Electronic harassment and cyberstalking:
Tenant harassment in the age of the Internet
I am a midlife woman and a long-term renter. Throughout my thirty years of renting, I've never encountered a situation of renter harassment... until now.
I live in Seattle and inhabit a small house where I have lived for going on five years. For nearly three of these, I have been openly harassed. Because I believe in civil rights and know what my rights are in my city, I have refused to consent to what has been not simply a tortious attempt to force me from my home but a downright illegal one.
I have decided to go ahead and start this blog now, before I have resolved the situation, because of the egregious nature of the harassment. In the last four months, in fact since I put this site online, I became aware that the harassment had gone cyber and become a stalking situation, on and off the Internet.
It would have been inconceivable to me, even until just a few months ago, that the legal rights of any tenant to domicile would be aggressively challenged for a prolonged period of time and in flagrant disregard for local codes. However, that has become the situation I am in, which has become a predatory situation of preying on a tenant in order to extend the reach of one's own property, to attempt to establish a hierarchy in the neighborhood that diminishes the investment of those who rent in their domiciles, that attempts to take every advantage of a single woman who dares to live alone in an area that is overrun, not by crime as one typically thinks of it, but by the greed of developers, of realtors, and people who put self-interest over the rights of others.
So, although I expected that resisting the harassment would discourage it, what has happened is that these people with a bit of money, people who are not my landlords and who have no business concerning themselves with my lease agreement, have escalated to the use of hackers or hacking, to the use of private investigators and invasion of privacy, to stalking me wherever I go on the Internet, on the FM band, by the use of microphones that amplify every sound inside my house and that then allow them to harass me round-the-clock with demands that I immediately move and more, in their attempt to strip me off all privacy, in effect, of my human rights as well as my civil rights, in their unethical and illegal effort to achieve their goal of acquiring the property that I rent and that my landlords tell me they do not intend to sell.
I'm writing this now because I believe this reflects a new trend in renter harassment. These people have happily announced that they are "mobbing" me and the techniques of electronic harassment ("bugging") and surveillance they're now using do seem to be described as mobbing techniques. I will detail this further in another blog entry soon but my hope is that others in Seattle have experienced this. There is a good chance of this since there does seem to be an attorney involved who has specialized in eviction. It seems entirely possible that though I am tenant to none of these people, that they have decided to use the technologies of the day to force me from my home since they have been unable to do it legally and have shown themselves to be altogether unwilling to respect the rights of renters in the area.
If you are in Seattle, if you have heard of anyone who has been evicted or forced from their home based on the use of hacking, electronic harassment, invasion of privacy and attempts to smear you, and especially if you believe that an attorney was involved in the endeavor, please write. If there's a trend, it should be exposed and those involved should be punished.
More when I can. In the meantime, stand up for your rights.
I live in Seattle and inhabit a small house where I have lived for going on five years. For nearly three of these, I have been openly harassed. Because I believe in civil rights and know what my rights are in my city, I have refused to consent to what has been not simply a tortious attempt to force me from my home but a downright illegal one.
I have decided to go ahead and start this blog now, before I have resolved the situation, because of the egregious nature of the harassment. In the last four months, in fact since I put this site online, I became aware that the harassment had gone cyber and become a stalking situation, on and off the Internet.
It would have been inconceivable to me, even until just a few months ago, that the legal rights of any tenant to domicile would be aggressively challenged for a prolonged period of time and in flagrant disregard for local codes. However, that has become the situation I am in, which has become a predatory situation of preying on a tenant in order to extend the reach of one's own property, to attempt to establish a hierarchy in the neighborhood that diminishes the investment of those who rent in their domiciles, that attempts to take every advantage of a single woman who dares to live alone in an area that is overrun, not by crime as one typically thinks of it, but by the greed of developers, of realtors, and people who put self-interest over the rights of others.
So, although I expected that resisting the harassment would discourage it, what has happened is that these people with a bit of money, people who are not my landlords and who have no business concerning themselves with my lease agreement, have escalated to the use of hackers or hacking, to the use of private investigators and invasion of privacy, to stalking me wherever I go on the Internet, on the FM band, by the use of microphones that amplify every sound inside my house and that then allow them to harass me round-the-clock with demands that I immediately move and more, in their attempt to strip me off all privacy, in effect, of my human rights as well as my civil rights, in their unethical and illegal effort to achieve their goal of acquiring the property that I rent and that my landlords tell me they do not intend to sell.
I'm writing this now because I believe this reflects a new trend in renter harassment. These people have happily announced that they are "mobbing" me and the techniques of electronic harassment ("bugging") and surveillance they're now using do seem to be described as mobbing techniques. I will detail this further in another blog entry soon but my hope is that others in Seattle have experienced this. There is a good chance of this since there does seem to be an attorney involved who has specialized in eviction. It seems entirely possible that though I am tenant to none of these people, that they have decided to use the technologies of the day to force me from my home since they have been unable to do it legally and have shown themselves to be altogether unwilling to respect the rights of renters in the area.
If you are in Seattle, if you have heard of anyone who has been evicted or forced from their home based on the use of hacking, electronic harassment, invasion of privacy and attempts to smear you, and especially if you believe that an attorney was involved in the endeavor, please write. If there's a trend, it should be exposed and those involved should be punished.
More when I can. In the meantime, stand up for your rights.
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