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Police Encrypt Radios To Tune Out Public
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Police departments around the country are moving to shield their radio communications from the public as cheap, user-friendly technology has made it easy for anyone to use handheld devices to keep tabs on officers responding to crimes and although law enforcement officials say they want to keep criminals from using officers' internal chatter to evade them, journalists and neighborhood watchdogs say open communications ensures that the public receives information as quickly as possible that can be vital to their safety. 'Whereas listeners used to be tied to stationary scanners, new technology has allowed people — and especially criminals — to listen to police communications on a smartphone from anywhere,' says DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier who says that a group of burglars who police believe were following radio communications on their smartphones pulled off more than a dozen crimes before ultimately being arrested. But encryption also makes it harder for neighboring jurisdictions to communicate in times of emergency. 'The 9/11 commission concluded America's number one vulnerability during the attacks was the lack of interoperability communications,' writes Vernon Herron, 'I spoke to several first responders who were concerned that their efforts to respond and assist at the Pentagon after the attacks were hampered by the lack of interoperability with neighboring jurisdictions.'"
You can tune me out from monitoring your radio, but you can't tune out my love.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Looks like we have a new challenge... First person to break the code wins an... eraser(?)
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Encryption also makes the conversations unavailable to portable scanners, as well as the internet audio feeds to smartphones. These have been around a lot longer. It is just the recent upsurge in people using the scanner audio streaming apps that is feeding this latest FUD. In my state there is a concerted statewide effort to get all local municipalities on the state-wide system, which can very easily use encryption if the local agency wants to. This is aimed at "fixing" interoperability by having everyone on the same system using the same keys.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I get that there are probably huge cost and scale issues, but it has always baffled me that police communications are still mostly unencrypted as complex encryption technology has gotten cheaper and cheaper.
I am a member of the public and a criminal. I am against this. I need to know when and where the police are coming after me. I have rights, you know. information wants to be free!
Well this of course could easily be solved by national standards dictated from Washington tied to various financial incentives. We couldn't do that during the Bush administration because "we don't want the government picking winners and losers" so instead we had 11 years of no progress. Now we could just pick a good solution and go with it.
Police always ON radio.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
I figured the easiest way to get a police scanner on your phone would be to build some fancy remote control / audio streaming setup...you mean there was an easy way to get local police scanner access on your phone?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Generally speaking, why not use a solution where you can opt-in or out of the encryption? There can be a a clear radio channel that all emergency responders in a jurisdiction can broadcast to unencrypted to, and encrypted ones when that's deemed necessary. I'm not sure where I stand on the encryption. Honestly, encryption might work if it was was weak enough where you could brute force after a certain period of time. While there are abuses for closed communication of LEO's, there are plenty of channels where that could occur. If a scrambled signal was available that would be encrypted long enough to not let burgulars know the cops were coming, but would show weeks later that the cops planted those drugs on the suspect, that seems like a good balance.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
There is a real argument that realtime police communications requires secrecy to protect police and their operations while they do the majority of their work that is indeed properly protecting the public.
But there is also a real argument that hiding those communications also hides lots of the minority of their work that at best doesn't protect the public, some of which severely harms the public.
These arguments don't conflict when the realtime parameter is removed. Both legitimate cop business and legitimate public protection are served if all these comms are published after some short delay. Like the following day, or perhaps even just a few hours later.
Publishing them also removes the advantage that some people have who can spend on equipment to monitor the comms. Instead any interested member of the public can check them. All of them, compared to audited logs of the activity on the cops comms equipment. The publication order has to have teeth, prosecuting people for obstructing justice when they're hiding cop comms they find inconvenient to reveal.
--
make install -not war
The police themselves will have to encrypt their speech.Training video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2syMaK_c1w
Why not only encrypt traffic that needs to be secret? or better yet, do that and send out both signals, one encrypted with lots of information, and one not encrypted with information for the public.
Officers will use an unencrypted channel starting next month to alert the public to traffic delays.
