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.
Published 2025-03-22
The technologies described in this story — the Frey microwave auditory effect, FMCW radar, IMSI catchers — are real and documented throughout this site. Marcus Webb is not. I. The Measurement Marcus Webb had been a network engineer for eleven years when he first heard it — or rather, felt it. Not a sound. The shape of a thought that didn't belong to him, arriving the way a draft arrives through a door you were certain you had closed. He was in the food court of a Hamilton shopping mall, eating a sandwich he didn't want, when the ambient noise seemed to bend. To focus. As though the diffuse roar of six hundred strangers had been tuned — very slightly, very deliberately — into a parabola, and he was sitting at its focal point. He told himself it was tinnitus. He was thirty eight. Tinnitus happened to people. That was a Tuesday in March. By Friday he had catalogued seventeen Bluetooth beacons between his apartment and his office, each one timestamped, each one annotated with signal strength, manufacturer prefix, and the small anomalies that distinguished a store's loyalty card beacon from something that had no obvious business being there. It was an old habit from work. When you couldn't explain something, you measured it. His wife Delia found the notebook on a Sunday. "You're mapping the coffee shop's router." "It's broadcasting on channel 13. Outside North American regulatory spec." "Marcus." "It's a documentation issue. I'm noting it." She looked at him the way she had begun to look at him — not worried, not frightened, something more precise than either. Like she was…
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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.