On being mobbed

[Note 10/22/25: This blog briefly describes the technique of “toilet talking” depicted in the Netflix serial “Jailbirds,” and suggests that it can be used in scenarios like mine, in which victims are “mobbed” from next door and other positions of proximity. It’s important to note, however, that the technique may be highly applicable in apartments and condominiums in which units are stacked with short runs of plumbing lines between them. Yesterday I noted a web referral from reddit.com/r/neighborsfromhell/ in the stats and want to point out that the shared walls and ceilings lend themselves to malicious use of carrier current communication via power line adapters, disruption via charging processes, WiFi jamming, and so on. You can search this blog for references to plumbing for more information about what it might look like when you’re being mobbed in a single-family home. Sometimes “neighbor noise” is sabotage or network attack.] 

Decades later, we establish institutions of social and political control to modulate threat. We build vast networks of prisons to contain threat. We construct citizenship to exclude threat. We elect politicians who amplify the threat we feel. We dwell in fear, and fear is used against us.

The term authoritarianism originated in 1883, adding an -ism to the authoritarian—”favoring imposed order over freedom.” Before World War II, the term was communist jargon. “Authoritarianism” describes a broad category of political systems in which pluralism is diminished—totalitarianism is one example of authoritarian rule. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) focuses on the emergence of Nazism and Stalinism as authoritarian political systems in the 20th century. The study of the authoritarian mind was taken up after the Second World War, when we struggled to come to grips with what we wished we hadn’t seen.

The Authoritarian Personality (1950) documented the findings of a study by Theodor Adorno and fellow researchers on what brings people to radical-right authoritarian movements (“Who’s drawn to fascism? Postwar study of authoritarianism makes a comeback,” CBC). The subtext of the study was the future of democracy, a concern that has not lost relevance with Trump’s second stint in the Oval Office. Adorno et al. found that fear is cultivated and put to use in authoritarian political systems, both in the drift toward authoritarian rule and in the maintenance of an authoritarian regime. Dujana Baroudi’s March 2025 research paper, “Fear and Authoritarianism: Psychological and Social Strategies for Maintaining Power” notes that authoritarian regimes maintain a ‘culture of fear’ so pervasive that it persists even after the government falls. “The findings indicate that authoritarian systems utilize repression, mass surveillance, political intimidation, and media manipulation to maintain public compliance and suppress dissent.” These markers of authoritarianism have multiplied from coast to coast, cemented by the proliferation of surveillance and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.

The original mission of the NNW was to monitor the block for “stranger danger.” After the September 11 attacks, the scope of the revamped “Block Watch” expanded to include a “focus on disaster preparedness, emergency response and terrorism awareness” (“Our History,” National Neighborhood Watch, https://www.nnw.org/our-history). The enlarged role reflects the heightened threat perception and xenophobia that set the stage for Trump’s rise to power, as well as a disquieting fear that escalates with each mass shooting and climate disaster. Given the aegis of the NNW as a policing organization and the personality traits and special interests of those who tend to join or find utility in the Block Watch, the existence and operation of these surveillance groups tears away at the social fabric that should bind us. The Block Watch is likely not to quell but to stir fear, their adherence to policing as a means of organizing a community no doubt contributes to authoritarianism and not to democracy, and their acknowledged tendency to vigilantism is patently extreme.

Ω

The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) defines extremism as the holding of extreme political or religious views, extending to advocating illegal, violent, or other extreme behavior (“Extremism,” Counter Extremism Project, https://www.counterextremism.com/content/extremism). The definition runs a continuum from ideology to action, distinguishing nonviolent movements that pursue extremist agendas through democratic process from movements that advocate violence in the pursuit of extremist goals. Violent or not, extremist ideologies commonly strive to “negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others” (“What is the new extremism definition and which groups might be on the list?” 15 March 2024, BBC).

What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.

—Robert F. Kennedy

The words of Robert Kennedy above are but one paragraph from a speech given in 1964. In the next paragraph he expresses a sentiment that resonates strongly for me after years of being mobbed in the time of Trump:

The intolerant man will not rely on persuasion, or on the worth of the idea. He would deny to others the very freedom of opinion or of dissent which he so stridently demands for himself. He cannot trust democracy.

The abrogation of individual rights and freedoms is fundamental to the extremist mission and key to its identification. House mobbing or “property mobbing,” an illegal drive to expel a legal resident from their legal home, is undertaken in the United States in complete contravention of the most basic Constitutional and civil rights. The extremism of mobbing is expressed in the unremitting verbal abuse—clandestine punishment of others that is intended to chastise or shame; for opinions or acts that are within the law; or in acts of sabotage intended to override and nullify the legal contracts of home owners and tenants.

Extremist views may be advanced through nonviolent activities like political organizing and protests. The same views might also be advanced through violence, terror and other human rights abuses. In Albany, California, and in South Cedar Park, Seattle, block watch groups that abuse their access to and protection by municipal government to batter their neighbors with verbal abuse, to deprive them of sleep, to sabotage their utilities and to pipe and pump noxious substances into their homes must be considered violent extremists.

