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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."
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..
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.
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.