As I came in from gardening a few weeks back, I saw the lowlife standing at the back of his car, next to a disassembled propane lamp. The trunk was open but I couldn’t tell if it was being loaded or unloaded. I wondered if it had contributed to the volume of particulate infiltrating the house the days before.
The lamp soon turned up in his back yard, positioned to draft across the back of the house when a southerly wind came along. I waited and watched but could not tell if it was used to draft soot or fumes of propane in my direction or was otherwise operational and contributing to the melee. A few weeks later the lamp was once more disassembled and left at the curbside. Perhaps it didn’t work.
It was an old Fire Sense lamp. The warning on the label read: “This Appliance is for OUTDOOR USE only.”
The lamp finally disappeared one night last week. That night the block captain’s relative, from what I could tell an avid participant in the mobbing, dropped by. He drove off as I returned home in the late evening. The curb was bare.
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There was the usual whispering from the lowlife house the other morning. In a variation on mobbing by speaker, the lowlife was stalking me from fence line, hissing the usual insults, threats and exhortations.
I poked my head out the back door in time to see the lowlife slink around the corner of the lowlife house, his girth unshielded by the planks of the fence. “I see you!” I called out as he awkwardly sidestepped into a back entry.
Like the north mobbing house owner in Seattle, the Albany lowlife recently added a homemade bird feeder to his arsenal. The Seattle north mobbing house owner installed numerous of them at the fence line but the sound they dispense isn’t usually bird song. The bird feeder in the lowlife yard is installed to line up with the back of the lowlife house, the feeder’s entry looking out this way over the clothesline zig-zagging between the run-down facade and the broken down greenhouse, the blue Ethernet cable strung out a second story window, the energized power cord that has appeared to be used as a radiator or a ground plane antenna, and the assemblage of a grill, newly added fanned devices and power tools that, for a short while, included the Fire Sense propane lamp. I can’t help but wonder if some of the fanned devices were moved to the back yard as reinforcements against the industrial fan I’ve been using to deflect the particle-laden pollutants that are being drafted, if not piped, into this house. As for the bird feeder, it might have been the source of the loud whistling sound I blocked soon after its installation, by setting a cookie sheet out on the back porch railing.
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It’s an unhappy thing to be targeted for a predatory crime. It’s a horrible thing to be the victim of a crime that strips you of quiet and of privacy. But the crime itself is overshadowed by the grotesqueness of the mobbing criminals who force themselves upon you, the unimaginably tawdry world view that must afflict them, and their will-to-power transmogrification into monsters. They commit unconscionable acts against others who are unfortunate enough to share in the coincidence of place, to trust their neighbors with proximity. The acts they commit eviscerate bedrock principles of civility. I have no interest in them, aside from seeing them prosecuted for their intrusively intimate crimes, yet they chose to inflict themselves upon me, to ensure that until I gave them what they wanted (and who knows where that ends considering what appears to be the coast-to-coast criminal network of the neighborhood watch) they would make me their “target” in their gang-stalking real estate scam. It’s extortion. But in its violation, mobbing compares to rape.
I have rarely mentioned “gang stalking,” but based on my experience of being mobbed I believe that a significant percentage of real estate mobbing uses the guise of “gang stalking.” When it comes to real estate, “gang stalking” is a hoax created to indemnify predatory criminals who batter legal residents from their homes to turn them over to speculation. Indemnification is built into the scam not only because of the defamatory lies these criminals spread about their victims but because, as the relentless stalking and harassment makes victims into captives, mobbers feed their “targets” the lies whose repetition sets them up to appear delusional and to reinforce the myth.
From what I’ve observed over years of refusing to flee from my home, there is a culture to this “shadow service,” this high stakes practice of clandestine forced eviction that demands from the perpetrator a devotion in direct proportion to the torment he seeks to inflict. It’s not that it takes a lot of time to download an audio or video track and set up repeaters, powerline adapters and radios. Not when you automate it. But to avoid detection and protect the scam, motion detectors or not, mobbers have to exercise the obsession of the stalker.
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In the same stretch of time, one night I returned earlier than usual from a visit to a relative. As I prepared to round the corner to my right, I spotted a sedan with blinding LED headlights parked on the left corner. Beneath the headlights the sedan was equipped with a smaller light, on the right side of the grille. I couldn’t tell if it was an RF-generating light, an LED light, a WiFi light or a speaker light. But it was obvious that if a similarly equipped vehicle pulled up close behind, the light was positioned low enough to be activated without being seen. I parked and averted my driver’s side-view mirror away from the window pane. The low-tone harassment was stilled.
I sat in the dark waiting for the sedan to leave. The glare of its headlights and the grille light lit up the undercarriage of the white Sprinter RV that was parked between us at the AT&T cross-connect box. Minutes passed–five, and then ten. I waited to see the sedan pull away from the RV. The sedan waited too.
Finally I got out of the car. The horn sounded as I secured the door with the key fob. I stood outside the fall of the headlights and out of view. The sedan pulled out from behind the Sprinter and accelerated past the house.
I don’t go far each night when I visit a relative. Here or there, I could be within range of harassment over the same WiFi extenders and repeaters. Airtool captures might even be used to verify this type of short-range stalking, which could be focused on access points. From the location where the sedan was parked, there could even be line of sight. And where the utility poles are provisioned with hotspots, you don’t need to string many together to plot a local grid. With mobbing and the telephone, local loop technology could easily be abused to harass. With WiFi extenders that can travel for a half-block, mobbers using WiFi-calling might be able to use background calls to follow you to nearby locations. With interferers and RF radiators, power lines might even be made to radiate abuse from one transformer to the next. The lowlife wouldn’t have to scurry back into his house like a rat.
Speaking of phones, there are other possibilities, like the CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) radio–simplex and line-of-sight–that many block captains, including Albany’s, can be trained to use. More on Albany CERT when I put the finishing touches on this blog entry. And more on harassment by phone, too–in this case, the possibility of VoIP harassment using STUN protocol (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT)–recent Airtool snippets to follow.
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It was after the incident where two Albany police officers showed up on the door on Easter Sunday and asked me to produce my elderly relative that I attempted to inform the City of Albany about the predatory real estate scam that was unfolding (Make Albany safe again; dismantle the National Neighborhood Watch). It was after the smirking officers in balaclavas visited the house that it became clear, based on her own words, that the Albany block captain who lived across the street was involved in the mobbing harassment. I tried to alert the City of Albany about the predatory crime that appeared to travel through neighborhood watch groups.
I’d have to go back through my old email to be sure of the exact sequence of events, but when the response of the Albany Police to my complaint about the block captain being involved in a scam to turn over properties and using harassment by Albany Police to do so fell on deaf ears, it was clear I’d have to make more public complaints. One of my complaints did receive a response from some Albany Police officer. He said I should contact him directly with any complaints about my neighborhood. But given the experiences I’ve had these last years, informal and undocumented contacts with any police department seem like a bad idea. And given that harassment crops up on my phone when I make telephone calls, I don’t talk on the phone much. Instead, I wrote the Albany City Council.
(To be continued…)