Speaking of extremists, I’m in Seattle this weekend. It is remarkable how angry the Nasty Neighborhood Watch Lady and the coterie of haters she was instrumental in installing around me are that they have not been able to run me off. This despite their collective involvement in felonies like stalking, cyberstalking, and sabotage of utilities, not to mention the likely federal crime of obstruction of justice that they busily cover up in the continuing effort to batter me into acquiescence. They bitterly abuse me through the night, in complete disregard of the fact that I have every right to be here, that they are harming me, and that what they do is criminal. This weekend it seems the north mobbing house owner is in town and the smell of gaseous exhaust from a generator or deliberate venting hangs in the air. All along assuming they were shaming me into silence, they did not foresee the measures I would take. They make me pay for it. What the City of Seattle allows these South Cedar Park racketeers to do is unconscionable. If there was justice in Seattle, if it were not for the bias of Seattle’s North Precinct police and the ignorance and complete lack of competence of Seattle’s judicial arm and attorneys to deal with block watch racketeering, sabotage of utility and crimes with digital features, I should have not have had to suffer this.

Sociologists Pete Simi and Robert Futrell write about the “hidden spaces” where extremists gather. In Albany, California and South Cedar Park Seattle, the hidden space is the block watch. The block watch is where extremist ideology holds sway. In South Cedar Park, Seattle, and perhaps in other neighborhoods where gentrification proceeds by arrangement, misguided “Christians” who express their anti-choice views with “eye for an eye” vengeance on the postmenopausal are lathered up by ex-military profiteers, real estate “investors” in heat, and block watch vitriol. The best targets are women like me—made available from neighboring structures, from underground utilities and flows or from the utility pole—for battering at home. The same can be said for Albany, California. In both cases, the comfort and aid given to extremism on the local level ensures that victims who report are defamed as delusional and victim reports are disregarded, ignored, or made the basis of some Kafkaesque litigation against them. When there’s a meeting of the minds between technocrats and extremists—particularly those with an interest in militia—every fence and border becomes a front you fight to save your home, to save your life. And when you report, you might well be talking to a sympathizer to their cause.

With their ties to emergency services and disaster relief, and pumped up by a post-9/11 mission that elevates them to homeland security, block watch groups like those in Albany, California and South Cedar Park, Seattle, are readymade for infiltration by the interests of real estate, the far right, Christian nationalists, antisemites and the lot of homegrown American haters. Focused on the rule of law as sent down by the Constitution and federal judiciary, we give lip-service to local law and enforcement. We ignore the access given to the block watch and the lack of constitutional safeguards to protect those exposed to their reign of terror. We give the block watch local rule by neglect and ignore the implications of their unmoderated influence on the community. When there is harm, we limit responsibility to the personal and the civil, permitting the same harm to occur again. In welcoming a police organization on every block, we put ourselves at cross-purposes to our democratic mission. We abandon the pluralism that democracy requires and embrace the narrowness of authoritarian rule.

Subsequent to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, extremist groups returned to organizing on the local level. The mandate for block watch involvement in disaster relief strengthens connections between block watches and extremist groups that exploit disasters (“From Katrina to Helene: The Far Right Exploits Natural Disasters,” Southern Poverty Law Center). The shared interest in disaster relief presents increased opportunity for extremists to influence or enter local government via the block watch. The KKK may not be the only extremist group with an interest in forming a watch group. If we don’t want extremism on the national level, we must guard against it on the local level.

Ω

The National Neighborhood Watch (NNW) is first and foremost a policing organization. The NNW installs representatives in the community but NNW is not of the community. The program was funded by the National Sheriffs’ Association and the U.S. Justice Department. The NNW titles representatives as “captains” or “coordinators,” giving them standing in local government that their neighbors lack. The purpose of the neighborhood watch or block watch captain, blandly stated on the NNW website, is “to assist citizens and law enforcement” (National Neighborhood Watch Program). NNW programs are usually run by the police and Wikipedia, for example, describes the NNW as a program in which citizens work with police to deter crime.

Since 1972, the National Neighborhood Watch Program (housed within the National Sheriffs’ Association) has worked to unite law enforcement agencies, private organizations, and individual citizens in a nation-wide effort to reduce crime and improve local communities. The success of the program has established Neighborhood Watch as the nation’s premier crime prevention and community mobilization program.

(National Neighborhood Watch: A Division of the National Sheriffs’ Association)

The captains and coordinators of the NNW and successor “Block Watch” groups are generally beholden to the police for their positions. They are typically trained by the police and any supervision they get is provided by the police. Volunteers for watch positions may disproportionately represent interests in law enforcement or real estate investment. These interests are reflected in the strategy, content and execution of my own mobbing. Watch positions may be entry points for to positions with the police or the city.

Adeoya Johnson, J.D., of Howard University School of Law (2015), argues that the neighborhood watch is irrevocably and inherently biased (“Neighborhood Watch: Invading the Community, Evading Constitutional Limits,” Penn Carey Law: Legal Scholarship Repository, 2016). The crux of the issue is that the neighborhood watch is both the organizing principle for a community and a component of community policing.

By 2015, watch group vigilantism was recognized as a rising issue. Johnson was stunned by the lack of constitutional safeguards in place to protect unsuspecting victims. He warned that guardrails must be put on the behavior of watch groups given the latitude to operate as “quasi-police.” Additionally, he states that citizens must have access to “the same constitutional safeguards that are afforded to citizens against the police” (emphasis mine). Such safeguards are obviously not in place, at least not in Albany, California or in Seattle, Washington where my attempts to report have been rebuffed, ridiculed, or worse. Even with guardrails, Johnson asserts that neighborhood watch groups are “dangerous by nature.”

