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Pasadena Police Encrypt, Deny Access To Police Radio
An anonymous reader writes "There is media (but not public?) outcry over the Pasadena, CA police switch from analog radio that can be picked up by scanners to encrypted digital radio that cannot. 'On Friday, Pasadena police Lt. Phlunte Riddle said the department was unsure whether it could accommodate the media with digital scanners. Riddle said the greatest concern remains officer safety. "People who do bank robberies use scanners, and Radio Shack sells these things cheap," Riddle said. "We just had a robbery today on Hill Avenue and Washington Boulevard," Riddle said. "The last thing I want to do is to have the helicopter or the officers set up on the street and the criminals have a scanner and know where our officers are." Just prior to the switch over, city staffers said they would look into granting access to police radio chatter, most likely by loaning media outlets a scanner capable of picking up the secure signal.'"
I'll accept the police having encrypted communications, the moment EVERY COP on duty has video and audio surveillance on their person at all times recorded on person, and rebroadcast to their squad car for preservation without tampering.
Short of that? No, you can't have encrypted communications.
I'm sort of surprised that the police are so willing to be accommodating here too
The reason they don't care is that they already use cell phones for any sensitive communications, as well as any communications that might not look good in a newspaper article or court transcript.
As I mentioned in an earlier Slashdot story on police use of encryption, the most common phrase you hear on the (unencrypted) Motorola Smartnet system around here is "Call me on my cell."
Current.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_25
And old but informative:
http://www.fordyce.org/scanning/scanning_info/encrypt.htm
From what I gather cell phone jammers seriously screw with this mode of communication, I think it's a bad idea all around to encrypt radios, not to mention repeater issues and the relatively low number of keys available.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Most encrypted (analogue or digital) radio systems have a remote stun/kill feature. When the radio is reported lost it is sent a message that disables it, or the disable code is sent regularly until the radio gives a stun/kill acknowledge. At that point the radio is a brick.
Queensland Police have been using encrypted P25 radios (not trunked) for some time in Brisbane & the Gold Coast. The media cannot monitor, but neither can tow-truck operators, which improves safety at road crashes. The clear-speech audio is recorded at Police HQ for later review or in court cases. The people that oversee police behaviour (Crime and Misconduct Commission) have access to this. Despite their own opinions, it is the CMC that keeps the Police honest in Qld, and that's why the CMC has access to the audio and the media do not.
So, the police have a legitimate reason for securing their network, and have discussed options accommodating other stake-holders who might be inconvenienced by improving their system's security.
This presumes that "the public" isn't one of the stake-holders.
While it's nice that the media acts keeps an eye on our interests, that doesn't abrogate any of the public's rights.
I, for one, am not in favor of more secrecy for the police.
More often than not, the less transparent a police force is, the more they're hiding.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It's not just trunked but P25, with encryption. P25 digital signals can be scanned with a modern higher end scanner specifically designed for P25. Trunktrackers will not cut it. There is regular and encrypted P25. Encrypted P25 cannot be decrypted by the scanners. You'd need 2-way radio that can connect to the radio system as a user on the system and have approval from the agency to allow you to hear decrypted radio traffic.
Some media and agencies do this, but it's not too common. The radios are rather pricey and leasing them out tends to make the agencies nervous and liable to pull the plug at any moment.
There are also methods to break the P25 encryption mainly based on sloppy key handling by the agency and ways to take advantage of sloppy practices by the officers.
Sig for hire.
This. I hope you're modded +10, Insightful.
Our local PD (in our small town of ~40k heads) decided to encrypt all of their radio traffic a couple of years ago. I wrote a (scathing, factual, naming-names) letter to the editor of the local news rag about that time, pronouncing that the concept was stupid and that all of their reasons for the concept were also stupid. (I'd link to my published letter and/or provide more details, but I like the aura of anonymity here, and my name isn't really Adolf Osborne.)
I have even been encouraged by a sergeant at the local sheriff's office to request recordings, as often as I feel like, under the FOIA, just to make it a pain in PD's ass. (The SO has encryption available to them, but they do not use it unless it is important that the things being discussed remain secret...unlike the PD, who does it 24x7. Further, the PD refuses to share their encryption key with the SO, rendering moot any chance that the two overlapping agencies might be able to help eachother out efficiently.)
I nearly lost my job over that letter, since I'm one of the guys responsible for actually programming the radios and I have the requisite encryption keys on my thumb drive and can (pretty much literally) do whatever I want to make things work/fuck up the system.
BUT: I never thought of a delay. 15 minutes is perfect. It allows the people to know what's going on with their paid and well-armed uniformed thugs, while also preventing active criminals from understanding the goings-on of the police department.
Scanner-land wins, paranoid public entity wins, and active criminals still lose. Sign me up. (Hell, sign everyone up.)
Kid-proof tablet..
There's two angles to this.
Realtime radio chatter is useful for getting data out to the media, for safety or media-assists. Examples: Amber Alert, Traffic accidents, police chases, armed robbery. The less people that get caught in the crossfire the better.
Non-realtime radio chatter is less useful, but allows for the media to scrape through it, but doesn't allow the media to alert the public to dangerous situations to stay clear of.
