On Being Subjected to Unlawful Virtual Confinement in My Home in Melbourne, Australia, Victoria and More

E. Lemma

Part 1, Saturday, 18 May 2024

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it: the acclaim was even greater. I think that is just how the world will come to an end; to general applause from wits who believe it is a joke.” - Soren Kierkegaard

If you are ever assailed by unusual events and circumstances, you would quickly realise that it is very difficult to get other people to truly grasp your plights and to come to your aid and to that of others. We are all very much captives to our beliefs and certainties about the nature of the reality that surrounds us. Thus, anything that challenges these pre-existing beliefs and certainties is written off swiftly – accordingly, most often, we only wake up, if we wake up at all, after it is already too late.

Undoubtedly, fear, apathy and inertia and the like play a very prominent role in all that and more. However, there are brave souls among us with energy and drive and natural wisdom who are not easily deterred by these things and who also deeply understand the myriad challenges that our human nature continually poses: our obliviousness, our short-sightedness, and the egoism and arrogance, and the propensity and proneness of so many among us to mindlessly inflict gratuitous injustice on those who are vulnerable, and on those whom they have come to believe are unlikely to challenge them, among other things.

It is ultimately these brave souls who will save humanity from itself. That is because it takes a lot of courage, generosity and kindness along with real intelligence and wisdom to be truly concerned with the welfare of others and to come to their aid while others remain passive spectators not realising what is a threat to a few now might in time become a great threat to all. In general, without having a deep sense of justice, a strong courage, and an ethics of care of others, it is impossible to confront those who abuse their powers and mistreat others, and to demand accountability from political and other leaders and to strive to wake up and motivate others.

It was mainly with these brave souls in mind that I resolved to write this account of my more than five months of deeply troubling, unlawful virtual confinement in my home in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, among other things. I undertook this not only to seek assistance from those who might be able to extend it, but to also make sure that no one would have to go through what I and some others around me have been going through. Here, if those responsible for these things are not made accountable promptly, then we could be certain that there would be a lot of pain and suffering that they would go on to inflict on a lot more others.

Moreover, it is highly likely that there were others in the past who might have been subjected to the same, or possibly, even worse, treatments than I and the others are being treated now. With all that and more, I strongly urge you that in reflecting on the account of events that I am giving you, please endeavour to think through them with these considerations in mind. The same should also be in your mind when considering and taking whatever action you might be able to take after reading what I wrote.

“So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.” - Voltaire

In any case, my name is Engida Lemma, and I am an Australian Citizen of Ethiopian origin, a mechanical engineer by profession, PhD (Aust.), ME, BE (NZ). I live in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; and am in to self- improvement and regularly dedicate time for meditation practices and philosophical reflections. I also read and strive to apply to my life the wisdom of the great sages such as Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca and others.

It was very lucky that I was into these things; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to withstand the intense psychological and other attacks that I was subjected to in the past five or six months - as such, I would have fallen apart, most people would have. However, after months of bearing up with these assaults, I am still mentally strong and continue to make every effort to fight back using any of the channels that are open to me including writing this account of what has been, and still, going on and asking for your assistance.

In any case, about six months back I started detecting that I was being followed – and, I was being followed while driving, I was being followed while going somewhere on foot, or while simply taking a walk. Moreover, these things continued day after day, after day. I thought this is very strange why would anyone would do these things, follow me around everywhere I went, and for what reason?

I cannot see anything in my life that warranted the attention that I was unmistakeably getting. Moreover, the people following me around weren’t very discreet about their activities – at least, it seemed they weren’t trying very hard. It appeared, for some reason, they wanted me to know that they are there, making me ponder that they are probably trying to frighten me; as such, they were not there to simply observe me – it was as if they were saying we are onto you, but onto me for what?

I have never been involved in any criminal activity of any kind whatsoever in my whole life. As such, I am not, and never have I been into the use and distribution of illegal drugs; or belong to any illegal groups and so on and so forth. In short, there is absolutely nothing in my life that would make any government agency launch such an expensive ‘surveillance’ operation targeting me.

What’s more, the scale of the operation, the relentlessness of it and all, its comprehensiveness, both physical and online, continues to be such that I get the impression that they are afraid that I might do something, but I didn’t have any idea what that was. Here, for example, when I walk from my home on Buckley Street, Footscray to the small local shopping centre, a distance of less than one kilometre, at times, there have been four or five people closely watching me and escorting me there and back.