The problem of exclusivity originates with the definition of a “community,” a concept that differs from “neighborhood.” A neighborhood is a physical location distinguished by geography, whereas a community is a cohesive and group of individuals of potentially disparate and scattered locations. A physical neighborhood may be socioeconomically bounded (the “other side of the tracks”) but may not be defined by exclusivity. Defining community based on principles of exclusivity structures relationships into polarities of “us” and “them” (“The Psychology Behind Us vs. Them Thinking,” August 2025, Psychology Today). Gated communities, the primary example of communities defined by exclusivity, are “residential areas with restricted access designed to privatize normally public spaces.” Such communities are made exclusive based on lifestyle, status, or security zone. Johnson notes, “The use of physical gates, security guards, canine patrols, surveillance cameras, and escorts all reflect a fear of crime that is associated with strangers who are physically and socially outsiders” (p.466). When this polarizing pattern of thought is applied to crime prevention, homogeneity becomes the paramount virtue of a neighborhood and difference the vice of the suspect.

Fear is a driver. Organizing a neighborhood to fear the other—those who are different or come from without—is a technique of repression. Fear plays a great role in racial prejudice. Fear drove Cold War political theories of an invasive communist scourge ravaging the American corpus. The East German secret police (the “Stasi”) leveraged fear to turn intimates into informants for decades after World War II. The racial profiling of strangers in NNW neighborhoods, too, is the result of fear.

Fear not only creates its environment, with its ghettos, gated communities, communitarianism, it has also created its culture, a culture of repulsion. It relates to racism and the rejection of the other: there is always a reason to push out, to expulse the other.

—Paul Virilio (The Administration of Fear, Semiotext[e], 2012)

Watch programs come from a tradition of vigilance or “watchfulness.” The Boston “night watch” of 1636 served to augment English court-ordered policing with “every able-bodied man of the town” and to “preserve the prevailing colonial order” (https://themetropole.blog/2021/06/08/anti-black-punitive-traditions-in-early-american-policing/). From the start, the night watch was the long arm of the law—Colonial law. The night watch was established within the tradition of American policing as a citizen-based force that served alongside military guards. And as the slave trade grew, so did the duties of the night watch:

Pursuant to their legal decree to “keep the peace,” northern watchmen were required to not only pursue “knaves, thieves, and burglars, of their own kith and kin,” but also to “keep tabs” on indentured servants, free and enslaved Blacks, as well as so-called “straggling Indians, who paid nocturnal visits from the wilderness.”^[3]

The evolution of the night watch cannot be severed from the racial animus of Colonial America. As racial outsiders in Colonial America, Blacks were subject to a “slave pass system” that made the presence of a person of color suspicious:

Municipal rules authorized bands of wealthy, slave-holding, and “poor, slaveless,” white men to explicitly target enslaved persons traveling “in the night time without written permission [or pass] from their owners, masters, or mistresses.”^[5]

The 1972 creation of the National Neighborhood Watch marked a return to a police force augmented by a community-based system of the “vigilant”. From Colonial America onward, black skin has been a primary marker of suspicion and the policing of Blacks has been central to the mission of the night watch and other patrols. The history of the night watch does not only clarify that the NNW is by no means a community group. It stands as another reason why any effort to reform the police must extend to the neighborhood watch and the troubling relationship between watch groups and police.

Ω

We cannot understand the impact of watch groups on their communities without considering proximity—the fact that these emissaries of police enforcement dwell in the neighborhoods and on the blocks they monitor. This is the case even for watch groups that have been upcycled into block coordinators, like those of Albany, California. These captains and coordinators are at once positioned as peers to their neighbors, yet they have greater standing when it comes to access and influence with police and local government. The NNW, with boots on the block, is a critical component in the apparatus of surveillance that has overtaken American life. The “eyes and ears” of these captains and coordinators do not fall only upon strangers. The “vigilance” these captains and coordinators maintain in this era when hate must be closeted and discrimination is veiled by defamation, this vigilance is turned on the neighbors they cannot lawfully exclude, the neighbors they seek to expel.

Ω

Years back, it became clear that the Albany block coordinator was participating in the mobbing. This was confirmed by her words to the Albany lowlife as he stood at the back of his car after a couple of Albany Police came to the house on a false complaint from the block coordinator or another of her coterie on Easter Sunday in the first year after my mother requested me to look after the house. The event is described in an earlier blog. So too is the fact that, denied any meaningful recourse, I wrote to all members of the Albany City Council to inform them that at least one block coordinator who was responsible for administering an emergency services plan for the city was in fact involved in sabotaging the communication and utility services of neighbors to force the turnover of property.

I had used the terminology “neighborhood watch” because that’s what the Albany Police website continued to call it. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the webpage was out of date. Neighborhood or block watch captains or coordinators had been renamed to “block coordinators,” but the name hadn’t changed the behavior. The response I got was and remains incomprehensible to me. In the end, then council member Peggy McQuaid wrote not to respond to the concerns I raised regarding “abuse” and “corruption”. She wrote to correct me on the finer points of the disaster preparedness program in Albany, explaining that she “wanted to close this [email exchange] out.” Having held office as vice mayor and mayor through 2022, McQuaid has been reelected to office and is currently the vice mayor of Albany. I continue to try to stay alive through day after day and night after night of in-home harassment in my childhood home at the hands of an Albany block coordinator and predatory and extremist coconspirators who appear to include a contractor, “investors,” men who seem to relish the opportunity to punish prochoice women, and at least a couple of the block coordinator’s Albany Police officer chums.

