On being mobbed

According to Wikipedia, the game originated in 19th century England, and perhaps earlier. The history of the game, and the nomenclature, follow the technology of signaling, from door knockers to electric doorbells.

An early doorbell is said to have been invented in 1817 by the Scottish inventor William Murdoch. The device utilized compressed air run through a pipe. By 1831, American scientist Joseph Henry had invented a bell that could be triggered by electric wire. By the early 1900s, electric doorbells were common (“Doorbell,” in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorbell). In the United States, the names of the knock-and-run prank changed with the technology as generations of American children grew up playing Ding dong ditch, Doorbell ditch, and Ring and run.

The first electric doorbells were wired. Wired doorbells are low-voltage electrical systems powered by residential electric services. The doorbell button itself acts as a switch. Press it and the circuit closes. The device emits a sound. Different doorbell devices are designed to produce different sounds, for example, a “ding-dong” versus a few bars from a melody. Some of these came to include intercom systems, a feature that underlines their use as communications devices and makes them comparable to the intercom ordering system that famed hacker Kevin Mitnick man-in-the-middled back about 1980.

Wired doorbells that run off house power typically rely on a transformer to step down the current. The lower voltage is usually less than 24 volts and might also power a lighted doorbell button. Doorbell systems that run on transformers use standby power. And when your home is wired using knob-and-tube, that always-on transformer doesn’t have the benefit of a ground wire. This means that, like that always-left-on television or radio, a traditional wired doorbell might be a good target for mobbing.

The low-tech origins and connection between the technology of the doorbell, doorbell notification systems, and the telephone is another area of keen interest to mobbers who would doorbell ditch their neighbors into selling their homes if they could. If wired doorbells are attractive to doorbell-ditching speculators, wireless doorbells make the monkey-wrenching easier. Wireless doorbells are radios. When you push the doorbell of a wireless doorbell, the doorbell transmitter sends a radio signal to a receiver installed inside. The receiver plays an alert sound through a loudspeaker. Most wireless doorbells signal on the overcrowded 2.4GHz band, the radio band of WiFi. This makes even a crude wireless doorbell another IoT device, but perhaps dumber. You might be able to change the channel the device transmits on, but a wireless doorbell remains subject to the chaos of the 2.4GHz band. When a child ding-dong ditches you, it’s a prank. When criminal speculators and corrupt city workers use radios—theirs and yours—to evict, they’re executing an exploit.

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In 2011, Jamie Siminoff and some friends were hanging out in his Los Angeles garage, looking for something “cool and important” to invent. When deliveries to the house were missed because they couldn’t hear the doorbell, Smirnoff went online to look for a doorbell that would send notifications to his phone. It was a “need” that had not been filled.

Siminoff and his fellow “inventors” called their product the “Doorbot.” Essentially a notification system, the Doorbot was a motion-detecting video camera in a doorbell, programmed to send notifications to a mobile application. The video doorbell was designed to occupy no more space than an existing doorbell device. The resizing of the video apparatus into the slim panel of a doorbell would be a step towards the miniaturization of home security goods.

Introduced as a convenience device, the video doorbell was repositioned as a security product when Siminoff’s company sought funding. In September 2014, the company solidified its position in the home security market by rebranding as Ring. The video doorbell now stands at the nexus of IoT and surveillance. The convergence between watching and being watched overrides every layer of the Amazon security stack built on the Ring “smart” doorbell.

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Amazon acquired Ring in April 2018. By 2017, Amazon had already added Ring competitor Blink to its portfolio (https://www.theverge.com/22704290/amazon-blink-ring-camera-doorbell-brands-smart-home-why). In May 2018, Amazon launched Neighbors, a “hyperlocal social networking app” integrated with the Ring smart doorbell. The integration was foundational to the Amazon subsidiary Ring LLC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighbors_(app)).

It’s here, in this pairing of Big Brother “security” with down-home appeal, that the neighborhood watch comes in. Groups like these, or groups with neighborhood outposts that attract people who find satisfaction in punishing others, function as instruments of policing. In the hands of authoritarians, those who enjoy bullying or bending others to their will, or profiteers looking to feather their own nests, they become instruments of social control. Passing as “good neighbors”, they speak softly, the big sticks of the police behind them.

Police publish bulletins on the app and use the app to request video relevant to investigations. Users of the “hyperlocal” app have access to a platform that allows them to post anonymously on public safety issues and events within a five-mile radius. Unlike Nextdoor, which formed a partnership with the National National Watch and includes an active real estate component, Neighbors claims its sole focus is public safety. Social network apps run by corporations, however, often exhibit less interest in the public good than in profit.

Given the use of the phone as a foundation of the doorbell in the digital age, mobbing might be seen as doorbell ditching for profit. But things become more complex given the technologies of surveillance and the rapid application of the video camera to policing. The Ring camera has become a platform with greater impact than being the “eyes and ears” touted by the City of Albany, California in their solicitations for neighborhood watch and block coordinators. Ring is a platform for living-off-the-land attacks that start with surveillance and invasion of privacy.

