[HN Gopher] Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the ...
___________________________________________________________________
Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd
protests
Author : elorant
Score : 151 points
Date : 2020-06-02 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| VectorLock wrote:
| Although I think a lot of police radios don't use encryption I
| think the majority are using trunked/digital radios which your
| garden variety scanner isn't going to be able to decode.
| Press2forEN wrote:
| With the rise of corporate censorship I don't think its wise to
| rely on app stores for access to police frequencies. Dedicated
| radios that monitor police frequencies are widely available and
| you don't need an amateur license to use one (since you're only
| listening, not transmitting).
|
| My city is on 700MHz P25 which requires a fairly pricey radio,
| but its been worth every penny over the past week. After
| listening in last Saturday we cancelled a trip to visit family
| after hearing about a riot on the local highway.
|
| Make sure to look up the frequency your town uses first before
| dropping so much coin on a radio. If your local LE is encrypted,
| you're out of luck. But many aren't.
| larrywright wrote:
| Any specific models/manufacturers you can suggest?
| Press2forEN wrote:
| I have a Uniden BCD396XT, which is a few years old and I'm
| not sure they make it anymore. However the second-hand market
| for radios is very strong and if you have an amateur radio
| store in your area (Ham Radio Outlet, or the like) you can go
| there and I've found them to be very helpful. They're likely
| to know the specifics of the LE frequencies in your area.
|
| I've been thinking about upgrading to an ICOM IC-R30, but its
| expensive and does way more than just police scanning.
| lozaning wrote:
| Get a Hack RF or other SDR and then just run Unitrunker on a
| computer.
| larrywright wrote:
| I have a couple of those, but unitrunker only runs in
| Windows, and I'd hate to run Windows just for that.
| blantonl wrote:
| You don't have to rely on app stores... Broadcastify is the
| platform that powers all these apps, and they are online at
| https://www.broadcastify.com
| Press2forEN wrote:
| Police scanning channels are a good way of gaining
| information about local political activity in your area.
|
| I think at some point you'll feel the pressure to censor
| those feeds as a way to limit information about
| demonstrations that aren't approved by the ruling class.
| bzb3 wrote:
| How come LE in 2020 is not using encrypted communication systems
| such as Tetrapol? Yes I know Tetrapol is European, but you get
| the idea.
| hkchad wrote:
| They are, in my area they have switched to P25 Trunked and
| added encryption, at least on the PD channels. The US is a big
| country and it takes a coordinated effort to upgrade the big
| city and the surrounding areas and is very expensive. The only
| thing open around me is Fire/Rescue.
| blantonl wrote:
| Europe and the United State government are drastically
| different.
|
| Local municipalities in the United States are very independent
| and will settle on a a communications system that they locally
| want to use. Budgets and planning are allocated at those local
| levels, and power struggles and turf wars will result in
| agencies right next door to each other using different systems,
| just because.
| bluedino wrote:
| Cost? They tried rolling out Tetra in a few places in the USA.
| sterwill wrote:
| I haven't done the work to sign up at Broadcastify, but if you're
| in Durham NC and want to listen hit http://home.tinfig.com:9999
| with VLC (or mplayer or whatever you like).
|
| It's an HTTP+Ogg+Opus stream from my BCD536HP. It's scanning the
| local P25 trunked radio system (Durham police, fire, EMS, ops,
| etc.).
|
| P.S. As I write this I'm hearing chatter about responding to an
| airplane crash... no more details yet.
| vmchale wrote:
| Mostly listening in to news about the looters here (Chicago).
| Obviously I care about the protesters/rioters but they're not who
| I need to watch out for.
| sonthonax wrote:
| Do police really still use unencrypted radios?
| sonthonax wrote:
| Wow, I'm really shocked that police still used unencrypted
| radios.
| empath75 wrote:
| I'm surprised they didn't mention that someone in Chicago seems
| to have stolen a police radio and has been trolling them for
| days.
| swebs wrote:
| I'm pretty sure any $30 Baofeng will let you broadcast on these
| frequencies.
| oasisbob wrote:
| Any trunked radio system hops between frequencies enough that
| this wouldn't work.
|
| Individual radios get "paged" on a control channel and told
| where to receive. Eg, "Radios tuned to the police talk group,
| go to frequency X now." The speaker, when transmitting, gets
| assigned a frequency on the fly.