So do they or do they not like people listening in on their communications?
then i wouldn't be hacking it. heh
The solution is actually pretty simple. Use encryption and have it send out the data in the clear after [X] minutes. You can still listen in, but it's [X] minutes old, so not much use to criminals.
they are hiding their communications from the public, I guess they have things to hide.
This will be cracked, but of-course it will be declared illegal to brake these communications (and DMCA can be used for this).
Police are just the tools in the hands of the lawless corrupt governments that are used to force the population to obey the power.
You can't handle the truth.
A solution to the interop issue exists: Standards, for all makers of gear to use.
To sell into this market should require proven compliance to interop standards,
across brands & models.
Easily fixed.
Heck, how can you have a secret police force if everything they do isn't kept secret? Do not be concerned, citizens. Our secret police force will keep us safe and secure and will inform us of all secret police matters deemed important for the security of our glorious homeland.
Proverbs 21:19
This has nothing to do with safety, this is to mute the press. The press follows the scanner conversations to report on all accidents and incidents. With police hiding records and conversations due to lawsuits, we dont need more "hidden" police communications, we them open to keep them honest.
Its bad enough the PR for police is on TV, almost 1/2 of the line up are some cop based shows, perfect cops fighting evil criminals.
In reality, we have a growing movement in the US to keep police honest due to the mega lawsuits in almost every major city. I'm in Seattle, and the police abuse is way out of hand here. The internal coverups, the blue code of silence, the getting ride of whistle blowers, the incompetent police are costing this state with awards and settlements in the millions. Its also sad that the state budget hides these lawsuits. The most open lawsuit loses, department of transportation, they list every payout in our budget. We need that detail for police.
I guess we won't be able to have as many street races like the ones you see in fast and furious anymore :p
How will Spiderman and other super heroes be able to keep a tab on crime?
'The 9/11 commission concluded America's number one vulnerability during the attacks was the lack of interoperability communications,' writes Vernon Herron, 'I spoke to several first responders who were concerned that their efforts to respond and assist at the Pentagon after the attacks were hampered by the lack of interoperability with neighboring jurisdictions.'"
Wikipedia quote:
TETRA was specifically designed for use by government agencies, emergency services, (police forces, fire departments, ambulance) for public safety networks, rail transportation staff for train radios, transport services and the military.
This is widely used standard around the world despite the slight downsides of the system.
Anyone want to guess if US government goes with standard system or decides to spend few hundred million to reinvent the wheel?
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Why not use a rolling window of encryption keys, and publish the keys after 24 hours or so? That way, criminals can't make use of real time updates on police status, but the police are still required to keep their asses clean on the radio?
Cheap now. It has always been cheap. 20 years ago you could pick up radio shacks cheapest scanner (about $100 us) and monitor the police. As for user friendly. It was far easier before trunking came about. Then truck capable scanner got user friendly. Then the trunking systems switched to digital. Digital has not been user friendly or cheap. The encryption just steps it up a notch.
Right after 9/11, all sorts of grants and public monies came out so that police and other first responsers could upgrade their aging systems -- also with the stipulation that the communities work together to be able to allow intercommunications.
Everybody wrote a grant and everybody got a brand new radio system.
Very few people worked together to make sure they were compatible with eachother. In fact, since most departments moved to digital systems on dedicated frequencies, they lopped off a whole integration system between different radios that allowed officers to talk from one municipality to another.
In our case, our State Police post can only communicate to the 5 surrounding municipalities via cell phone (or land-line, I guess). We have a central dispatch that does our 911 center, and they have to have 3 different radio systems in order to communicate with the three areas they dispatch for. It is a complete mess, and it call came from each silo wanting to do their own thing and not talking to anybody else.
And I know we are not the only ones...
Most of the Australian Police forces in metro areas have been switched to encrypted digital radio (using Motorola I think) since ~2008. Primarily due to the media listening in and arriving to many major incidences before police. Tow truck drivers listened in to get to car accidents before competitors. etc. Most police officers ended up using personal mobile phones for any sensitive info.