At least in Seattle, Washington and Albany, California, neighborhood watch groups and block coordinators leverage human emotion and physicality to evict. These are not community groups in any true sense, they are not elected, and their mission is quagmired in their historical relationship to law enforcement. These are outposts of old-school social control, for graft and logrolling, for influence-peddling, unethical conduct, and the kind of corruption that cities like Albany, California are loathe to acknowledge but quick to disregard. Perhaps the three monkeys (“mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru“) wish to avoid ruffling political feathers. Perhaps the nasty neighborhood watch ladies and city officials turned block coordinators are left to wallow in and spread their hate because in towns where liberals hold sway these groups actualize right-wing agendas that cannot be publicly aired, agendas whose infiltration we do not want to acknowledge. “Look not at what is contrary to propriety….” (“Three Wise Monkeys of Tōshōgū Shrine “, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/three-wise-monkeys-of-toshogu-shrine). But in the San Francisco Bay Area, the home of the now merged Mother Jones, The Center for Investigative Reporting, and the PRX-coproduced Reveal, journalistic efforts in muckraking and investigative reporting are core to the democratic mission. These journalistic institutions should give us hope. These institutions right wrongs and can do so in Albany, California.

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“Leave the Ring on.” So said the nasty neighborhood watch lady of northeast Seattle. Regardless of whether you know the type or have had the displeasure of your neighborhood becoming a real estate speculators’ haven, the Internet of Things (IoT)—in mobbing, the Internet of Malicious Things—must be regarded as a core component of mobbing.

In 2019, Amazon debuted Amazon Sidewalk, a platform allowing IoT devices to communicate over a mesh network. Sidewalk uses the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol for short-distance communication. For long-distance communication, 900 MHz LoRa (long range) is used in combination with other frequencies.

Support for IoT devices on the sidewalk is a critical piece of the supply line for living-off-the-land attacks on the home front. No comms, no bombs, goes the military saying. Bluetooth is the short-range communications protocol that many of us use for wireless mouse devices and mobile speakers. But Bluetooth doesn’t play nice, causing interference into WiFi spectrum and common in surveillance. The 900 MHz band that Amazon uses for longer range communications is shared with amateur radio bands and vulnerable to interference from powerline technologies. Powerline adapters are known to cause radio frequency to leak from outlets and appear to be in use in mobbing to disrupt victim electrical services.

The crux of the matter is that, short- or long-range, the deployment of signal into uncontrolled environments can have unanticipated impacts. The more pathways between public hotspots and private electrical systems, the greater the opportunity for monkeywrenching. Network architects define subnetworks they call “DMZ” (demilitarized zone) in military parlance. The DMZ is a barrier or perimeter network that helps to insulate corporate networks from penetration. When access to signal is unbroken, and the IoT ecosystem is populated by unsecured devices and appliances, there is no DMZ on the home front.

The deployment and heavy use of WiFi access points and extenders may also boost radio frequency and contribute to an effect similar to the use of powerline adapters on the neighbors’ knob-and-tube electrical services. Note that radio frequency-producing interactions, like EV charging and the use of different kinds of “generators,” also appear to be employed to interfere with the victim electrical service and to enable carrier current transmission and audible harassment. As I’ve mentioned in some earlier posts, a Berkeley electrician told me a few years back, that a generator was being used to harass people in the area. When you have a knob-and-tube electrical system that cannot be grounded, the monkey wrenching may be comparable, at least in part, to the effect of an ungrounded generator.

We are increasingly concerned about the security of the grid, but we fail to see the connection between the national grids and the endpoints that our own homes represent. Whether Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or power-line technology, piggybacking on power services—public or private—invites exploit. Low-level physical attacks like power and signal hacks defeat routers and firewalls. Our homes are rife with vulnerabilities that are not acknowledged, sometimes purposefully so. And in cases like mine, criminals exploit those vulnerabilities to evict. The LinkedIn posts of vehicle security experts like Jay Turla, a principal automotive security researcher at VicOne, are worth reading. For an interesting read on intercepting the communications of a Bluetooth-enabled home elliptical trainer sold by Decathon, see Juan Carlos Jiménez’s Practical Introduction to BLE GATT Reverse Engineering: Hacking the Domes EL500.

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Amazon Sidewalk was designed to be a “crowd-sourced” mesh network. This meant Amazon would build a mesh network atop the proliferation of Amazon devices. The strategy was successful. By 2023, Amazon claimed more than 90% of the US population dwell within the Sidewalk mesh network. But the effects of the market saturation exceed those who “buy in” to Amazon’s conquest of private life. It doesn’t matter if the devices are secure when the signal itself is vulnerable. The near universal extension of bandwidth support makes mobbing over IoT more likely. Sidewalk supports Ring and its Alarm Pro Base Station that builds out the Amazon backbone with a built-in Eero WiFi 6 router. When the nasty neighborhood watch lady of northeast Seattle sidled over to the north mobbing house and asked that the Ring be left on a few months back, she asked for access to a wireless security system, its wireless router and range extenders, for malicious use against a common neighbor who was tenant to neither of them and did not dwell on their properties. Between wireless signal, charging and power, we’re strip-mining the natural world for a coast-to-coast megalopolis of gadgetry coursing with interference. Where will we go to escape the noise?