|
| A baofeng could stomp on a transmission, but nobody would
| follow it otherwise.
| blantonl wrote:
| Chicago uses a straight analog repeater system
| oasisbob wrote:
| Analog repeaters still use trunking protocols.
|
| Edit: Whoops, I didn't realize CPD still had so many
| assigned frequencies in-use with just a code to activate.
| That could be done with a Baofeng.
| callalex wrote:
| Interesting, on any radio enthusiast forum there are countless
| warnings about how if you do something like this the feds will
| be knocking on your door almost immediately. I guess that's
| just urban legend to discourage lazy bad guys?
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| Anecdotal, but an ex-friend cop told me YEARS ago that they never
| use their radios for "sensitive" communications anyway, they just
| call each other on their cell phones so that there are no records
| of their conversations.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| In practice you will still hear sensitive information from time
| to time. Psychology is so dynamic that emotion easily finds a
| way to route around these invisible barriers. It's hard work
| and they're humans...
| Lammy wrote:
| *no publicly-accessible records
| oasisbob wrote:
| Matt Blaze has a classic talk about crypto failures by LE using
| radios. In short, the feds still screw it up and accidentally
| operate in the clear.
|
| I've personally heard a Stingray being used for an arrest being
| broadcast on an open, analog channel.
|
| https://youtu.be/re9nG81Vft8 (Can't find the original.)
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| > Don't mess with the Postal Inspector.
| myself248 wrote:
| I remember, years ago, that they'd use their Mobile Data
| Terminals for anything "sensitive", again to get around scanner
| listeners.
|
| Apparently they didn't know about MTDMon software. Which was
| even cooler than listening on a scanner, because you could set
| it to beep the PC speaker if your keywords appeared in the
| feed.
|
| I assume all that is encrypted now, but it sure wasn't at the
| time!
| trumpoline wrote:
| The US is now worse than belarus or russia, you are going to need
| a lot more tools than radio scanners to regain freedom from your
| government! Not long until the army will shoot at you as they did
| at civilians in pretty every country they went to.
|
| Press reporters abducted by the police live? Innocent people
| gassed? Police ramming protesters? Entire races oppressed? Not
| thats not the soviet union, it's The United States of America
| folks.
| mring33621 wrote:
| These digitized scanner feeds are interesting, but I worry that
| they can/will be used for propaganda/misinformation. What's to
| keep a feed supplier from injecting fake content?
| blantonl wrote:
| Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is
| the platform that powers all the apps that provide police
| scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active
| HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have.
|
| It's an interesting business to be in these days...
| PappaPatat wrote:
| Thank you so much for the possibility. I grew up with scanners
| and am truly reminiscing while listening on these intercepts.
|
| Here in Europe there is close to no police still using analog
| and listening to air traffic control or couriers just does not
| cut it for me.
|
| Bought the app, hope you'll be able to keep this up.
| ISL wrote:
| Any surprises with the uptick in traffic? Do you see increased
| usage ahead of news-reports of protests?
|
| Also: Thank you! I've been listening to Broadcastify both at
| the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak and yesterday, to track
| nascent looting <2 km from our home.
| blantonl wrote:
| The past few months has resulted in us seeing record traffic
| and revenue... it turns out that people stranded at home due
| to stay at home orders are thirsty for entertainment and
| information.
|
| I can't say that I'm really surprised by anything anymore
| after all that has happened over the past 3 months :)
| _curious_ wrote:
| Interesting product/service! I've been familiar with it in the
| past but really used it a lot over this last week - thank you
| for offering a free n accessible tool.
|
| When, Why and how did you get into it?
|
| Does it generate meaningful/worthwhile revenue or is to more to
| cover overhead? (I only noticed the occasional 30 second
| commercial intro) Maybe you have a lot of premium subs?
|
| Why sometimes do certain cities/counties change their feed? For
| example one night the Minneapolis police were on a completely
| different county that was hours away.
|
| Majority of the time, these feeds are relatively low key
| right...with actual concerning/escalated incidents few and far
| between. Wondering: is there someway to us ML to identify
| specific things and provide push notifications to people in a
| given geography around that? For example it could listen for
| "shots fired" in a specific area and notify me via sms or
| whatnot when that occurs.
