C.A.T.C.H. Presentation

Presentation to Our Local Rape Crisis Centre

Presented on: Monday, April 18, 2005

People present:

5 rape crisis centre workers (including our representative), plus a 6^th who came in late

3 representatives of CATCH

Click here for the comments and feedback we received.

Good evening everyone,

I’m a representative of CATCH, which stands for “Citizens against Technological and Community-based Harassment”. [Poster #1]

Before I get started, I just want to clarify the reason for this presentation.

We would like to get your feedback on a number of items.

I’ll be giving a talk for about 15 minutes and then we’ll have a Q&A session for another 15 minutes.

We will be looking for information such as:

How did you feel about the subject matter?
Did we lose you at any point, and if so, what was it?
What was the single most important piece of information you learned?
What did you disagree with?
How could we do better?
Did you understand the terms that were used? We’ve provided feedback forms which you can fill out if you prefer to give us feedback that way, rather than during the Q&A session.

Now I will begin.

Rather than give you a definition of what “technological and community-based harassment” is, let me give you an anecdote from my own experience.

This weekend as I was just drifting off to sleep, a rumbling noise began coming from my night table. I hadn’t heard this before, so I sat up and searched for the source of the rumble. It sounded as though a heavy truck was driving by and making some objects on the table vibrate. Except there was no truck in the picture.

I pressed hard on my night table and the noise stopped. Once I let go, it started again. I shifted my table around in several positions and eventually it stopped rumbling.

That was a single example of technological harassment. We also call it electronic harassment. This was one in a series of similar experiences I’ve had daily for the past 2 1/2 years.

Having objects in my bedroom vibrate is the latest twist in a long series of abnormal experiences. Before that, I had banging noises - but only at night, and only when I was trying to go to sleep. Sometimes the wall would bang, very often the TV would bang even though it was not plugged in. In order to get to sleep, I had to cart my little 14” TV out of the room every night. I also had to run a fan to drown out the various noises in the room.

The technology does MUCH more than just create noises and cause vibrations. It causes pain, fatigue, dizziness, confusion, weakness, blurry vision, extreme headaches, and so on. It can make individual muscles in your body contract causing body parts to move in ways that they would never move naturally. It can target any part of the body, and the sexual organs seem to be a favourite of the perpetrators. Many people write to me and ask if it is too strong to call this rape. All I know, is that when someone’s body is being violated and they have no way to make it stop, that is rape. It’s like being raped every night when you go to bed, for years on end.

If you were a psychiatrist, you may think I’m having auditory hallucinations. But I’ve recorded the banging, and members of my family have heard it.

If you’re inclined to believe in the paranormal, you might think that I am suffering from a poltergeist or a ghost. But there are other clues that go along with this that point strongly to the fact that real live people are behind it. I’ll get to that shortly.

I’m not the only one experiencing this. When I began to search the internet, I found that there were hundreds of people online having the same experience. After I put up a website about it (www.eharassment.ca [Poster #2]), hundreds more wrote to me with stories that were remarkably similar.

Technological harassment uses sound and microwave technology, and perhaps some technology that the general public has not yet heard of. Some of this is available to anyone who has a computer and access to the internet. For example, there are plans in this book [High-Tech Harassment: How to Get Even with Anybody Anytime by Scott French] to create a sound-based device that will make your neighbours nauseated and irritable. It is completely silent. The most common one on the internet is called sonic-nausea.
This one [Phasor Blast Wave Pistol] I printed off the internet. [Read description of device].

These devices, because they operate invisibly and at a distance, are commonly referred to as non-lethal weapons or directed energy weapons.

The other aspect of this - Community Based Harassment - is one of the clues that the perpetrators are real human beings. After I put my website up, I had some curious experiences.

One day I left the house to go across the street to my son’s school. A limousine was parked outside my house, on the opposite side of the street, with the driver inside and the engine running. I crossed the street behind the car and walked up the sidewalk. I heard him turning the car in a U turn very quickly. As I climbed the steps to the school, I heard the driver honk. When I turned around, he was giving me the finger and looking at me as he drove away. There was no one else around except me – it was clearly directed at me.

Only two days later, I was walking to the corner store with my son. A teenager was walking along the street coming towards us. As he passed us, he held his hand up in front of my face and wiggled his fingers to get my attention. When I looked at him, he too gave me the finger and kept walking.

We refer to this type of behavior as “gang stalking”, cause stalking, vengeance stalking or multiple stalking. It is often very subtle, and can involve vandalism to one’s belongings as well as incidents with cars. These incidents tend to be repetitive so they stand out as different from normal random incidents. David Lawson, author of “Terrorist Stalking in America”, calls this repetitive behavior “sensitization tactics”. The objective is the make sure that the target knows that they are being watched.

For example, whenever I go outside with my son to play in the school yard, a steady stream of cars will begin to drive by the school about 10 minutes after we go outside. Needless to say, I am talking about a residential neighbourhood, not a busy street. Sometimes people will just sit in their cars across from where my son and I are and stare at us as long as we’re outside. One woman who has been involved in a few stalking incidents (on foot as well as in her car) actually came and stood in the schoolyard talking on her cell phone the whole time we were outside.

David Lawson studied extremist groups in Canada and the U.S. for many years and managed to infiltrate these groups. He gives “sensitization” examples such as repetitive pen clicking, key jingling, picture taking (of the target), note taking, standing close to the target and swarming the target. He says that they will try anything and then repeat whatever gets a response.