On the same note, a few years back I wrote to a Seattle City Council member about the extreme harassment from the South Cedar Park “Good Neighbors” neighborhood watch group. Bending over backward to maintain neutrality, an assistant of the council member responded, “[S]ome people like them.”

Yes, and some people like the KKK. Be that as it may, it doesn’t take much online research to find that those in the business of real estate encourage the installation of watch groups as a positive selling point, even assisting with their creation or installing themselves as captains or coordinators. Exclusion is “safety,” and “safety” sells. Of the five or so “co-captains” of the South Cedar Park watch organization that railed against the tenants who rented single-family homes on the street, I believe at least two had backgrounds in real estate. As a Seattle mobber from the north mobbing house once put it, “We like the neighborhood watch. They keep the renters down.”

Ω

Mobbers evict by eliminating privacy. They interfere with utility and communications “flows” that run in and out of your home, jamming your communications, creating transient blockages in plumbing lines, and making electrical interference by sending direct current over alternating current lines. They access abandoned pipes and low pressure lines to bring in the flows that you want out, flows of verbal abuse and discharges from their drafting or venting systems. They crosscut your property with signal extenders that boost sound interior to your home and they “put it in the street.” This is what the north mobbing house owner of Seattle told me they would do with the sounds of sexuality. They clamp down on their victims to humiliate and shame, listening over wireless services for sound in locations where the law provides a reasonable expectation of privacy. They eavesdrop on private spaces and then chatter about the “show” you put on. They try to convince their victims that they are the criminals. Mobbers turn things inside out.

In a 2015 paper that explores connections between the Stasi and the surveillance state, Computer Science professor Robert H. Sloan and Professor of Law Richard Warner write about the importance of information held private, even within the public sphere. This is information that is relative to the interaction and shared based on mutual restraint (Robert H. Sloan & Richard Warner, The Self, the Stasi, the NSA: Privacy, Knowledge, and Complicity in the Surveillance State, 17 Minn. Intell. Prop. Rev. 347 (2016)). The norms by which information sharing is coordinated allow individual development and expression. Sloan and Warner compare the threat that American surveillance poses to the self to the repressive impact of the East German Stasi police from 1950 to 1990. The Stasi turned relational norms on their heads, cultivating neighborhoods of informants in which lovers betrayed their intimates and children their parents. These are the norms that mobbers violate as they insert themselves into the lives of their victims, babbling in the background of cellular calls, layering verbal abuse over the music players of their victims, and pumping sound backward over low-pressure plumbing lines. As in the world of the Stasi, in surveillance there is no filter, no restraint. Surveillance devices are “agnostic” to the content; all sound within range is information to be collected. For mobbers looking to leverage their victims’ psychology, all information is of value. Sloan and Warner remark: “The United States possesses a degree of knowledge about its citizens that the Stasi could only dream of.” Reiterating the question of security expert Bruce Schneier, the researchers ask whether we have done nothing more than to build technologies that are easily modified to “watch and control.” The pair warn that there is a comparison to be made between the United States and East Germany.

The United States is not East Germany,
but it is on the road that leads there.

—Sloan and Warner

“Watch and control” is apt description of the overarching mission of those who mob. “Watch her!” demanded the aging builder who hailed from the state of the Aryan Nations as he stood before the house he built. I don’t remember if that was before or after he paid my landlords a visit, telling them there were “ways to get [me] out” of my Seattle home.

In East Germany, the Stasi created a system of informants in service to Zersetzung—”decomposition.” The Stasi collected information to “disintegrate” the lives of their victims, interfering into relationships and alienating their victims from intimates. They put private information to work, using the principles of operational psychology to break down and mute their victims. According to British journalist Luke Harding, the Stasi effected the ruination of its victims in secrecy, leaving victims discredited and disbelieved (“Zersetzung,” Wikipedia). Like the Stasi, mobbers make a studied effort to collect and use information about their victims against them. For those who practice “decomposition,” even a name is useful. Mobbers may pass by and greet their puzzled victims by name, before entering the mobbing houses to harass them. They incorporate victim names into their verbal abuse to make you understand that you are the “target” of their hate. They use your name to convince you that they know everything about you, even the things you might not want known. They want to convince you they know you, even if you have no idea who they are. Like Stasi, they utilize any source of information they can access, including information on social networking sites, browser history, search data, knowledge or assumptions based on embodiment—gender, race, physical appearance, and they delve into the private sphere to understand what makes their victims “tick,” and what their “friction points” might be. “Friction point,” as mentioned in earlier blogs, was a term a mobber used early on as she harassed me inside my home over some speaker-enabled access point. She explained that she was probing for my “friction point,” something they appeared to believe they could use to provoke a crisis and break my resistance to abandoning my home.

In his 2017 Master’s degree dissertation, Stasi Brainwashing in the GDR 1957-1990, Jacob H. Solbrig applies the term “brainwashing” to the methods that the Stasi used for mass manipulation. Solbrig differentiates brainwashing from gaslighting, which he describes as “sowing seeds of doubt in the mind of the individual or targeted groups.”

Stasi brainwashing campaigns extended to systemic repression including “interfering in personal relationships, preventing social mobility, blackmail, and [indefinitely] detaining persons thought to have seditious or revolutionary ideas….” (p.4-5) These practices are evident in mobbing and can be enumerated in events that have occurred in mine. Much of the verbal abuse is gratuitous and appears intended to “brainwash” or “decompose.”