|
| And AI could be used to show more of an abstract map view if
| and when "violence" is rising based on action on the scanner,
| right?
| blantonl wrote:
| My Grandmother had a police scanner that she used to listen
| to drama going on in her small town in Virginia. Old ladies
| with police scanners is still quite common. It sparked an
| interest and my parents got me one as a Christmas present. I
| spent many years in the IBM ecosystem as an technical SE, but
| developed an online database (RadioReference.com) in the late
| 90's that consolidated frequency information for all the
| municipalities around the world. When online streaming came
| to the Internet, I purchased a small business that was
| putting scanners online and launched it as Broadcastify.
|
| The business is wildly successful. Revenue is a split between
| paying subscribers, license and royalty revenue, and
| advertising.
|
| About 90% of the feeds are provided by volunteers who simply
| connect a radio to their computer and broadcast to us. The
| other 10% are actually provided by the agencies themselves.
| We probably turn over 20 feeds a day, so coverage comes and
| goes all the time. There is a lot of work going on in the ML
| / AI space around the content, but it is a hard problem to
| solve because the quality of the content diverges wildly.
| Vernacular differs. Coverage comes and goes. Organizations
| like Citizen, which have HUGE funding (60 MM lol!), are
| trying to solve this, but they still end up just employing
| armies of workers to sift through the data and audio and
| normalize it all.
|
| We're doing a lot of innovation in the space on our end,
| including using SDRs to vacuum up wide swaths of RF and then
| store call data, which is going to be the next "revolution"
| in our space. Interesting times...
| _curious_ wrote:
| Right on thank you so much for taking the time to answer my
| questions...love the history, glad to hear it's "wildly
| successful" and godspeed to you and everyone else going
| forward.
| oasisbob wrote:
| > including using SDRs to vacuum up wide swaths of RF and
| then store call data
|
| Been there, done that. The technique is scary-good, even
| with cheap hardware.
|
| Capture everything, sort by talkgroups, form listen queues
| ("police", "fire", "police NOT university",) prioritize,
| and place recordings in queues. Stream queues through ice
| cast. Drop low-pri messages if you fall too far behind
| real-time.
|
| Speaking of: if anyone wants nearly two years of
| uninterrupted Seattle police radio archives (and everything
| else from KCERS), they should get in touch.
| lozaning wrote:
| Im doing the same right now in Minneapolis. Running Hack
| RF and Unitrunker V2, tapped straight into Minneapolis
| City Center Multicast. I have a radio reference account
| so Unitrunker just syncs to its database and all that
| info auto magically appears.
|
| Here's my live youtube stream and archives:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuCP1ZetSEA
| oasisbob wrote:
| Will unitrunker handle multiple simultaneous captures at
| once?
|
| One of the magical things about the SDR approach is being
| able to synthesize dozens of streams from a single
| antenna and several SDR devices. The setup I had could
| capture ~10 simultaneous transmissions before things
| started to fall apart.
| lozaning wrote:
| I think there's a roundabout way to go about doing that.
| Essnetially create a lot of additional voice VFO's and
| then set each one of those VFos to have only 1 talk group
| with its priority set to 1. And then set the output of
| each VFO to a different VB audio cable in, then source
| would be VB audio cable out in audacity.
|
| The hack RF definitely supports grabbing an entire 20Mhz
| swath of bandwidth that covers all the signal and voice
| frequencies.
|
| Id be super curious to hear more about your setup, both
| hardware and software.
| blantonl wrote:
| Yup, see our Broadcastify Calls Implementation
|
| https://www.broadcastify.com/calls
| larrywright wrote:
| Is there a way to report incorrect feeds? I was listening to
| our local scanner feed last night and growing increasingly
| alarmed at the amount of activity, until I realized that the
| scanner audio was actually for a larger city an hour away. I've
| listened before and it's been correct, but last night it was
| definitely not.
| blantonl wrote:
| You can always open a support ticket with us. Feeds are
| provided by volunteers so we battle quality issues all the
| time. It's a tough problem to solve.
| kennxfl wrote:
| Is there a way of legitimately detecting Stingrays? I
| understand this is the kind of situation where they are
| actively deployed despite all the social awareness.
