution of Medical and Dental Sciences 3, no. 49 (2014): 11715+. Gale OneFile: Health and Medicine (accessed October 27, 2021). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A467259249/HRCA?u=anon~1529d53e&sid=googleScholar&xid=96686848.); propagandists use hate as a weapon. Those who mob appear to do the same, in tandem with committing an intrinsic hate crime, expressing hate to personalize the crime and achieve a hidden economic end. Constructed as a hate crime to obscure the breadth of motives that come into play when greed is joined by politics, mobbing is a revenge crime in which mobbers avenge their insecurities and jealousies as they criminally harass and terrorize others from their legal homes. But hate cannot undo what ails them—their failure to compete, their unwillingness to take responsibility, the civil rights they refuse to acknowledge belong to others, their anger at society for doing them wrong, and their lack of humanity.

The nature of mobbing as vigilantism or punishment is evident both in Albany, California and in Seattle, Washington; there are signifiers of religiosity and the military in both locales. In Seattle with the mobbing households on both sides apparently indemnified from prosecution by their high-income, high-status professions, there was something of an “I bully because I can” attitude that can’t hide the deep-seated inferiority that requires the satisfaction of getting away with a predatory crime against a woman. In Albany, where some mobbers try to turn the discovery of their involvement into an asset by bullying more openly, mobbing as personal failure or criminal enterprise comes to the fore.

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Stay tuned for part 3 of The mobbers’ “World Wireless System” and hate culture in Albany, California. There’s more to come.