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four (1949), a dystopian novel that examines the effects of totalitarianism, surveillance and repression, the main character Winston Smith is imprisoned, isolated and tortured to brainwash him into compliance, “wash[ing] [him] clean.” The word brainwash originated from the Chinese expression, “wash brain.” The Stasi actively “brainwashed” citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into spying and informing on their neighbors. “In many cases the relationships between Stasi agents and their informers blurred the line, with agents posing as friends and colleagues and even lovers” (p.1)

When the block watch is a hidden space for extremists, coordinators and captains are agents who “pose” as “neighbors,” falsely concerned for the welfare of those who neighbor them. In a post-9/11 world, the block watch in a town like Albany, California becomes a far right sleeper cell in a clandestine network of cells that is the National Neighborhood Watch (NNW). Or perhaps the block watch is a team of legal resident spies operating under the aegis or “official cover” of local police and government who, much like their diplomatic forebears, receive de facto immunity for their sabotage, domestic terrorism, and sundry anti-democratic activities.

Ω

Mobbers punish with a strategy that incorporates surveillance disciplines core to the National Neighborhood Watch, the police, and the military. With each IoT or low-power device you configure, you give them another way “in” to your home, you give them another way to get you out. The greater the investment of IoT devices in your environment, the greater the number of entry points you make available to signal jammers, dirty trick investors, unethical block coordinators and the like. By cyberstalking, criminals hide location behind a black cloud, cloaking themselves in secrecy and damaging victims while they indemnify themselves from prosecution. Cyberstalking gives mobbers a leg up whether they are NNW, police or militia, making it ever easier to discredit victims by claiming they are delusional. This is especially true when the police refuse to accept reports of “Internet crimes” and refer gaslit victims to an unresponsive FBI. Mobbers turn things on their heads, then they turn them inside out, DoSing your interiority like they smurf your router. “Don’t give her any quiet,” the north house mobbing owner said to his toadies as I gardened in my front yard.

Sloan and Warner explain the concept of privacy in public by examples of enclosure and obscurity. We create privacy when we enclose information in a barrier that may be physical or protected by societal norm or privacy law. We create privacy by obscuring information from view. For all those who have shelter and are not being mobbed, home is the enclosure that wraps you in privacy. When you leave your home and walk down the front steps, the path you tread is obscure to your neighbors if they have not turned motion and other sensors upon you, if the wireless bandwidth they deploy does not exceed the property line, if the lens of their Ring camera is not turned on you or lacks the range to detect your position. Your words to your partner on the sidewalk and the embrace you share remain obscure to neighbors because their position is distant from your own or because your neighbors adhere to societal norms on privacy and respect privacy law. None of these things are true for the victim of mobbing whose harassers spare no effort in keeping her under thumb.

“She moved!” the Albany lowlife and his mobbing partners exclaim when they confirm signs of life after waking me from sleep. The practice indicates the likelihood of wireless sensors or beam-focused WiFi cutting through the private areas of my home. Another time in recent weeks, there was a long silence as the Albany lowlife tried but failed to locate me in the middle of the night. I drifted into sleep and then woke once more to the sound of pounding at some door, probably the door of one of the houses on the south fence. “That doesn’t mean she moved,” I heard. But I had. There was a pause, then the sound of quick footsteps at the fence line to my south as some device or appliance was placed or switched on. And recently in Seattle on one early morning when the noise of mobbing was unremitting, there was the sound of a vehicle traveling down the road, then a pounding that may have been on the door of a house formerly occupied by an elderly man I’ve mentioned before. “Can you keep it down?” The sound of the mobbing had traveled too far. Apparently even the ex-military have difficulty maintaining radio silence when they’re battering victims in their beds with sound.

When criminals park out front and use public infrastructure to harass you in your home by name, you have no obscurity. Sloan and Warner comment on the vast number of cameras collecting video and aided by facial recognition in the downtown Chicago of 2016—some 20,000. Data from this saturation of the public sphere is easily aggregated with biometric information collected from your day-to-day movements, diminishing the obscurity of the metropolis. No more am I a stranger in a strange land. But one can find some solace in the blanket recording. When I stop at an intersection, I can still hope for obscurity, to be nothing more than one frame among the hundreds, thousands or millions of those who’ve traveled the same path, one frame in data stores of terabytes, petabytes, and exabytes so vast that I am obscure. But when surveillance is stalking with the goal of extortion, there is neither enclosure nor obscurity. “Maybe we can make her sell her house,” I overheard the north mobbing house owner say the last time I was in Seattle. (You may have noted the recent New York Times op ed piece on police surveillance, The N.Y.P.D. Is Teaching Everyone How To Track Everyone Every Day Forever. We must begin to warn others that these excesses are not limited to the police—we must beware of the use of surveillance from next door.)

Sloan and Warner conclude that the watched conform to the standards they attribute to those who watch them. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (1968), one of the many books my mother scattered around the house during my childhood, describes a world in which surveillance is the price you pay when you challenge the authority of those who have the power to watch. Each of us strikes a bargain between self and the state:

[P]ose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be
fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority
that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of
wrongdoing. This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience, and
conformity. The safest course, the way to ensure being “left alone,” is
to remain quiet, unthreatening, and compliant.