In addition to continually following me around, while walking and driving, they also installed a tracker in my car, closely monitor my internet, intercept my emails, control my computers using a Bios or ‘persistent rootkit attack viruses,’ and control my phone, even delete messages that they don’t like along with systematically destroying almost every relationship that I have had with others. With all that and more, I have been in virtual confinement for more than five months now, apprehensive even to go outside, or to attend social functions where they usually have their agents waiting for me.

Here, while I don’t personally know those who are responsible for these things, however, they have made themselves known to many people around me including some of my friends and acquaintances - all of whom were approached with the purpose of collecting information on me, among other things. These friends and acquaintances, however, were put afterwards under some sort of gag orders to stop them from revealing what went on to me. Thus, I have been in the dark regarding the exact identities of those who have been tormenting me for more than five months now - though initially I thought they might belong to the Victorian Police force.

However, considering the massive resources that they seem to have at their disposal, along with an extraordinary power, with an extensive reach that seem to give them access to a range of businesses and services, both public and private - I could not be sure at all that this is a simple Police ‘surveillance’ unit. Consequently, I wanted to consult legal professionals to find out who exactly they are and why they have been after me. However, I have been, and continue, to be systematically hampered by them – something unimaginable in a democratic country.

Moreover, I was also worried for my personal safety for some time. This was due to the manner with which they have been, and continue to conduct themselves - which does not in any way resemble that of any responsible authority in any democratic country, among other things. Some of their methods and actions would even be outlandish in some autocratic countries as well. In any case, what I feared finally come to pass about three weeks ago. In that, I started having a nasty and persistent cough, the type that I have never experienced before.

Around the same time, I also found on one of the changes in my pocket, a dollar coin, a brownish, dry mould like substance stuck on one of its sides. Suspecting what it might be, and alarmed by the possibility, I washed and cleaned up everything, my clothes and all, but it was already too late - within a couple of days or so, I started choking with violent, incessant cough and more.

Thus, I went to the doctor, and was told I had a respiratory infection and was given Ceclor 375 mg that brought me back almost from death. Here, while there is much more that could be said about the incident but for now it suffices to say, it was a very unsettling experience. It is hard to understand why anyone would be wasting so much time, energy and other resources targeting me, mobilising what seemed like an army - without adding to that, they also want to murder me, what for? While these things are the norm in autocratic countries such as North Korea, Uzbekistan and such, but this is alien to a democratic country, Australia - those who are engaged in these things now are sabotaging and harming the country’s values and its worldwide respect and admiration.

In any case, they went all out in their surveillance of me: following me around incessantly, monitoring my online activities including the sites I visit, controlling my computers and accessing and searching through my documents. However, they didn’t find anything even remotely illegal - they couldn’t, because there was nothing to find. They siphoned off thousands of documents from my computers, but these documents consist almost exclusively of articles and books on philosophy and related topics as well as a range of materials on engineering.

Unless they find the works of the likes of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus and books and articles on engineering thermodynamics, mathematics and such problematic, there was absolutely nothing in these computers that would have been of any interest to them. I read and enjoy these things, for self-improvement and for professional reasons; I also read news and articles, mostly from mainstream outlets, also write articles, sometimes, for a couple of websites on the current affairs of the country that I was originally from, Ethiopia.

This is a country with a very long and proud history that has been brought down to its knees by successive repressive leaders - of which, the current Prime Minister of the country, Abiy Ahmed, has been by far the worst. He has initiated multiple civil wars in the country that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, millions have been displaced and have become internal refuges, millions more are on the verge of hunger and starvations.

He has also jailed most of the journalists and public intellectuals in the country, even some members of the otherwise rubber stamp parliament, in make shift prisons and concentration camps. Owing to all these things and more, I have been writing, trying to help those who have been suffering under Abiy Ahmed’s autocratic and lawless regime, but that was interrupted – I myself have been in virtual prison for about six months now.

In addition to those articles, I have also been trying to write about my life experiences, among other things, the difficulties that I have had in life, how I was able to overcome these difficulties, my personal transformations including the sages, both classic and contemporary, who have inspired and guided me in all of these things – and producing several drafts in the process, but publishing nothing so far. About seven months back, however, I sent a draft article to ‘The Age’ editors to ask them if they would be interested in publishing my story.

Along that draft article, I also sent them a separate letter on the rent increase for my apartment, about fifty five percent rise, which took my rent from some fifteen hundred to over twenty-three hundred per month. I was already having a great difficulty paying what I was paying before, this increase made things extremely difficult.