Of-course all encryption schemes are doomed to failure http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/hi-tech-hackers-crack-nsw-police-force-22-million-encrypted-radio-system/story-0-1226119185214
Most of the police departments are moving to APCO P25 which just so happens to be extremely vulnerable to a simple hack...
http://hackaday.com/2011/08/18/project-25-digital-radios-law-enforcemnet-grade-vulnerable-to-the-im-me/
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Man...even though I know a lot more about this than the average Slashdot audience, your idiot mods are probably going to mod me out into -1000 troll territory for saying what I'm about to say, but guess what - bring it on mods, you're morons...not techs....so I can afford it...
Not a single person of you here, know what the SINE or TETRA system is...but I'm going to explain it to you. (gawd knows why...)...but I'm all for information to the public, so I'm going to tell...
In Scandinavia the police use Sine and Tetra. The radios are developed by Motorola and often called "Spectra". (google it if you must), these have a specific software & hardware encryption system. It works something like this - every unit has a GPS built in, in fact...it's kind of like a 10 year old cell-phone with a GPS, pretty crappy screens, but it does sport TETRA and SINE, an infra-system that is very difficult to crack (but HAS been cracked, with a 32-piece FPGA card...again...google this, I don't care what you know), or you could use an average pc. to crack one minute of conversation in 1 hour if you don't care to have it real-time.
The thing is...the police wanted a system that was interconnected with the Fire-department, Hospital & Ambulance, and lock out any of the public listeners as they could be drug-distributors, thieves & criminals...but things didn't exactly go according to plans, the system failed numerous times, and they had to revert to their old systems (which...btw...also had an analog&digital encryption option...that still hasn't been cracked...)
However....this new system had a downside...namely people! People all over the country was used to owning and listening to police radio...you know...analog signals...kind of like your FM or CB radio...for years, like the last 30 years...these where gone now, everything was SINE (tetra) and digital, so no layman out there could listen in (unless they where geeks, and purchased the very expensive 16x2 (32) FPGA cards for their pcs...and installed the geeky software) realtime, so the police didn't get the info on purps...as they usually got from the faithful legal scanner listeners...they used to get information from.
What do I mean by this? Imagine your average joe out there, wanting some action, purchasing a Scanner...he listens in....hears the police talking about some criminal in his neighborhood...he looks outside the window...discovers the purp...calls the police, and informs..
Now...he can't do that anymore, because it's encrypted...
The only people who can do this now...is the Drug barons with a lot of money to buy the Open-Source 32-FPGA cards that are available to the public...and eliminating the average JOE from listening in...helping the police.. ...I bet the authorities didn't see that one coming.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Sounds like a hacker's wet dream.
And after 6 years of fighting for it, they'll send you a piece of paper with everything blanked out.
They sure worked well in World War II: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker
In an ironic historical twist, you don't call for the Calvary anymore . . . call for a Navajo Code Talker . . .
Of course, large criminal gangs will also start recruiting native talkers . . . just like criminals pay for information from informants in the police themselves. But this will at least cut out the phone app scanner crowd . . .
. . . until someone writes an app to translate Navajo in real-time.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The article doesn't say to which protocols the agencies are switching to. This could be an issue.
As weak the current (clear-text) system sounds like, there is no expectation of privacy, and officers know that. In Montreal at least, when they need to communicate privately, they exchange cell phone numbers and talk over the phone, which is considered more secure (something could be said about that too).
With an encrypted system, the officers will then expect the whole network to be secure and will therefore say a *lot* more on the airwaves. As soon as a radio is stolen or the protocol cracked, the whole thing will fall apart and then much more information will be revealed.
The more secure the system, the higher the risk.
I like the idea that the current system is transparent, and allow even ham radio operators to communicate with emergency teams in case they need to. This just makes sense. Encrypting everything seems like a bad move, and probably a business scam too.
