Field Notes — StopBeingParanoid
Long-form writing on RF physics, acoustic side channels, surveillance detection tooling, and how to stay grounded while investigating any of it.
- They Found Me — I have been studying how surveillance works for months. The RF patterns, the acoustic attacks, the vestibular effects. I built tools to detect them. Then my own tools started alerting.
- The Frequency Diary — A night-shift security guard begins keeping a log of unexplained sounds in a downtown Toronto office building. What starts as a maintenance complaint becomes something stranger — and then, slowly, something she can explain.
- Signal / Noise — A man who understands real surveillance technology begins to believe he is its target. A literary story about knowledge, fear, and the most sophisticated attack vector of all: certainty.
- The Frey Effect: How Pulsed Microwaves Create Sound Inside the Skull — Allan Frey documented it in 1961. Sixty years of peer-reviewed research confirmed it. The microwave auditory effect is real — here is exactly how it works, what the threshold is, and what Lin (2022) actually says.
- IMSI Catchers & Cell-Site Simulators: How Stingrays Intercept Your Phone — and How to Detect One — An IMSI catcher — also called a cell-site simulator or Stingray — is a fake cell tower that forces your phone down to 2G, disables encryption, and captures your International Mobile Subscriber Identity. Here is how these cell-phone interceptors work, who can legally buy one, how to detect an IMSI catcher, and how to block or defend against one.
- GNU Radio and HackRF: The $400 Software-Defined Radio That Changes Everything — GNU Radio is free. A HackRF One costs $340. Together they give you a fully configurable radio that transmits and receives anything from 1 MHz to 6 GHz. Here is what that actually means for security research — and why it matters.
- FMCW Radar: How a $50 Chip Reads Your Heartbeat Through a Wall — The Texas Instruments IWR6843 is a 77 GHz FMCW radar evaluation board used in automotive collision avoidance. It also extracts heart rate, respiratory rate, and HRV from a person through a wall at six metres. Here is how.
- What Your Phone Broadcasts (Without Asking Permission) — Every device in your pocket is continuously announcing its presence. MAC addresses, probe requests, Bluetooth beacons, cellular timing — here is exactly what leaks, how far it travels, and what it reveals about you.
If any of this frightens you: this site documents what signal physics makes possible in a laboratory, which is not evidence about what is happening to any individual. If you feel watched, targeted or unsafe, that distress is real and treatable. Read about paranoia, mental health and how to get help, or call a free 24/7 line — 988 in the US and Canada, 116 123 in the UK and Norway, 13 11 14 in Australia, or find your country at findahelpline.com.