The use of customer devices to support a network built on an Amazon stack, is not new to the retail giant. AT&T and Comcast have long supported their Internet and television services by installing public access points on customer routers. As mentioned in earlier posts about infrastructure mobbing, my mother’s Comcast service included a publicly available access point by default. She did not set up the service and counted on others to access the settings when necessary.

Most people have no interest in learning how to configure routers. We shouldn’t have to become security experts to use the Internet. The default settings routinely installed with home internet service conflict with the principles of minimum access that rule the corporation. Why are our homes being put up for sale? Like AT&T and Comcast, Amazon gives away your security and your privacy by enabling Sidewalk by default, at least for users who set up Amazon Sidewalk Gateway devices before the platform was launched and for those who do not complete the setup process. And again, we ignore the fact that the option to disable the setting is one that the neighbors of those who purchase these devices do not have. Device owners can disable the option in settings but the bulk of those who consume their products are unlikely to understand why they might want to do so. Device manufacturers know that. This is how manufacturers get away with blaming users who are damaged when they do not change default passwords.

When it comes to IoT security products, fear drives the market. And when you pair a lineup of security products with a social networking platform, the use of fear extends beyond the market. Studies of fascism show the connection between fear and authoritarianism. Today’s NPR broadcast of On the Media with Brooke Gladstone included an interview with Jennifer Mercieca, Texas A&M Rhetoric professor and author of Demagogue for President. Mercies points out that for those who exhibit authoritarian tendencies, those tendencies are activated by threat.

Platforms like Amazon Sidewalk and products like Ring profit from a fear-based culture that is averse to the other, providing grist for the mill in a culture lurching toward authoritarianism. The partnership between Amazon’s Nextdoor and police becomes a force for the use fear as a tool for social control. It is as though the neighborhood watch, authoritarian from the day of its charter, is encoded into an app that promises anonymity to those who resent others for the malice they must hide. The app becomes an interface for the abstraction of control and the inflicting of punishment. By our silence, and with our wallets, we make ourselves subject to constant video surveillance by the cyclops gaze of camera doorbells stretching from block to block. It is as though the panopticon of the prison watchtower has turned inside out, encircling us with unceasing gaze. Having so freely given up our privacy, we are subject to the scrutiny of mistakes and regrets that belong to us alone. Because we don’t value privacy, we invite interrogation from those who exploit the personal tragedies of others for pecuniary gain, or those who accuse others so as to take their rights, their liberties, and their possessions. The nosy neighbor need not out herself when she’s turned a camera on the renters next door. Because we did not object to the panopticon, the panopticon surrounds us. As Michel Foucault wrote of the prison: “He is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication.” Siminoff’s company marketed the Doorbot, progenitor of Ring, as a “pre-crime” system. It’s a “pre-crime” system that casts all of us as criminals. We’re all in prison now. (“What does the panopticon mean in the age of digital surveillance?“, in The Guardian, July 23, 2015.)

(Photography was more interesting when it was deliberate. When in Seattle I mounted a security camera on a window ledge in an attempt to tamper down the boldness of my mobbing neighbors, the only footage worthy of the camera was the dancing of a spider on the lens, rendered white against the black of night by infrared.)

The video doorbell was given to us as a gadget for convenience, then re-presented as a position in a niche market of security. Now it’s part of a security platform in which access to wireless services converges with the ever-widening scope of surveillance. Like the dependence on the mobile phones clutched in our hands, the proliferation of notification devices that track movement across the domestic sphere is a choice that devalues privacy, and not just that of others. In technology, we lose our appreciation for the moment, and of chance. We sacrifice interiority. We abandon the public square. In the same way that we ignore the ramifications of carrying an unsecured wireless device into a confidential meeting or into a public bath, we ignore the far-reaching consequences of wireless technology on our lives.

“One wants to be an object,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre of the desire to be seen and desired, to surrender agency. This existential imperative, the same phenomenology that underlines the importance of representation to minorities and other-centered sexualities, is denuded by the use of the video frame as an agent of police surveillance. The position of the surveillance camera within the ecosystem of IoT changes everything. Where one wanted to be looked at, represented in art books and on the walls of the Met, to be captured within the video frame increasingly means being an object of suspicion. One does not want to be “target,” one does not want to be watched, to be “looked at” in that way. To be seen through the “lens” of a video doorbell is to be framed for a mug shot. The video doorbell lacks the human eye and represents a miscasting of the gaze. When doorbells stop being signaling devices and instead become “pre-crime” devices that capture video for the police, they are an apparatus of social control.

The mobbers deploy their armory across multiple properties, flanking their victims with devices that sense and detect, oculi that see and record. They create a distributed system of surveillance and control for which no authority is responsible and in which all of us are made subject and culpable. In this landscape of guilt before crime, mobbers mount felony attacks in their drive to shame people from their homes.