My mother brought home books like Betty Cavanna’s Jenny Kimura, on the topic of racial prejudice, for her kids to read. Paperback books bearing the names of critical authors of the day were scattered around the around the house like amulets: Kurt Vonnegut, Erika Jong, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Daniel Ellsberg, Betty Friedan, Lillian Hellman, Malcolm X, and endless others. My mother was a California primary school teacher who spent much of her time at the kitchen table, grading papers and drawing up lesson plans. There is a bitter irony to being attacked by “investors” who spout natalist excuses as they oust and “flip” the homes of California teachers for top dollar in the City of Albany, California.

Ω

On a wintery morning in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Causley Edwards readied himself to depart for work. Edwards was an assistant manager at Whitehall Mall Merchants Bank. It was December 20th, 1988—the height of the Christmastime spike in bank robberies.

Before he could make it to the car, Edwards was abducted by a masked man. He had been made captive in an extortion scheme. Edwards was forced to drive around at gunpoint as his abductor ran down a set of instructions. The man wound a wire around Edwards’ neck and fit the connected device into Edwards’ pocket. He demanded Edwards retrieve a “substantial amount” of cash from the bank. If Edwards failed, the device would be detonated (Suspects sought after failed bank robbery, Dec. 19, 1988, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/12/19/Suspects-sought-after-failed-bank-robbery/5247598510800/).

The extortion scheme quickly went awry. Edwards was released after a harrowing standoff. The device was disconnected and removed from his pocket. The bomb, it turned out, was fake.

It was an uncommon extortion scheme but bomb threats have played a role in other robberies. The victimization always costs the victim, whether the bomb is fake or real. In a 2021 replay of bank robbery by bomb, Brian Douglas Wells, alleged to be a willing participant, might have agreed to wear a fake bomb. It didn’t matter. Wells lost his life when authorities closed in and the device was remotely detonated. For Causley Edwards who expected to be blown to bits at any moment, the nightmare did not end with the revelation that the bomb was fake. Suspected of being an accomplice, Edwards was suspended from the bank without pay and was reinstated only after a lawsuit that followed the masked man’s confession. That was five years later. The events of that day changed the course of his life. Edwards left the bank to become an attorney. He now works as a business attorney in Arkansas (Ex-banker thought bomb was “real,” Oct. 5, 2021, https://www.mcall.com/2003/09/07/ex-banker-thought-bomb-was-real-it-was-a-case-like-the-one-that-killed-an-erie-man-in-1988-causley-edwards-had-a-device-draped-around-his-neck-and-was-forced-to-rob-a-whitehall-bank/).

The common belief is that many bank robberies are enabled by an “inside man.” This theory tends to arise in cases, for example, where the timing of the robbery or the method of entry demonstrate the likely possession of “inside information.” In some cases, the investigation of the victim reveals a thief. In Edwards’ case, the victimization was unusual and extreme. Here was a man who claimed he was forced to participate in a bank robbery against his will by a masked man who was not there—a masked man who remotely administered the crime.

Edwards was entrapped in circumstances that were highly unusual and, because of their rarity, damning. As an attorney once remarked after I described what was being done to me in my Seattle neighborhood, that “would be a novel crime.” The description reflected his skepticism, and his ignorance. Mobbing may be obscure but it is not new. I hope the writings on this blog begin to pull back the veil on mobbing and that we can begin to see the man behind the curtain.

Beyond novelty, the remote administration of the crime that victimized Edwards was effected through technology, a condition that seems to leave local police—pouf!—without ready suspects and to put investigation out of reach. Tech-enabled crimes seem to be even more damning for victims who must persuade the police of their victimization, even in cases where the victim remains trapped in a coercive situation. Police are also gobsmacked by crimes that are perpetrated from behind the walls of neighboring houses. This may be generally true even when the investigating police are not involved in the gang-stalking scam.

Finally, what happened to Edwards was complicated by bias. Edwards was the sole bank employee who was not cleared after the FBI investigation. This fact he attributes to being black. Edwards’ rehiring was the result of a lawsuit against the bank for racial discrimination. His decision to attend law school and leave the bank does not surprise. If my mobbing had been adequately investigated and resolved, I might have done the same, though I would have finally pursued this path I long ago rejected not only for the financial stability to pursue my personal writing and art work but because I’m pretty certain that those who continue to try to harass me out of my legal contracts and assets think twice before they target a lawyer. Not surprisingly, Edwards’ experience left him with a “dreadful suspicion of police authority.”

All of this resonates for me. There is the victimization heaped upon victimization that comes with the ambiguity of crimes that are remotely administered. There is the victim blaming common in cyberstalking and tech-enabled crimes heightened by the bias of investigating officials. There is the absolute inability of the victim to secure the belief of investigators and the impossibility of justice that results.

Ω

Mobbers indemnify themselves by abstraction. If it’s not enough that they use your pipes and your wires to create a phenomenology damning in its unfamiliarity, they use technology—digitization—to confuse their victims about the source of the harassment and about their locations, identities and even their voices (Police practice must change to protect us from mobbing and IoT crimes). Automation like that of earlier remote-control extortion schemes, is built into the use of wireless signal extenders that enable mobbers to detect the victim movements from network-connected locations. Obscured by digitization, mobbers shapeshift into imposter attorneys, landlords, bill collectors, rapists and police. Combine call-in harassment with mobility and public access for a succession of events without causal chain to connect them: One mobber speaks the words, the next places the phone, another makes the connection, and the last deploys the access point. Add voice synthesis and voiceprint has no meaning. Combine voice synthesis with text-to-speech (“read aloud”) and translation, add in some closed captioning and voice control on streaming devices, and you have indemnification end-to-end (“Speech synthesis,” Wikipedia).