My response to all this was to immediately put up another website about this phenomenon as well (www.gangstalking.ca [Poster #2]). I vowed that as long as this took place I would use the material to write about it online.

Community-based harassment uses multiple people to harass a person when they leave their house. If you think this is unlikely, then take a look at the handout I’ve provided which contains a summary of quotes from “Terrorist Stalking in America”.

What is so curious about this situation is that almost everyone who has one kind of harassment also has the other. That’s why CATCH deals with both types, even though they may seem unrelated to one another.

Some key things that set this apart from other types of stalking and harassment are:

(1) People often don’t know who is behind it or why they have been targeted.

(2) Multiple people are involved who have no personal connection to the target.

(3) The intention is to apparently destroy a person’s life by preventing the person from working or even having normal relationships with other people.

The situation is extremely traumatic because it is a kind of psychological warfare. Although the technology can harm the body, probably even to the point of death, the ultimate goal seems to be to affect the person’s mind - to break them down and make them ineffective. It not only isolates the person (because they are rarely believed) but it renders the person too weak or ill to work, destroying an individual’s self-esteem. Many people take their lives, many others end up on medication and collect disability for the rest of their lives.

The victims of this crime have no voice. To date, they have been easily marginalized and dismissed due to isolation and lack of organization.

CATCH is an effort to bring together people who are genuinely targeted in order to gain a voice.

The biggest question we hear, other than “HOW IS IT DONE?”, is “WHY IS IT BEING DONE TO YOU?”

As I said earlier, in most cases, there is no answer to that. If we don’t know who is doing it, it is impossible to guess why it’s being done.

I think, however, that most people can understand revenge as a possible motive for stalking or harassment. If you go online and do a search on the word “revenge” you may be shocked at what you see. Revenge has not only become an acceptable part of the sub-culture, those who promote it refer to themselves as “revengists” or “avengers”. People are targeted when they deserve to be “taught a lesson”. But the lessons are invariably cruel, and the perpetrators revel in keeping their identities a secret. This activity is empowering for the perpetrators, so they continue to do it.

It’s not hard then to imagine that similar kinds of people who may have access to more sophisticated technology might choose to turn it into a kind of sport.

The invisible technology to harm human beings may not be largely publicized, it is very likely not a present concern of yours, but many people, especially in Europe, have been working for years to get laws enacted to control such technology. It is well known by certain political groups that such technology does exist. Dr. Caroline Lucas, Green Party MEP for South East England, wrote the following email to a targeted individual in May of 2004. I’ll just quote some of the more alarming parts of it:

“Electro-Magnetic (EM) weapons are one of the newest and most serious military developments in the world today. Enormous secrecy surrounds their development… They can be broadly broken down into two categories - those aimed at the environment and those aimed at living systems, or in reality the human central nervous system.”

“The more sinister aspect concerns the ability to use [electromagnetic] waves to literally 'tune into' the human central nervous system (CNS), something that has been achieved in the laboratory, according to publicly available scientific literature. This might be done on an individual scale… so as to elicit certain behaviours from human beings. It is alleged that many victims have been tested involuntarily for decades now with this technology.”

If you would like to see the letter in full, it is posted on our website (www.c-a-t-c-h.ca) [Poster #1].

There is also some legislation already in effect.

In January of 1999, the European Parliament in a report on the environment, security and foreign policy made a motion for a resolution on several activities which they called “Legal aspects of military activities”. Among the motions was:

Number 26. which called on the European Union to seek to have the new ‘non-lethal’ weapons technology … covered and regulated by international conventions;

AND

Number 30, which called in particular for an international convention for a global ban on all research and development, whether military or civilian, which seeks to apply knowledge of the …functioning of the human brain to the development of weapons which might enable any form of manipulation of human beings, including a ban on any actual or possible deployment of such systems. Oddly, it appears that nothing has been done since that motion was passed 6 years ago.

In April, 2003, the Michigan State Legislature added a new definition to their penal code, as follows: (Bill 4513)

“Harmful electronic or electromagnetic device” means a device designed to emit or radiate an electronic or electromagnetic pulse or signal or microwave that is intended to cause harm to others or cause damage to, or destroy, or disrupt any electronic or telecommunications system or device including a computer or computer network.

They also added (Bill 4514):

“A person shall not manufacture, deliver,possess, transport, place, use, or release any of the followingfor an unlawful purpose:” and added “A harmful electronic or electromagnetic device” to the list of illegal devices.

Despite these small indicators that some people are aware of the seriousness of the situation, we are FAR from being able to fight this. This is because many of the people who know about it are also extremely limited in what they can do because they themselves are targets.

And the media doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation, nor do they seem to be aware of what is becoming increasingly possible. As Dr. Caroline Lucas pointed out:

“Unless this development is stopped, we are entering an Orwellian ‘1984’ type scenario, which could potentially permanently transfer enormous power to those in control of the technology”

Hopefully I’ve succeeded in shedding a little bit of light on this serious situation. Before you dismiss someone as paranoid or delusional, I urge you to remember that laws are not passed for things that don’t exist. We’ve entered a dangerous age when people can harm other people without ever coming into contact with them, and without ever being seen. And to date, they have been able to rely on disbelief and lack of public education to keep this technology a secret. Each day that goes by, each year that passes, this technology gets stronger and more sophisticated. I fear that by the time the public knows what is possible through their own personal experience, it will be far too late to stop it. From what I’ve witnessed, I fear it may already be too late.

Thank you for taking the time to hear about our situation.

I would like to open the floor to comments and feedback now.

Click here for the comments and feedback we received.