Still, rents were going up for a lot of others, too, at the time; thus, by its own, my rent increase was nothing special. However, there were some anomalies about it that prompted me to look into things closely, as such, certain elements of it didn’t add up. So, I went through a few processes but the mystery remained; and, as a last resort, I wrote that letter to ask readers of ‘The Age’ if they could help me unravel the mystery, promising to provide all the necessary details. But none of that come to pass; but a couple of weeks or so afterwards, however, the intensive ‘surveillance’ and the other activities I am writing about in this account of events began.

The first thing I noticed was that some of the people around me whom I have never said anything to about my communications with the editors of ‘The Age’ started alluding to the contents of my email, which was a bit strange. It seemed to me that my email to the Age editors was either intercepted or those who around the same time started surveilling me acquired it some other way and shared its contents with the people around me. It also became clear this group whose interests that I have attracted came across me long before I sent that email.

It took me some time to put things together giving this group a lot of time to completely muddy the waters, create false narratives and disseminate them widely and use misdirection to confuse even me. However, given the situation, this was to be expected. As such, when you are being continually intimidated and terrorized by an entity with an unlimited resource at its disposal, with extensive powers and reach, and having to deal day and day out with that, you don’t have a lot of mental band width left that you could use for figuring out things.

In any case, in 2022/23, I worked for the CSL Australia for few months but had to leave owing to some circumstances. When I got the position initially, I was very grateful for the opportunity and was planning to do everything in my power to help them achieve the objectives of the project that they were carrying out at their airport site. However, when I started working, I was met with an intense and almost general hostility, a hostility whose underlying reason and rationality that I was not able to understand at all at the time.

Overtime, this hostility subsided somehow, and I started to breathe a bit easier, thinking it might have been behind me. However, within about three months or so, one of those with whom I have been working with started the whole thing all over again, spreading malicious gossips and stealthily undermining me and more. I was surprised by these things, because I thought my working relationship with this particular person was good. I also realised that he was unlikely to ever stop what he was doing; and, I dreaded having to go through what I have already gone through - having to psych myself up every morning just to go to work and face the hostility.

Therefore, I approached the higher site management and asked them to change some of the working arrangement; stating that it would be difficult to continue otherwise. Instead of making the changes as I have asked, they terminated my contract; and, following that, there were arguments that went on for a while, including because they refused to pay me the severance that they owe me saying that I have left the position of my own will, which was a counterfactual, and there was a document showing clearly it was.

I threatened to take them to court if they are not going to pay me what they clearly owed me, but it was to no avail. In the end, they didn’t pay me, and I didn’t take them to court, lacking the necessary resources and such. Here, it was remarkable, in the very short time that I was there, and despite the challenging environment, I saved the company close to a million dollars; I could have saved them triple that amount except for the haphazard record keeping there that made tracing things difficult. Despite all that and more, they fought tooth and nail to avoid paying me the less than three thousand dollars severance they clearly owed me, which was all that it was.

In any case, while I was having these arguments with the CSL, I wrote several letters to the company, not only about the severance pay, but also about the earlier circumstances including the general hostility that greeted me there initially. And in editing these letters, I used an online AI application that made these things easily accessible to others. As such, I could say now with a very high degree of confidence that members of the group who has been assaulting me for the last five or six months have had access to all these documents as well.

What’s more, not only were they party to the conversation, accessing my letters and all, but they were also party to everything that went on from the beginning of the process of my employment there, around July 2022. It is now very clear to me that the hostility that I have experienced initially was a misdirected one. As such, it was highly likely that their true target was this group who might have been involved in employment decisions somehow. It seems to me that those at the project site, including high level project management, were unhappy about these things; thus, they took their anger and frustrations on me - I was a soft target who happened to be there and such, which explained a lot that went on there and that I was completely mystified about at the time.

Here, I have to leave out many details in regard to the reasons why I am now able to say with very high degree of confidence that the group that has been orchestrating a campaign of harassment and intimidation and more against me now is the very same group that was part of the CSL process, among other things, owing to considerations of space and time, but of its truth, I have very, very little doubt.

In the arguments that went on, it seems that this group decided to side with the CSL, perhaps to curry favour with them after enraging them earlier, and thus they initiated the investigation of me. This was months before I even come to realise that they were investigating me – for all these, there are other evidences, too, including the people who were contacted by them to seek information around that time.

It was disingenuous to initiate that investigation to check my background - as such, when I started working at the CSL, there was security and criminal background checks that all cleared me up not only locally, but also internationally. Thus, the investigation was nothing more than a cover for the campaign to damage me, whether this was being done to appease others or not. Specifically, their aim was purely to illegally destroy my employment opportunities, my relationships and more. What was also illegal was facilitating my rent increase that they were undoubtedly responsible for - all of which, I will elaborate on in Part 2 of this article. ”