A while back I wrote that I’d soon publish some ideas for anti-stalking apps. With apps that are purposed or repurposed for stalking, we need apps to substantiate and prosecute the ever-increasing stalking crimes police ignore. When police tell victims they must contact the FBI for “cyberstalking” crimes, perpetrators get the message that they can stalk with impunity. Some police in Albany, California seem to think it’s funny when women are stalked by neighbors in their own homes, smirking when women attempt to report. But then, based on my experiences in Albany these last years, it’s clear that some police are aware of, if not involved in, the stalking fun. While the term “cybercrime” may have been useful in the early days of the Web, many traditional crimes have gone digital or at least have digital aspects. In stalking crimes, the following may begin in the virtual world and evolve to include or focus on the physical world. Police who refuse to take reports of stalking when a woman tries to report should not be police. It’s this refusal to do simple police work that allows neighborhood watch groups and real estate speculators to bully women in their homes for years on end.
The app described here is relevant to mobile stalking. Victim travel is where it may be the easiest to differentiate devices that are benign from those of stalkers.
A crucial part of the mobbing platform is that the audible abuse by voice is unremitting and cannot be escaped. Mobbing victims are tracked as they traverse time and place. This tracking is stalking; stalking to harass is addressed in criminal codes. In a case like mine where the stalking behavior crosses state lines, federal stalking laws come into play: “[T]he conduct must involve travel across state lines or the use of a facility of interstate commerce, such as telephones, mail, or the internet” (Criminal Law: 18 U.S.C. 2261A: Federal Stalking and Harassment Laws Explained).
I have often considered whether the agent or manner of tracking purposefully changes as I drive across state lines between Washington State, Oregon, and California. Given a quieting that often occurs close to a border, for example, it has long seemed possible that watch groups and mobbers hand off to other groups and mobbers as victims move out of their locale. This would help to avoid the appearance of stalking across state lines, something that mobbers who are or are advised by rogue police or others familiar with the law might guard against. I doubt that ensuring that local stalking is locally performed would, in the end, evade additional law that says that stalking on someone else’s behalf remains stalking (Stalking and the Law in Texas). I’m no attorney—if I had chosen to go to law school I’m pretty sure I would not have been mobbed—but I imagine that in a case like mine where abusers in multiple states collaborate to provide the victim with an experience of inescapable harassment, even if the harassment is deployed locally over WiFi extender, repeater, and local [phone] loop, the perpetrators would be acting as and considered to be one.
Over time it’s become apparent that mobbers are not simply deploying smart phones with open hotspots to their vehicles (like the Nasty Neighborhood Watch Lady of Northeast Seattle) or using public hotspots. They may transmit WiFi via directional antenna into the victim house from a strategically parked vehicle on the public road (“Crime Watch Daily: Can These Cyber Security Experts Hack Into a ‘Smart House?’,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb23Gwhc9DU). They may also follow the victim in a vehicle with tracking and harassing capabilities. Mobbers may also be able to use wireless repeaters to track moving victims from stable locations. When the victim travels with a phone, she’s just a phone call away.
It’s the fact of the mobbing victim’s movement that provides an opportunity to “capture” the stalking behavior using a frame capture application like Airtool. As the victim moves, she traverses networks. As she moves, the capture data changes. When she is being stalked, her stalkers ensure she is within range of the devices they use to track her and to transmit verbal abuse. This means that their devices and information about those devices are within range for capture by an anti-stalking app.
This app helps the victim of stalking by conducting the capture of network frame data based on preconfigured settings. The victim should have to do nothing more than to click Start to indicate she is in Travel mode. After the travel concludes or after a preset distance, the app filters across time for the MAC address that identifies each device. The app filters for MAC addresses that persist across time and distance and excludes MAC addresses that are expected, for example, those belonging to the devices or components of the vehicle the victim is driving. I have carried an open Mac laptop in a vehicle while conducting an Airtool capture and then filtered for MAC addresses later at home. This manual method works, too, though more time-consuming and not nearly as user friendly.
When the same MAC address is repeated in mobile capture after capture, further investigation may be appropriate. Because the capture information includes time, it may also help to establish a timeline of events. Notifications can be triggered or logged to indicate that following may be in progress. The app could also trigger another device to collect additional sound or video information.
The information this app provides may be most relevant to stalking scenarios involving perpetrators who are sloppy or lack knowledge of the wireless technologies they use to commit crime.