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
When she was working, mom was a journalist. I spent a bit of time in various offices she worked at, and the one thing that they always seemed to have was a police scanner. There really isn't a better way to get up-to-date news about all manner of interesting things. Encrypting those communications will undoubtedly make journalists' jobs a fair bit harder too. Though I suppose that's the least of most newspapers' worries these days...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is a US based website geared towards international readers, it might be handy to not assume everyone is from the US...
"...around the US..." would have been shorter to type even...
I enjoy listening to the local police/fire but have always wondered whether HIPPA does/should cover fire-department dispatches.
Given the encryption and privacy requirements for your doctor/hospital/pharmacist, it's a bit odd to hear the constant stream of "Engine 71 respond to a medical. 1233 Main apartment 12. Attempted suicide. 23 year old female took a bottle of pills. Stage for PD.", "Engine 65, respond to 4321 Center. 34 year-old female having a miscarriage.", "Engine 72 respond for a 76 year old male non-breather. 8765 Harbor Place.", etc.
No name, but age, sex and address which pretty much uniquely identifies the person and which is combined with potentially embarrassing information (drug overdose, drunk, family disturbances, sexual assualts, and the like).
Other info that I'd prefer stay off the air: "Use gate-code 5564 to get in.", "Person is disabled, key is in the fake rock by the chimney"...
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Sorry, but what country are talking about? Surely there are more countries than the US.
People bitch and say: "Encrypt all your emails! You should encrypt them all even if you have nothing to hide!"
Now is "Waaaaah! The police are encrypting their communications! Waaaaaah!"
In Europe, we have TETRA-network ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TETRA ). It's basically encrypted GSM-like walkie talkie network. Finnish version is called VIRVE.
Police, fire dept etc can easily create user groups for different tasks and missions. Only who belong to current group can hear (and participate in) the chat.
Our city switched to a new P25 radio system this summer and opted NOT to go with encryption due to costs and other issues associated with it. Instead for things like burglaries they put the initial call out as "Unit# copy a call on your MDC" and send an instant message to the officer with the address. They either reply back "received" or "didn't receive" so usually it's a faster response than reading the address over the air. So the address goes through the cities citywide WIFI network (which is encrypted). The address info also appears on the MDC of other officers on the unit status screen so if one of them is close they can respond as well. Once an officer is on location if more officers are needed then the address goes over the air. For other calls that aren't a concern if someone knows where they are going, it goes out over the air still.
This is an easy fix.
Assign each cop's radio a unique ID, encrypt the communications when "in persuit" by having a second button on the radio or LED-lit button that indicates that communications are being sent in encrypted or in-the-clear. The radio network can broadcast "crime in progress" securely to all cops geo-located in the area or all cops in the department. When in "emergency response mode" eg responding to accidents/hit-n-runs it operates in "clear" mode which allows for all cops, fire and paramedics to be able to communicate on the same or all channels.
Not everything requires a complete overhaul of the radio system. Most of the time the solution is already available, but just nobody knows how to use it.
the media members are not going to publish anything they hear for fear of losing that access.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Great job /.
Can we now get more current news from the 90s? Police have been moving to encrypt their radios since the late 80s. This is not news. In fact, good chance a lot of people commenting on this were born *after* police started using it.
Well, I'm currently installing P25 systems in different counties -- and I also think we are moving toward a police state -- but I actually don't think the motive here is to hide communications. Most agencies we have converted are not using encryption, though the scanners are expensive. Most seem to care less about being able to encrypt.
I think they were sold a buzz word. The systems cost a fortune. Due to the nature of digital radio, they work well, or not at all. If you work for the city water system, that's fine. When you work for the police, not working at all is a huge problem. Several firefighters were killed somewhere up north because nobody heard their calls for help.