Even early on in the mobbing, the manipulation of the verbal abuse that was transmitted into the house was clear. The mobbers told me they recorded nothing. But they had already played back clips of recordings from conversations I had had with my mother, my landlord, and a friend, perhaps to demonstrate omniscience or show that they had control over my communications. As the months wore on and they could not expel me, I watched “monitors” come and go from the mobbing houses in “shift changes” and noted repetition of the harassment that was transmitted or “played” for my hearing. The mobbers were recording, and they were replaying their recordings. When I talked about their asking me again and again in nighttime harassment one night, “Who am I?” I focused on the event as an interrogation and on the difficulty of making an identification based on voice. But even then, it was clear that the use of some kind of voice filters or synthesis could have been in use and that through this technique of interrogating their victim over speaker they sought to show that I could not match voices to identities.

Black hats have long been known to disguise themselves with the use of voice changers, adopting avatars to protect their identities as they cut deals with customers. In recent years, voice synthesis technology has been made available on the consumer market and now we worry about falling victim to scammers who capture our voices when we say “Yes” on the phone. Technologies like these make it easy for mobbers to hide their identities and impersonate or manipulate victims speaking in any language, dialect, or regional accent.

In an exploration of defending against speech synthesis attacks, Yuwen Pu and Zhou Feng, et al outline an attack vector that begins with victim use of a voice assistant (Yuwen Pu, Zhou Feng, Chunyi Zhou, Jiahao Chen, Chunking Hu, Haibo Hu, Shouling Ji, “FreeTalk: A plug-and-play and black-box defense against speech synthesis attacks,” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00561v1). When you use a voice assistant, you upload your voice data to the device. Upload makes your voice data vulnerable to exfiltration and use as a sample. According to the researchers, attackers obtain voice samples by “eavesdropping from voice assistant tools, which is relatively easy to achieve because numerous existing studies have demonstrated privacy leakage vulnerabilities in current voice-based systems.” The researchers note that attackers can also obtain voice samples through acquaintanceship with the victim.

Speech synthesis is used to generate speech in “malicious activities” including fraudulent blackmail or reputational damage. Pu and Feng, et al outline financial, sociopolitical and personal motivations for speech synthesis attacks. The description of personal motives for synthesis are the best fit for the verbal abuse that is central to mobbing:

Personal Motivation. Attackers pursue personal objectives like revenge or harassment through targeted voice manipulation. This includes creating threatening messages or fabricating emotional distress scenarios to exploit personal relationships.

The use of synthesis in mobbing, for purposes of extortion, opens other doors. From next door or from access points that intersect with your services or devices, mobbers can easily collect that three-second sample without resorting to a phone call. In a scam in which perpetrators try to convince their victim or potential investigators that a resistant or reporting victim is delusional, using voice synthesis to clone the victim’s voice makes it easy to fake calls to police and “swat” the victim in his own voice, or perhaps to barrage the victim with verbal abuse in her own voice as they try to convince her that the voices she is hearing are “all in her head.”

Mental health workers need to pay attention and update test criteria and the standards they apply in making assessments (The New York Times on the digital tools of abuse). Extremists and real estate scammers are on the bleeding edge of using these technologies and, from what I can see, psychologists are easily influenced into delivering the findings suggested by those who are be biased, corrupt, or altogether ignorant about technology and cybercrime. The people who’ve gotten away with attacking me are no doubt attacking others in the same way—they’ve no reason to stop when they’re able to get away with it.

In the example given by Pu and Feng, et al, the attacker extracts and uses a text-to-speech tool to apply a speech synthesis process to the voice sample. This produces forged audio that can then be used in identity forgery or fraud. Given a three-second voice sample, the process yields text-to-speech (fraudulent speech from text), or a voice conversion (fraudulent voice).

Early on the mobbers played back intercepted calls and conversations during the mobbing harassment. Recording and playback was used at other times as well. Early on, I suggested that if they played Kathleen Turner’s seductress role play of a stewardess (Bodyheat, 1981) on the plane the next time I flew down to the Bay Area, I would leave the Seattle house. They did. I didn’t. From the start, I left open the possibility that the mobbing abuse included synthesized or otherwise altered voices.

Mobbers are avid cyberstalkers, whether from the house next door or from a neighborhood watch town a few states away. The tips and tricks of the mobbing trade are not much different from the burglary tourism we’ve increasingly seen in Southern California over the past couple of years. In broad strokes, the techniques parallel those used by the military—this might of course be influenced by ex-military who mob. In another spin on No comms, no bombs, interfere with communications and you interfere with performance. This is true whether they jam you with signal or sound, or whether they apply electrical interference to cause your devices to “glitch.” It’s the same whether they take down your Ring camera or drop a combat drone from the sky. The rules of the road are the same for block coordinators who mob and the burglary tourists who use their conveniently positioned Ring cameras.

The mobbers’ combination of voice manipulation and mobility technologies with cyberstalking makes it even easier to hide identity and avoid prosecution. For example, distributing the illegal utterances from the cloud abstracts the speaker from the mobber who places the cell phone or player in proximity to a hot spot or wireless extender for transmission into the environment of the mobbing victim. A drive-by mobber can pause or park within range of a hotspot or cellular extender, connect, and download or play the illegal utterance localized to the language of the victim. If the victim reports, the mobber’s accent indemnifies him even before he tells the officer: “I don’t speak the language.”

