Just a quick note on the automation of mobbing abuse from Seattle’s South Cedar Park, a wireless network hop from the criminal conduct that is the neighborhood watch. The term Internet of Things (IoT) refers to an ecosystem of intercommunicating wired devices. In the case of real estate mobbing, I’ve called it an Internet of Malicious Things. Autonomous communication between processes in devices or software is typically enabled by events that trigger other processes. For example, the thermostat in your home detects the cooling temperature and triggers the heating process. In this case, the temperature dropping is an event that triggers the thermostat to start the heater. In the case of mobbing, the IoT from the mobbers’ house—perhaps the WiFi extender the mobbers deployed over your driveway as well as their own, or the motion-sensing lights over their garage door—detects a presence in your driveway and triggers the start of a malicious process. It is through events and triggers that mobbers stitch together devices in the IoT ecosystem to create an autonomous event-driven system of IoT abuse.
In an event-driven system of IoT devices and software, events may be communicated over WiFi extenders or over power. Typically, with mobbers’ use of household devices that are not likely to be suspected, the events and triggers may be enabled over WiFi. This means that the deployment of WiFi extenders over the property line is significant. So too is the fall of light, whether motion-detecting or radio-frequency producing. A malicious event-driven system works if the victim does not understand what is happening—once a victim begins to understand cause and event in a system of malicious processes, the mobbers may have to employ other triggers, they may resort to activating malicious processes manually, or they may have to trigger them using a timer in accord with the victim’s schedule.
To enhance the firing of the triggering events, the mobbers appear to deploy WiFi extenders and lights in a pattern that allows them to trigger them if you do not. The event is “agnostic” to the agent that creates it. When the mobbers create the event, the same malicious process is unleashed in your environment. Perhaps by the use of garden tools with induction motors on a WiFi extender that interferes with your electrical system, they can enhance the interference as well as amplify the sound of the tools. Perhaps by parking in the right place they can boost the ingress of radio frequency onto your electric wiring. Perhaps by triggering their smart lights, they can initiate the transmission of just enough of a hot spot made of dirty electricity to be piped into your home to ensure you hear them, perhaps even a standing wave deployed along the hedge. (It’s apparently okay to “gas” women who live alone, whether in Seattle or in Albany.) Smart phones with open microphones on the same extender might ensure that the harassment that is uttered or “played” carries onto your electrical system and is heard at a higher volume. Contractor trucks may deliberately park in the area of the WiFi extenders or rogue hot spots that cross your electrical infrastructure or intrude into your home and smart phones may deliberately be left active in parked cars. Verbal abuse distributed from a file share or the cloud gives the familiar harassing voices portability across an array of smart phones and wired transmitters held by neighborhood watch captains and block coordinators, those of dissimilar languages and regional accents, young adults and old. Speaking in other tongues indemnifies.
Unseen devices may also raise events and trigger processes. For example in my own case, I wondered about a barometer I noticed in Airtool frame captures and whether that might be how my opening a window seemed to trigger immediate localized harassment just outside. Or whether the shift to bedtime harassment was the result of detecting when I unplugged the router or turned off the lights to sleep. And some processes are more difficult to be sure of, like whether the SAMJIN vendor OUI for a Samsung smart refrigerator might be used to identify my older, “dumb” refrigerator and focus a malicious process in the Seattle house. Here the refrigerator faces the side door opposite an exhaust fan that the south house mobbing owner repositioned to the center of the door’s half-light early on. Until recently, perhaps after the south mobbing house owner moved out or until I began using cold packs in the refrigerator and keeping breakers off at night, the refrigerator was an obvious point of distribution for audible harassment, with the abuse coming up with the churning of the refrigerator compressor and fans. As of late with most household power off at the Seattle house, there’s more of the sickly smell of exhaust or maybe the unspent dirty electricity associated with a power generator that hangs in the air and pools around the devices that demand the highest amperage—when the breakers are on, anyway. At the Albany house, even with disabled outlets on the infrastructure side of the house that is most exposed to the lowlife house next door, I had to devise a strategy to minimize ingress from a structural flaw behind the refrigerator. Flaws like this could be exploited by sabotage or targeted based on an understanding of the travel of ductwork in an old home. Compact thermal imaging tools like those used for home inspections could be used to find air leaks or missing insulation. I think about how my elderly relative explained her moving out of the Albany house to me: “Something in the house is bothering me,” she said. Perhaps it was something from next door.
[Note 05/01/22: It’s worth articulating that when neighborhood watch and block coordinators seek to turn over rented properties, any increase in inventory almost certainly does not accrue to the benefit of first-time buyers or to most of us. The impetus for the turnover is to create the opportunity for housing speculation, not ownership. The result is properties on the market for prices that are unaffordable for most of us. In the end, these properties may be more attractive to those whose plan is to profit off of the further gentrification of the neighborhood. Speculation is the enemy of housing inventory and the first-time buyer—not tenancy. First-time buyers are more likely to find affordable homes in healthy neighborhoods where tenants are not vilified.]