To get radios with federal grant money, the radios have to be P25 compliant. However, there is zero law that says they have to be used in digital mode. All the radios work in analog mode. All the systems we have put in will work in digital and analog mode. But no matter what the complaint of the new systems are, they can't reach over two inches and talk in analog. Why? Because it isn't a buzz word. I honestly don't think it has a thing to do with anything but that. It would almost be funny if the radios didn't cost hundreds of dollars more than their old radios.
See also: Google about the planned nationwide 700 Mhz system for public safety. It was falling through the cracks but Senator Jay Rockefeller is now trying to get the project going again. The Rockefeller family has a lot of power in Motorola. Who wants to guess how much money he/his family is probably getting in a round about way through Motorola.
This isn't about public safety. This is about multimillion dollar deals to enrich the same old people...in a country that is flat broke.
But hey, I'll still cash my paycheck! :)
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
We already know that police officers have no right to personal privacy on work owned communications equipment (smartphones or cellphones)
encryption is a method of privacy. Hence police communications cannot be encrypted.
I can understand the need for special units to use encrypted communication like SWAT. LAPD SWAT used LASH radios for years.
But there is simply no need to encrypt all police communications.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Encryption ain't cheap, ok so I have not shopped around or even used it. But it seems to me it make look inexpensive but if it's digital that means it is computer/software meaning you have to pay and renew software licenses, upgrade to upgrade to meet the next upgrade, etc.
Then all this talk of interoperability (which I am thinking more of it as a bankrupt expression these days), but encryption not helpful in that regard unless you have everybody using same key (which doesn't seem to make much sense).
Regarding cost, I am seeing public safety agencies laying off cops and firemen and/or cutting pensions. Then these companies are pushing new radio systems which are ***very*** expensive. Sorry I don't buy that encryption is lowcost these days, kind of like cellphones that advertise lowcost but they will sock it to you with fees and locked-in monthly plans.
And now this interoperability thing, I think it is industry driven to make lotsa money by bleeding govt agencies for whizbang systems with short life like cellphone apps. Talk to a regular beat cop or fireman, interoperability... what does that mean? The cop wants to be able to talk to dispatch and talk to other officers in his department. The fireman wants clarity and versatility (meaning be able to scale up or down depending on the ICS). For multi-dept response, firefighters have established mutual aid frequencies (fire white, yellow, blue). Occasionally a senior police officer may want to talk to another department, and if they can't use BAYMACS or CLEMARS, they can use the Raytheon ACU-1000. Or use a cellphone or some other means at the ICS command post. We all hear about communications breakdown during 9-11 but also realize NYC did not use ICS and there is a city ordinance that prohibits chief of police and chief of fire to meet the mayor at same time. Incredible as it sounds, maybe they straighten themselves in past ten years (I doubt it), I remember seeing footage on news of several NYC police and firemen in a large fist fight. This occurred some time after the 9-11 attacks and they had to reduce rescue/recovery staff at ground zero (virtually dead bodies been recovered). Some did not want to leave and return to normal duties, others insisted they do so, high emotions resulted. OK, I have to admit I haven't followed up with this story but I could only think, good thing my city doesn't have such a rife between fire and police (and their dispatch offices are right next to each other, instant interoperability and their sneakers don't need software).
Sorry for the rant guys but that's my Gripe Of The Month.
mfwright@batnet.com
Wait a minute. I'm a police chief, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about APCO P25. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature I have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any digital communications.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "interoperability ", "inter-agency communication" and "encryption" to describe the security of APCO P25. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some P25 systems even use Improved Multi-Band Excitation (IMBE) vocoders. That's rock solid in my book.
My main concern isn't with the security of APCO P25, but rather with getting my team to learn all about it so we can deploy some state of the art Motorola radios to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our communication, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to the next phase of the P25 project.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
APCO P25 supports encryption out of the box, and that's what 'backwards' forces like the Queensland Police Service have been using for YEARS. When word came out that the QPS were moving to digital many truckies and tow-truck operators went and bought P25 scanners from the USA. This turned out to be an expensive exercise, with encryption rendering them useless
The local media bitched and complained, but the biggest benefit is that you can have a car accident and not be swamped by tow-trucks vying for your business (and their 'gentle encouragements'). Oversight was achieved by having the clear-speech conversations all recorded at police HQ.
