Can you hear me now? Mobbing mishaps and intercom touch

“I need intercom touch,” whined a female mobber this morning as I lay in bed. After hours of deliberately interrupting my sleep, possibly from the Tesla parked within a couple hundred feet, she had tired of the chore. And then an “oh no”: “Can she hear me?” Why yes, you low-end criminal. I can hear you. This is what the torturer’s idiom reaches out for, albeit in a Trumpy and tawdry real estate scheme that seeks to covertly punish and evict. Sleep deprivation is considered a form of torture.

“Intercom touch” is apparently a feature in entry management systems that, in a miracle of convergence, conveys the powers of video, audio, and door access control. According to DuckAI, this allows users to “see, hear, and communicate with visitors at a door or gate” and integrates with similar security systems. Victims of mobbing done the way the Albany mobbers do it might occasionally hear a chime come out of nowhere or the ring of a call coming in on someone else’s phone. This while the victim is inside her own home and likely being harassed by neighborhood gangs of haters and the real estate-interested. This was true even early in the mobbing and led to me writing about Ma Bell and local loops. From the start, the mobbing arsenal has included household security and intercom systems like Ring doorbell. I wrote a piece that talked about the connection between the block watch and the malicious use of security systems after hearing the Nasty Neighborhood Watch lady ask the main squeeze of the north house mobbing owner in Seattle, “Can you leave the Ring on tonight?” (“Leave the Ring on”, and other tales of the Nasty Neighborhood Watch Lady) In this drive to criminally evict their neighbors from their homes and given the military influences of their Ring-leaders, these “property war” drivers enlist every radio within range, from smart phones to encrypted radios and walkie-talkies, to modems and medical devices. It would not surprise me if they removed the dash cams from vehicles and installed them in their homes to better hide their activities from their neighbors. Perhaps this is some of what goes on when mobbers bring home shiny new EVs and connect them to overnight charging systems in their garages. Woe be it to mobbing victims who dare to use battery-operated devices or leave circuits enabled overnight. Mobbing expresses a convergence not only of technology but of the interests of conservatives or right-wing groups who distain and disparage liberal views and want those views out of “their” neighborhoods, even if it was those views that shaped their communities. Based on the content of the verbal abuse they dish, they are at least anti-choice and might be so-called “Christian nationalists.” They are certainly not pluralists.

Mobbing is driven by heavy use of mobile tech, and that includes all kinds of phones. Mobbers strive to, in effect, turn your house into a phone that you can’t hang up unless you get out. The use of vehicles as sites for the deployment of mobile triangulation systems comes to the fore when you hear one mobber asking another to “move your car” as I did this morning, because “she can hear” something she should not. Mobility tech is increasingly implicated in crime, for example, in “burglary tourism” or other “living off the land” attacks in which the victim’s devices are used to effect the victimization. Pursuing crime from a vehicle abstracts criminal behavior from the houses of the criminals and enables “drive-by” exploits. Criminals are shielded by the appearance of being conscientious drivers who’ve simply pulled over to consult GPS or make a call, and street parking makes for a quick “getaway” when the victim catches on. When hotspots and phones are deployed to strategically parked vehicles as part of a local loop that puts a “mesh” over a victim house, criminals work from the comfort of the house next door and “calls” are relayed from house to house until they terminate on the infrastructure the mobbers provisioned for you and without your knowledge.

The criminal activities that are pursued from vehicles, from charging EVs in driveways, to vehicles left running over storm drains in the parking strip, to the Tesla equipped with “Sentry mode,” radar and possibly even Lidar–these activities are hidden from network users who believe their routers protect them from digital crime. With mobility technology, with smart devices and power line technology, with IoT and convergence, this is simply not true. The network you’re on is shared over power lines, underground and on the grid. There is no air gap. The network you’re on has become a platform to onboard wireless users in a continually connected world. The military is not the only early adopter of wireless tech; military radio know-how is influencing the use of wireless tech in crime. This is why it’s important for us to begin to understand not simply how our cities use surveillance tech, but how our neighbors do.