| millzlane wrote:
| I remember a few apps that you could watch the towers in your
| area and be alerted or warned when new ones popped up. But
| one app needed to be trained to remember the towers in your
| area.
|
| Something like this maybe? https://f-droid.org/en/packages/in
| fo.zamojski.soft.towercoll...
| oasisbob wrote:
| University of Washington researchers are working on this,
| their technique has used roaming car sharing vehicles and
| anomaly analysis:
|
| https://seaglass.cs.washington.edu/
| krageon wrote:
| You can look up where the towers are and perform
| triangulation on the ones that you are connected to given
| multiple antennae. It'll cost you some hardware and you'll
| probably be writing some software also.
|
| Another option can be just seeding a few phones around the
| area and have them report moving (or transient) towers.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Sweet talk a cellular network engineer into giving you the
| engineering firmware for your phone and a list of all the
| cell ID's.
| gruez wrote:
| stingrays can't spoof cell ids?
| LinuxBender wrote:
| They can and do, but they and the other cell sites can't
| up and move around. All cell sites have multiple
| transceivers that are directional. Each site has a unique
| cell ID and each transceiver has a unique ID. Your phone
| has GPS. If you drive around, you can find out who
| doesn't belong. Be careful about publicly disclosing this
| information.
| ISL wrote:
| The disclosure of facts is protected by the First
| Amendment.
| gruez wrote:
| Does that work for DRM encryption keys? I think sony went
| after a few people who leaked either the blu-ray
| encryption keys, or the signing keys for one of their
| consoles.
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| There are sometimes non-legal reasons to be careful.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
| elihu wrote:
| That isn't universally true.
| vertex-four wrote:
| I dunno if you noticed, but the law doesn't always
| exactly mean much in terms of what actually happens.
| callalex wrote:
| >Be careful about publicly disclosing this information.
|
| Why, what do I have to fear about that in the United
| States?
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I suppose that depends on your tolerance for drama and
| legal cartooney. One of my former employers and a three
| letter agency would go after people publicly disclosing
| such things and the people always backed down. The
| cooperation between nations can blur the lines depending
| on what nation you are in. That said, I am not a lawyer
| so it is probably best to get their input rather than
| mine.
| swebs wrote:
| I guess if you were to build a map of static cell towers, it
| would be easy to see if a new one suddenly pops up.
| jackhack wrote:
| additional temporary "towers" are sometimes added when very
| high but transient network loads are anticipated (such as a
| music festival, or county fair, etc.). not all new towers
| are sniffers.
| z9e wrote:
| I don't have any questions but I'd just like to say how much I
| love what you're doing, thank you.
|
| When I was a kid I loved geeking out with my scanner I bought
| at radio shack, your site relights this flame for me and it's
| awesome to explore all of broadcasts going on in the world
| through your site.
| blantonl wrote:
| Thank you for the kind comments. I started out in the hobby
| the exact same way, my parents got me a scanner for Christmas
| and I was hooked ever since.
| bochoh wrote:
| I was investigating starting a small personalized Scanner app
| with an AI twist but found that you're no longer granting
| licensees for mobile app developers - basically stopping all
| innovation in this area.
|
| "The broadcastify audio feed catalog API is only available to
| approved licensees. We are currently not issuing addtional
| licenses to mobile device developers at this time. "
|
| Can you explain the rational here?
| blantonl wrote:
| Yes, it's pretty simple. There has been a proliferation of
| apps that all do the same thing - front end our feeds, and so
| we're protecting the investment that our core partners have
| made to write apps.
|
| We are extremely plugged in to AI efforts that are occuring
| around the use of our feeds, and so we have a pulse on what
| is going to work and not going to work in those area. You are
| more than welcome to use the feeds to develop AI models and
| present that back to us so that we could grant an exception,
| but the simple reality is that 99.9% of developers that want
| access to our feeds are simply trying to get yet another
| scanner app in the marketplace. It just dulites the
| environment, cheapens the brand, and presents a race to the
| bottom scenario in the app stores.
|
| I'll readily admit that we don't "know it all" and there
| could be some serious innovation out there, but the app store
| market has left a serious bad taste in our mouth of nefarious
| actors who will go to the ends of the earth to make a buck vs
| innovate.