As for interoperability, New South Wales police were up in Brisbane following the floods helping with law and order and they had their radios too. I guess it is just a matter of authorities sharing keys, or having a common key established up front. When Australian police forces went to New Zealand to help following the Christchurch earthquake in February they could use their radios. Tait Electronics and others set up programming stations and as long as the frequency coverage was there, the radios could be used.
I use an 800MHz TETRA system with the State Emergency Service (like the US CERT, but state based) in Brisbane. This is not encypted (not all TETRA is), but there are very few scanners out there. Unfortunately this is incompatible with the 460MHz UHF system that the rest of the SES in Queensland use, so when we have teams from out of Brisbane we need to operate two networks. The text messaging feature of TETRA is very good for passing job information (flood evaculations, storm damage to houses, missing person details) that is not audible to people around you. Having an encrypted radio is not private if the volume on the speaker is very high and the media are within earshot.
The emergency services and the armed forces have been doing this for at least a decade here in Australia, including telephone and satellite interconnect. What's the big deal here?
This is a Very Bad Idea, for several reasons, but one very BIG reason is called "bonking", or "The Sound of Death".
Full story here.
If Firefighters won't touch them, then police should probably avoid them too. But not only are they going to be using them, they're going to try and stack encryption on top as well?
Bad idea. Very bad idea.
[End Of Line]
I see no reason why the community shouldn't watch the police. If the police aren't corrupt and aren't breaking the law or doing anything wrong why do they have to hide their communications?
The Police should have sophisticated communication including on person audio and video transmission to ensure crimes are recorded accurately and that the testimony of the officer comes with wide screen video proof of the perpetrator performing acts of daring don't. This also ensures that the officer can't thump people like ripe melons and not face some serious scrutiny. Said communication system should be part of a comprehensive communication fabric for a wide variety of service providers ensuring that police are able to receive any and all emergency resources any officer might need under any given circumstance.
All communication should be able to be monitored by "Authorized Access" which any citizen should be allowed to attain through a simple licensing process, closed to felons and known gang members. If a person uses communications access to facilitate a felony, it should be considered an enhancement with serious punitive conditions (a year of hard labor working on city infrastructure for example.)
A volunteer organization comprised of interested citizens should be keepers of a police communications archive, in the event of a questionable arrest or police action. This would allow the group to ensure that vital recording don't disappear, that unfounded complaints against the police are dismissed with velocity and that officers who perpetrate crimes are dealt with, keeping the integrity of law enforcement at its highest possible level. Such transparency would weed the cowboys out of police work pretty quick. Ultimately leaving the remaining hard working dedicated people, who for the most part take "Serve and Protect" deadly serious, able and empowered to do their jobs without constraint or concern (their backs are covered on multiple levels.)
I think this is a win-win for everybody except possibly the turkeys, and with Thanks Giving just around the corner, we all know what to do with Turkeys...
they are hiding their communications from the public, I guess they have things to hide.
This will be cracked, but of-course it will be declared illegal to brake these communications (and DMCA can be used for this).
Police are just the tools in the hands of the lawless corrupt governments that are used to force the population to obey the power.
Because if they are serving the public interest they shouldn't mind if the public sees what they do and how they work. What do they have to hide and why are they doing this now?
This has nothing to do with safety, this is to mute the press. The press follows the scanner conversations to report on all accidents and incidents. With police hiding records and conversations due to lawsuits, we dont need more "hidden" police communications, we them open to keep them honest.
Its bad enough the PR for police is on TV, almost 1/2 of the line up are some cop based shows, perfect cops fighting evil criminals.