Some compromise is needed. For example the 24 hour news networks like CNN, could obtain a realtime scanner, and the police can rotate through encryption cycles every few days so that the scanners don't work, requiring that the "media" radios be returned to the police, checked-in/checked-out. Anytime a radio isn't returned, the encryption code is switched. The media scanners are "relayed", so that the police don't have to cycle their own radios unless a radio has gone missing.
This solves most of the problem, and introduces only several seconds of latency for media radios. It also allows the media radios to be killed for security reasons. You abuse them, you lose them.
Law enforcement will never be able to justify to me why their actions cannot be 100% transparent.
Because they have a job that's far less dangerous than fishing for crab off Alaska.
Snark aside, that's the usual bullshit excuse - that they're risking their lives and all that. Sure, there are a very few places in this country where officers would probably increase their safety by volunteering instead to sweep for IEDs by hand in Iraq. But by and large, the common knowledge of it being dangerous to be a cop is absurdly overstated. Yet this continues to justify military-like armaments, ridiculous pay and pension, effective immunity from prosecution, a lack of transparency and oversight, et cetera.
I worked for the IT department for a large PD in Australia and this is what we did.
Jobs were release or not with delays based on certain criteria:
Release information by direct data-feed dispatch about all job
types, with the following exceptions:
A Job types to be excluded
mentally ill person
offences against children
shop-steal child
absconder hospital/institution
absconder juvenile
rape
attempted rape
indecent assault
wilful exposure
indecent acts
domestic violence
suspect terrorist activity
B Job types to be released after a one-hour delay
armed person
siege
shots red
hijack
hostage taken
bomb threat
sudden death
C Discretionary delay
Authority to withhold or exclude a job from release should reside with the
Duty Ofcer, Police Communications Centre and be based on documented
compelling and demonstrable public safety or police safety reasons.
Realtime radio chatter is useful for getting data out to the media, for safety or media-assists. Examples: Amber Alert, Traffic accidents, police chases, armed robbery. The less people that get caught in the crossfire the better.
This sounds contrived. Can you provide one example of a situation where a life was saved because someone was listening to a police scanner and avoided a situation where they otherwise would have been caught in the crossfire? I doubt it. The reasoning the police give for having privacy is a lot more realistic: to deny criminals the ability to track police actions.
Non-realtime radio chatter is less useful, but allows for the media to scrape through it, but doesn't allow the media to alert the public to dangerous situations to stay clear of.
The police can and will alert the media and thus the public of dangerous situations. I expect it is standard practice for them to alert the media in a hostage situation or whenever the public is in danger. To assume that the media and public would get the message indirectly by monitoring all police chatter is irresponsible. And Im certain that isnt what they depend on. You think if there is a shooting at some school, that they just talk internally about it and hope the media gets the message implied?
Some compromise is needed.
I dont think any compromise is needed.
For example the 24 hour news networks like CNN, could obtain a realtime scanner, and the police can rotate through encryption cycles every few days so that the scanners don't work, requiring that the "media" radios be returned to the police, checked-in/checked-out. Anytime a radio isn't returned, the encryption code is switched. The media scanners are "relayed", so that the police don't have to cycle their own radios unless a radio has gone missing.
This solves most of the problem, and introduces only several seconds of latency for media radios. It also allows the media radios to be killed for security reasons. You abuse them, you lose them.
How come every time we improve upon the past someone says we need to break it in order to retain the deficiencies we became accustomed to? I think it is good that the police have secure and private communication channels. If they had this from the start, these sorts of "solutions" would be laughed out of here and this topic wouldnt even be discussed.
Maybe u natually distrust the police and want to know someone is looking over their shoulder all the time. Having unencrypted police communication is a clear deficiency, and now that this agency is fixing it... lets just let them do it and stop looking for ways to make it as deficient as it used to be.
The solution you suggest about rotating keys and limited access to radios is a lot of work for nothing. Further, I dont like the idea of selective eavesdropping as it introduces politics into the equation. Why not just let these police continue on with doing what they need to do: improve the police service.
In the United States the media has had the long standing job of watching over the shoulder of the government to keep them honest. This is particularly true for police because there position as the enforcement arm has historically been among the most vulnerable to corruption. The radio is specifically important because it is the central hub for all police communications and currently the media, and the public, are privy to the same level of knowledge about the activities of individual officers as police headquarters are, and the concern is that removing this public and media access will make it that much easier for police to close ranks and protect their own against outside investigation.
Make a media room at the police station, put one of the police's receivers there, and let the media guys send drones to listen. The drones can call their companies when something of interest happens. The police get their encrypted radio, the media get their live feed, and people who shouldn't be listening might not be able listen (how good is the encryption?).
Actually 'encrypt everything' is a perfectly fine solution. Even under the "protect our rights" flag (and I'm not sure how being able to follow police radio chatter is a rights issue) it would be trivial to either set up a station which can decrypt the radio traffic and record the traffic to a device somewhere. Hell - just record the encrypted stream and make it possible for people and the media to request access to radio traffic after forty-eight hours have passed.
The issue then becomes forcing the police to record all traffic and respond to requests, but that's a job for the judiciary (and is frankly no different than the situation now - lots of stuff can convienently go missing when it concerns police).
While a valid point, I am more than a little concerned about police forces never having to worry about what they are saying (or planning i.e., covering up). This combined with their propensity to confiscate and erase the devices of anyone recording them publicly does not a democratic society make.