| bochoh wrote:
| Really appreciate the feedback here. That makes good sense
| on the low quality money grabs.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Just wanted to say I appreciate how candid and direct your
| answer is, even though it might be displeasing to some
| people to hear.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Is there a way to listen to the broadcasts in a web browser
| without Flash Player?
| blantonl wrote:
| We've abandoned flash as our default player long ago in favor
| of html5 audio. I'm not sure why you'd be seeing flash as a
| default unless you previously set flash as your default
| player.
| vidanay wrote:
| Is the poor audio quality a function of the participating
| scanners that feed your service, your infrastructure, or the
| current workload? My local feed is nearly unintelligible.
| blantonl wrote:
| It is solely a function of the participating scanners. There
| is a report a problem link on each feed's page which allows
| you to let the provider know there is a problem.
|
| There are a lot of times providers simply don't know that
| there is a quality problem.
|
| Edit: there are also a lot of problem vectors. Poor
| reception, failing equipment, old equipment, and even the
| case of some providers that don't care and just rush a feed
| online just to get the premium subscription.
|
| Crowdsourcing content isn't always easy :)
| imjustsaying wrote:
| Your site helps me know what's happening when I'm in Chicago.
| Robert thanks you for your service and for checking those keys.
| o7
| kaitai wrote:
| Hey, just wanted to say thank you. I'm in the Twin Cities
| (Mpls/St Paul MN) and I've absolutely been on Broadcastify for
| hours in the last week. On Friday/Saturday night things were
| getting pretty wild near my house, and being able to hear where
| dispatch was reporting incidents was really helpful in being
| able to calibrate my sense of personal danger, to be frank.
| Just sitting on the front porch listening to the scanner and
| watching for cars with no license plates the last few nights...
| and using what I hear on the scanner to try to convince the
| guys with their impromptu militia that they ought to at least
| sit down in f*(&ing lawn chairs to indicate they're local
| instead of pacing around after curfew looking like the very
| folks we don't want to see (they had the police dispatched on
| them 3+ times).
|
| Broadcastify, Unicorn Riot, and some select trusted sources on
| Twitter have helped me understand much better what is going on
| as these protests unfold.
| autojoechen wrote:
| Is there a text transcript feature for users who may want to
| search through the communications? I'm curious how well those
| speech-to-text tools work for the audio feeds.
| mstade wrote:
| I suppose maybe you can try running it through Otter[1].
| We've used it with varying degrees of success when
| interviewing customers, and it's also what powers Zoom's
| transcript feature which is what we use these days.
|
| It's hit and miss, in my opinion. It'll give you a good
| enough base to refine the transcript from, but I've yet to
| come across a transcript that doesn't need editing. (Which is
| annoying, since Zoom doesn't give you that option.) I'd say
| it's more valuable having the tool than not, but don't expect
| miracles.
|
| (I'm not affiliated with Otter or Zoom in any way.)
|
| [1]: https://otter.ai/login
| panda88888 wrote:
| Could we run the audio stream through YouTube livestream and
| enable caption?
| lunixbochs wrote:
| Hi, this is a difficult problem but I've been working hard on
| it for a couple of days with some help. I have a pipeline and
| website that automatically transcribes scanner feeds that is
| working pretty well, and the website allows users to correct
| and vote on transcriptions.
|
| My goal is to train my own models on the corrected
| transcriptions (I work in the speech recognition space) so I
| can transcribe many live feeds inexpensively.
|
| I will respond with a link here (hopefully very soon today)
| once I've fixed a couple of remaining UX bugs.
| ciarannolan wrote:
| I thought there were some open source speech-to-text models
| already [1].
|
| Maybe there's something unique about how these low-quality
| radio transmissions sound that make these ineffective?
|
| [1] https://voice.mozilla.org/en
| lunixbochs wrote:
| I work in the speech recognition space and train my own
| models already. The existing open-source models aren't
| very good at noisy radio speech. I will specialize one of
| my models to this task once I have some data from the
| site.
| jcims wrote:
| As you're well aware but HN folks may not be, it's not
| just that it's noisy, it's heavily coded, contextually
| bankrupt speech between multiple parties that spend all
| day in contact with each other. Dispatchers in particular
| seem to have superhuman ability to extract information
| from completely unintelligible garbage.