In reality, we have a growing movement in the US to keep police honest due to the mega lawsuits in almost every major city. I'm in Seattle, and the police abuse is way out of hand here. The internal coverups, the blue code of silence, the getting ride of whistle blowers, the incompetent police are costing this state with awards and settlements in the millions. Its also sad that the state budget hides these lawsuits. The most open lawsuit loses, department of transportation, they list every payout in our budget. We need that detail for police.
The same logic that the police applies to our community should be applied to the police. If you don't have something to hide and you aren't doing anything wrong why do you need encryption?
The police are going around pepper spraying protesters, and arresting people for possession of drugs but they want privacy and secrecy so they can more efficiently plot against ordinary non-violent Americans?
I thought that there was a delay in the online scanners... That would make it difficult to use to avoid getting caught for a crime...
-Myke
I know there's some very good radios out there. Or have heard of them. But whatever the police and fire departments buy... I can virtually guarantee will be cheap unless they come from some of the defense grants. And the ones that come from those...well...most of them aren't at all trained in.
The average officer can't even use their firearm safely reliably--a device that usually only has three controls.
Whatever they use to distribute the keys in these radios is practically doomed to get leaked, stolen, lost, or otherwise bungled up when one of them hands it to their kid to play with. They just aren't smart enough to manage it. Maybe feds could.
So...we'll have some of the most corrupt people and violent people in the country, thinking they are talking in safely...while anyone with a bit of competence and hardware will be able to listen in in a few months.
Sounds like good times to me.
I hope all of these departments are more competent than the Milwaukee Police department which has been trying to move their radio communications over to OpenSky. They intended to make the switch to a digital system to prevent the problems they were having with their traditional system like interference (with the added benefit of the public not being able to listen in) and the new system ended up having even larger problems with dead spots and just plain not working, putting the officers and firefighters lives in even more risk. The system has completely failed and been off-line for quite a bit up here, and has caused a lot of controversy and problems for government officials as they sunk a ton of money in to this piece of shit. I just hope all of these other departments who are planning on implementing digital systems and/or encryption have a lot better luck than we have over here in Milwaukee.
There's a lot being said here about how encryption keeps the traffic off scanners or how encryption is so tough or not tough to break. The fact is all of that is meaningless.
Most of the public safety folks I've ever worked with are careless when it comes to their equipment. The lose things. I have even been aware of cops selling their radios on eBay, complete with current configuration and programming. So all anyone has to do is buy one of these (or find one) and hook it up to their streaming software. It's already commonly done and actually provides better audio quality than most scanners.
Once you have one of their radios you don't need to worry about breaking encryption. When they change the keys (which is pretty darn rare in my experience) you simply get another radio. They're cheap enough.
In Florida at least, 911 can't call a location with an AED and tell them there's an emergency on their property because that would be disclosing medical information.
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2011/nov/06/jeff-lytle-its-an-emergency----but-you-cant-tell/?print=1
The police and sheriff have been using encryption for years where I live. But they only use it when they have something "private" to say. I bought my first scanner in 1992. When I can no longer listen to broadcasts, the scanner will be another obsolete item I'll have to throw away. :(
Everybody says they want interop but when the rubber hits the road, the fact is that everybody who has a radio system (or even a group of users on a system where they lease space) looks at their little corner of the world and theirs alone and they don't WANT to share it with users from other agencies and they also don't want their people on somebody else's system. In both cases, they lose control.
As an example, I live in an area where about four different towns meet. They used to operate four different sets of radio channels which were technically compatible. Even when responding to a combined incident (a police chase, or mutual aid fire scene, for example), none of these four agencies would hop on the other agency's radio channels and coordinate directly. Instead they all routed traffic through their dispatch offices who then had to phone it across to the other towns because they weren't allowed to do anything else.
Along comes P25 and all four towns migrated to a county radio system that covers the area -it belongs to none of the towns; they just lease space on it. Now, they ALL have the same radio gear, they could all theoretically have exactly the same programming in each radio or at least a group of common channels. In times where they need to coordinate, guess what happens? Yep. They each stay on their own channels and have the dispatcher phone across to the other towns, exactly the same as before even though it is actually easier now to do interop.