Ω

Any effort to govern, to repress, “decompose” or establish social control requires an intimate grasp on communications systems. Unfettered communication is basic to democracy. In prisons that seek to punish, communication is heavily regulated. The same is true of mobbing in which inbound and outbound communications may be subject to jamming, spoofing, and deletion as mobbers work to ensure that the victim gives up before they are found out. There are no rules in mobbing and no assurance that digital communications are sent or received. In prisons, privileged communications with attorneys excluded, outbound and inbound communications are limited and surveilled. Smart phones are contraband. Cell phones, not as easily monitored as the prison phone system, are contraband. Communication between confined inmates is subject to the regulations of the correctional facility. But people find a way.

Restricted to a narrow urban lot amid downtown Sacramento, the Sacramento County Main Jail (1989) is “articulated to form six slender towers” (https://nachtlewis.com/history_project/sacramento-county-main-jail/). These towers form the backbone of a complex communication system. According to California inmate Arthur McCall, “What I didn’t know at the time was that an intricate telecommunications system linked the eight floors and all those people via the plumbing. The jail is well known for ‘toilet talking,’ or the use of toilets as a means to communicate with each other and obtain items” (“Need Legal Advice in Prison? A Burrito? Even a Sex Toy? Check the Toilet,” Arthur McCall, January 22, 2025, Prison Journalism Project). McCall describes how inmates make calls and pick up the phone in “toilet talk.”

To begin, someone tapped on your vent — the pipe connected to the toilet — and told you to “bail out.” The voice came muffled through the water, but we all knew what the request was. Bailing out involved clearing the toilet water for conversation.

In an episode of Jailbirds, an inmate shows how it is done. To open a “line,” you “bail out.” This means you clear the toilet bowl of water, usually by scooping it out. Once the bowl is empty, you knock on the vent that’s built into the side of the toilet. Your knock tells the listener who you are.

Some shout into the bowl, dropping their heads into the vessel to listen. Others stack rolls of toilet paper in the empty bowl so they can access the phone from over the rim; they might top the stack with an empty roll and use the cardboard tube as a “mouthpiece.”

To hang up the phone, you flush. The influx of water fills the trap and cuts the “connection.” A female prisoner says in earnest, “I don’t who figured it out, but whoever first did it first was a genius. Because it’s real science, for real.” Her tone is grateful.

If one inmate can find a way to use a plumbing system to talk to another in prison, the mobber planted in the house next door can probably do the same to talk to you, and probably has done as much to talk to me. Mobbers evict by holding you captive to inescapable abuse. They get to you by simplex—one-way—communication that does not require your consent or cooperation. If they listen, they may use one device to “listen” or track you, maybe a motion-sensing device, and another to speak to you. This makes it more difficult for you put the finger on them. You can turn off your phone, you can pull all the old POTS jacks from the walls and disconnect from the Internet. You can shorten pipe runs, move them away from exterior walls and remove corroded metal piping as you find it. You can get rid of irrigation systems that run too close to the property line for comfort. But excluding access over a shared sewer lateral or abandoned piping is more difficult.

In both Seattle and Albany, I was able to confirm that the sound of verbal abuse at the sink was not ameliorated solely by opening the window. It was quieted best when the sink drains were plugged and the sinks were left with standing water. Even then, and especially in the kitchen and bathroom that were not plumbed to code in one of my mother’s remodels (plumbing so poor it was unlikely that it was installed by a licensed plumber or inspected by the City of Albany), I discovered that the verbal abuse was quieted for a longer period of time if I recharged the trap, however poorly installed. This is where a mobbing victim might find she has to strike a balance between stilling water in plumbing lines to stop the ingress of sound (radio frequency being conducted over piping) and ensuring plumbing lines contain the water necessary to keep the traps charged and make it harder for mobbers to pump or blow noxious substances backward into her environment. I’ve also considered that wet pipes might be less susceptible to magnetism or becoming conductors, but I live in this situation knowing that without an investigation, it is impossible to have a comprehensive understanding of the dirty tricks of mobbers and how to defeat them. Arrest is likely the most effective way.

Mobbers might digitally imprison their victims, but the victims of mobbing are not incarcerated in a prison—they traverse a traveling matte. Mobbers subject their victims to continuous verbal abuse and harassment from outside the victim dwelling, whether the other side of a shared wall in a condominium or outside the exterior walls of a house. In prison, an inmate on one floor “bails out” the water that secures the trap and talks over the plumbing line to an inmate in the next wing. In mobbing, the mobber next door waits for a charged trap to clear in the victim bathroom before abusing her over an open stretch of buried pipe.

Like other flows of natural gas, air, and electricity, plumbing systems connect the private domain to the public. A plumbing system is a communications system. Contiguous surface is the channel. Current is the network protocol. You might not be in prison but your home is very much on the block.

“Evil comes from a failure to think.
It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil
and examine the premises and principles from which it originates,
it is frustrated because it finds nothing there.
That is the banality of evil.”

—Hannah Arendt

Mobbing is extremist. My lowlife “neighbor” leans against the side of his car and harasses me, probably over the WiFi hotspot he and his wife tend within. His child stands on the lawn a few feet away, blowing bubbles, checking for his father’s approval.

Ω

Stay tuned for more toilet talk and mobbing abuse in part 3 of Mobbing is extremism.