|
| Are you doing any kind of speaker identification?
| blantonl wrote:
| This is a very accurate description of the problem space.
| Every municipality has their own jargon, vernacular, and
| ways to communicate brevity which is key in public safety
| communications. The communications are often digitized
| over vocoders that are less than optimal, and then you
| have the process of recovering voice from noisy
| communcations channels.
|
| This is definitely a very hard problem to solve.
| ciarannolan wrote:
| Got it, thanks. Good luck!
| save_ferris wrote:
| Do you have a sense of how many precincts are encrypting their
| scanner comms these days?
| blantonl wrote:
| Every year new technology drives some agencies to remove
| their routine general dispatch operations from public access.
| Some agencies really like their communications to be
| publically available, and some don't.
|
| If I had to back-of-the-napkin it, I would say that 10-15% of
| all law enforcement general dispatch operations are encrypted
| full time. The vast majority in this country is still
| unencrypted.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Not OP, but: many common voice encryption implementations
| have serious usability issues which lead to users
| inadvertently -- or often even intentionally -- disabling
| encryption
|
| https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/p25sec0810.
| ..
| parliament32 wrote:
| That was actually a great read, thanks!
| kebman wrote:
| Isn't police radio usually scrambled? It is where I am in
| Norway. It was legal to listen to it before it was scrambled
| though. Not sure if it's legal to de-scramble it, if it's at
| all possible. AFAIK you can still listen to the ambulance
| channel, though, but sometimes the details are ... grisly.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| In the United States, no. Police, emergency, first responder
| radio transmissions are generally in the clear. I don't know
| the precise history of it, but I have always assumed it is a
| combination of legacy (emergency radio in the United States
| is very old, and predates cheap and convenient electronic
| encryption standards), compatibility (first responder funding
| and maintenance in the United States is generally a local and
| state issue, so practices vary widely; for anybody to
| successfully come up with an encryption standard would
| require an unusual top-down standardization that has only
| been seen in extraordinary circumstances, such as after
| September 11th), and utility (in a disaster scenario where
| disparate groups coming from disparate points of the country
| might need to quickly ad hoc communications with each other,
| the absolute last thing you want is lives on the line while
| people are configuring their encryption protocols for their
| radios... Nor do you want to deny local volunteers the
| ability to understand where first responders are and how to
| get to them by having that information communicated in
| scramble).
| simcop2387 wrote:
| This is starting to change, but it does take time since it
| usually requires replacing hundreds of radios at one time
| and a bunch of additional training on how to use the new
| radios properly.
| thephyber wrote:
| Yeah, San Jose just scrambled theirs 6 weeks ago. One
| article from 2015 claims only 2 departments in California
| did this for the primary radio communications, so things
| are changing that way.
| ISL wrote:
| It would seem reasonable to be able to FOIA the encryption
| keys in US locations where it is encrypted.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Doubtful.
|
| https://www.foia.gov/faq.html
|
| > Exemption 7: Information compiled for law enforcement
| purposes that: (A) Could reasonably be expected to
| interfere with enforcement proceedings
|
| I'd fully expect other exemptions to apply if you FOIAed
| the White House's SSL private key or something.
| filoleg wrote:
| Afaik some channels are encrypted and there is no way for
| normal people to listen in on those. But majority of "normal"
| police and emergency response channels are not, and those are
| the ones you can tune in to on those websites.
| primogen wrote:
| Thank you for you this! For the last couple of years, I play
| Broadcastify combined with one of those downbeat live channels
| in YouTube while I code. This after I tired of
| http://youarelistening.to/
| turrican wrote:
| You may already be aware of this, but SomaFM has an ad-free
| version of this idea streamed 24/7. I enjoy it.
|
| https://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/sf1033
| Simulacra wrote:
| Most of our local departments use encrypted radios.
|
| "Over the past few years, an increasing number of municipalities
| and police departments, including the District's, have begun
| encrypting their radioed communications.."[1.]