They will not do it. PD Chief A does not want HIS officers talking to somebody else's dispatchers. Same for PD Chief B, the fire captains, and so on. They want their people to talk only to their people, and they don't want some other users coming on their system, using incompatible codes and signals (locally they are mostly compatible but with some oddities), and they mostly don't want to give up any control whatsoever. Their radio channels are theirs and no sharing.
The whole idea of interop is to give up that precise control in the name of solving the problem faster/better. It sounds great on paper. In reality, it's a flop. If they have it, they don't want it and won't use it.
Moving to encrypted P25 is not going to fix this -plenty of local areas already have P25 and still nobody talks to each other.
There is one exception not far away from me where basically an entire county does have a working interop system where the local jurisdictions work with the county police all the time. Of course, they do this on conventional analog VHF with a booming glorious signal and it works very well. They don't even bother with trunking! Can you imagine this in 2011? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I love it.
Sig for hire.
Police have been trying to encrypt or scramble their transmissions since piezoic crystal-based scanners. I guess in the 80's they assumed most criminals were either stupid or poor, which might have provided an effective filter at the time. Now we know the best criminals are quite bright in important ways, and as a result, quite wealthy... I think that if there were something in place so that they couldn't control the local police, that might be a shortcut to reason. In the US, police would then have to be very bright switched on individuals, and this would be a distinct paradigm shift. These things take time.
If the police can encrypt their long distance radio transmissions, then we should be allowed to encrypt ours. If the police can video record you from their patrol car, then we should be allowed to video record them from ours.
To tune out police.
We now interrupt your public policy debate to bring you language geekery from an AC.
Police departments around the country are moving to shield their radio communications from the public as cheap, user-friendly technology has made it easy for anyone to use handheld devices to keep tabs on officers responding to crimes and although law enforcement officials say they want to keep criminals from using officers' internal chatter to evade them, journalists and neighborhood watchdogs say open communications ensures that the public receives information as quickly as possible that can be vital to their safety.
That's some sentence there! I can see little reason not to split it into two sentences around the boldfaced word.
Once, while on a hike in the southern part of the Appalachian Trail, I met a local fellow who was kind enough to give me a ride to a nearby town to do some resupply. He drove a small non nondescript car that had six or eight pieces of electronics mounted in the front. Several were scanners tuned to the Forest Service, County Police, State Police and other law enforcement agencies. And a CB radio to talk to his friends. As we drove along, he spotted several forest service crews and knew all of their names, what they did and their schedules. He waited while I did my business and drove me back to the trail crossing. Later that night, he showed up at the shelter I had stopped at with a few of his friends, all a bit intoxicated. He said they had thought of me and had brought a mason jar of local produce for me. I declined the gift, since I don't drink, but we talked a while. They were in a real talkative mood. Turns out they ran a distilling operating on National Forrest land and use the scanners to track law enforcement whenever they seem to be interested in them. He said the equipment was more for avoiding mutual embarrassment since law enforcement was not really interested in small scale producers of untaxed alcohol. Just a bunch of good old boys.
Dear government:
Don't waste your time. We will crack your codes, root your servers, publish your secret documents, and ensure the transparency that is prerequisite to a free and open society.
No matter what steps you take to attempt to hide the corruption and cronyism that dominate this country, we will defeat you. We, the cyberpunks, cypherpunks, crypto-anarchists, techno-libertarians and hackers, will not only evade and defeat any technological measure that you attempt to use against us, but we will actively subvert any such mechanism and use it to further the cause of freedom and liberty.
If you listen to us, we will listen to you. if you track our whereabouts, we will track yours. If you attempt to destroy our systems, we will destroy yours. We will not allow you to control the free flow of information and use secrecy and fear as tools to oppress the people.
#cryptoanarchism #technolibertarian #cyberpunk #cypherpunk #fuckthepolice
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