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/last-of-t...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I don't think this is a positive development. It's already too
| easy to blackhole information that could be used to hold police
| accountable (body cams, arrest reports, etc.). This removes yet
| another avenue for citizens/journalists.
| dmkolobov wrote:
| Completely outside of my area of expertise, so this may be a
| silly question, but are police transmissions distinguishable
| from others in their encrypted form? If so, there could still
| be a use case for knowing _where_ the cops are. Wonder if some
| sort of mesh could be used to triangulate the positions of
| these signals.
| oasisbob wrote:
| You could look for the repeater uplink, maybe.
|
| Keep in mind that these public radio systems are often used
| by firefighters and other agencies.
|
| Finding police specifically would probably involve some sort
| of metadata leak in the radio signaling protocols.
| alvern wrote:
| I think the repeaters would block out any of the mobile
| radios. So you could see the dispatchers easily, but the
| individual mobile operators (EMS, Fire, Police) would be hard
| to distinguish.
|
| If the mesh was every Digital TV tuner inside a municipality,
| then maybe the mesh could triangulate position.
| ryanlol wrote:
| Often they are, yes. It's relatively easy to use an USRP to
| generate alerts when someone is using TETRA nearby.
|
| But sure, other agencies may generate false positivies.
| [deleted]
| Simulacra wrote:
| Outside of my area as well, but, IIRC Kevin Mitnick wrote
| about using a radio set to encrypted frequencies. When he was
| out and about, if he heard traffic on those frequencies, then
| he knew the FBI etc. must be nearby.
| catalogia wrote:
| What I heard is many police departments now encrypt their radio
| communications, with the exception of dispatch which they keep
| in the clear as a concession to the media and ambulance
| chasers.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| They also refer each other to their MDT or cell when working,
| which is equally effective at cutting out the public (whether
| intended or no). In many rural areas, analog FM voice is
| still in use with no encryption, which I've heard is at least
| sometimes due to more favorable propagation characteristics
| for reception at a distance.
| [deleted]
| protomyth wrote:
| I remember as a young kid my family, and a few others, had police
| scanners. It was fairly interesting and you got a feel for which
| of your neighbors were trouble. A lot of my relatives were rural
| fire department volunteers so the scanners were a useful warning
| before the actual alarm page was sent out. I do remember one of
| my relatives drove out to pick up a cop on a back road when his
| cruiser died, or the night they chased a light all over hell and
| back. The first reality programming.
| Lammy wrote:
| > which of your neighbors were trouble
|
| Or which of your neighbors the ruling class want to
| destroy/subjugate, as we have seen recently.
| bg4 wrote:
| > or the night they chased a light all over hell and back
|
| Please elaborate.
| protomyth wrote:
| Well, this is a couple decades ago - so the play-by-play is a
| bit lost, one cop at a locally infamous speed trap after dark
| started seeing a light in the woods near the road. He
| reported it over the radio, and speculated it might be
| someone spotlighting deer. Hunting deer at night is very,
| very illegal as the deer freeze when the light is shined at
| them. He didn't hear shots, but was understandably reluctant
| to pursue the light by himself as people committing illegal
| acts that are obviously armed might be unsocial. Another two
| patrol cars showed up and they decided to surround the area
| where the light was. The "light", when flushed by the
| officers, took off down the road. The officers only saw the
| light and not what is was attached to nor did they hear an
| engine. This pursuit went from road, to another field, down
| the side of a river, and back into the wooded area. The light
| would turn on and off traveled at high speed about four feet
| off the ground. They finally lost sight of it outside town,
| last seen headed down the road. Apparently some folks called
| in sightings (land line days to the dispatcher), but the
| latency made these a bit unhelpful and the officers did
| comment that some of the callers might not be trusted
| observers and some might be ..uhm.. less than perceptive
| having their head inappropriately situated. The officers did
| say some words that were not strictly professional and
| threatened all manner of violence on whoever was behind this.
| It probably cost them some revenue as they were not available
| to assure the public's safe speed particularly after the bars
| closed. They did not catch the light nor did it happen again.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > Hunting deer at night is very, very illegal as the deer
| freeze when the light is shined at them.
|
| Is that really the rationale? I would think risk of
| accidentally harming humans or property would significantly
| increase at night.
| twox2 wrote:
| A while back I bought a baofeng handheld on amazon - it's not
| ideal as a scanner, but good enough. I've been finding plenty of
| crazy shit during these protests.
| jules-jules wrote:
| Can you share some examples?
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