Slashdot Mirror
"Police Detector" Monitors Emergency Radio Transmissions
schwit1 writes A Dutch company has introduced a detection system that can alert you if a police officer or other emergency services official is using a two-way radio nearby. Blu Eye monitors frequencies used by the encrypted TETRA encrypted communications networks used by government agencies in Europe. It doesn't allow the user to listen in to transmissions, but can detect a radio in operation up to one kilometer away. Even if a message isn't being sent, these radios send pulses out to the network every four seconds and Blu Eye can also pick these up, according to The Sunday Times. A dashboard-mounted monitor uses lights and sounds to alert the driver to the proximity of the source, similar to a radar detector interface.
How do you say "My pig sense is tingling." in Dutch?
our police overlords will have this banned very quickly. Imagine a network of these in a city that can update a location map in realtime. Remember, just because the cops are public officials operating in public doesn't mean they think the public has a right to know about anything they are doing.
like if you are driving 90mph in a state where radar detectors are illegal
We've had this technology in the US since around 2006, however it was restricted to trunk/hybrid, or analogue radio systems and came bundled as part of a radio scanner. Scanners in many states are illegal to operate in a motor vehicle, hence the technology never really caught on. its biggest, perhaps only manufacturer, was uniden with their 'beartracker' feature
in the states many municipalities still use antiquated strobe technology to change traffic signals in the event an emergency vehicle needs to pass. several of our radar detectors alert for these 'strobes' of IR radiation. "Safety radar" was an invention that never saw much usage in the united states but would alert the driver of road hazards and approaching ambulances using dedicated transcievers. its largely been discontinued.
radios in the United States use APCO P25; this change was made largely after 2001. A digital system, it has cryptographic capability and is best-effort in protocol. Gnu Radio projects to capture and decode the unencrypted traffic are successful, and can yield through data capture, ping latency and triangulation a wealth of information such as who is in a given vicinity, their name, their unit number, the radio MAC address, what shift they work, and even their routes. much of this data wouldnt require 'listening' to the communication at all but is, much to our chagrin as slashdotters im sure, metadata
http://www.crypto.com/blog/p25... unrelated but this presentation gives insight into how pointlessly flawed APCO p25 is.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Surely this is old news, the bad guys in games like GTA have had this tech available for years.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
In many places, Ambulances and firefighters are using the same technology. So expect some false positives...
In Oklahoma. But what isn't, huh?
Don't those Dutch have an OCEAN with which to be concerned?
Yeah, but is it encrypted?
In an age where police are driving around with license plat scanners checking dozens of plates a second, city wide CCTV systems & police routinely rummage through police databases to satiate their own curiosity about individuals they come across or celebrities its seems only fair that citizens have some ability to watch the police.
Isn't it easier to just drive carefully, refrain from exceeding the posted speed limit by more than 5-10mph depending on whether you're in town or on a highway, stay in the right lane, avoid tailgating, and use your turn signals? The people who would find this useful are the sort of crazy asshole drivers for whom I used to keep a grenade launcher.
Unfortunately, my wife took away the M-79 I kept under the dash soon after we got married. Said it made her nervous.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Cops could easily jam this system by putting devices that look like TETRA in certain crime-ridden neighborhoods. They could even mount them on city buses and have mobile signals.
If criminals take these detectors seriously, it'd be cheap crime deterrence to flood these devices with false signals.
I had an idea to build something like this combined with a police scanner using an SDR and a Raspi or similar. And at over 1000 euros for this system, those plans are still looking pretty good.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Or you could, you know, follow your local traffic regulations instead of casually breaking the law.
Why is everyone so obsessed with breaking speed limits?
Doubly so!
... can build passive receivers to detect the presence of any radio frequency broadcast.
Equally do-able is fabricating radio frequency jammers.
Hell, beginning HAM operators can do this.
College-level electronic techs can do this.
If there were any real black market for such devices, they would have been ubiquitous way before now.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
That a cop goes 10-100.
Many might think "hey i can avoid those pigs and break the law!" but if I could know how many and the concentration in an area, that might tell me there's something serious going down somewhere I'm heading that I should avoid.
Who says that it will be used exclusively by motorists looking to avoid a ticket? Reporters could find this to be a useful tool to indicate an incident that may be newsworthy and homeowners may find it useful to know if there is something going on in their area for which they may wish to take precautions (locking doors, looking out for suspicious individuals, etc). Not all uses of such technology are nefarious.
while it would make it easier for "real" criminals to evade police it would also make it easier for law abiding citizens to effectively ELIMINATE the possibility of their property being stol... er - "assets being subject to civil forfeiture", getting stopped & frisked, photos of self/spouse being forwarded to cops buddies, having a bb gun mistaken for real one/getting shot and/or simply having their time needlessly wasted.
remember: nothing good can come from interacting w/a police officer - the BEST case is you break even & have your time wasted. I'm inclined to agree that the creating/use of a comprehensive cop tracking app would likely be a net negative to a given area but there are plenty of reasons the perfectly law abiding (putting aside the discussion that at least in the US we're ALL technically lawbreakers nearly all the time) would want to actively avoid the police...
Well, Why are so many people obsessed with other people following some arbitrary rules designed to do little more than enhance revenue?
Perhaps the difference in those questions might help answer yours.
Anybody break the encryption yet?
Turnabout is fair play
Government should fear the citizens, NOT the other way around.
The bad guys had one in Gotham. They new when the swat team was outside.
It made the raid much more interesting.
Similar tech is being developed by the Chinese to spot our stealth jets.
Well, Why are so many people obsessed with other people following some arbitrary rules designed to do little more than enhance revenue?
Do you honestly believe that the sole reason those speed limit signs are on the side of the road is to generate revenue for the government, and safety is not a consideration? No one involved in traffic engineering is taking into account maximum reasonable speeds for a given section of road and marking it so people know, and helping ensure that cars drive at a more uniform rate which has been shown over and over to help reduce the severity of accidents, or using them to inform people of changes in road safety such as approaching residences or school or pedestrian intersections around a turn?
I think your tin foil anti-government headband is on too tight and is cutting off some blood flow.
You have never driven in the US midwest have you... (Or most of the rest of US outside cities).
Distances are ridiculously huge, and roads are usually nice, wide and straight.
main(i){putchar(177663314>>6*(i-1)&63|!!(i<5)<<6)&&main(++i);}
I'm from the midwest, but when I lived in Arizona outside of Tucson, you could literally set your cruise to 90 and leave it there for an hour or so when travelling to Phoenix. A straight shot boring-assed drive if there ever was one.
Since police officers have no expectation of privacy in the performance of their duties, and police equipment, such as vehicles, may only be used for official duties, it is perfectly legal to tag police cars with location tracking devices.
The only reason a warrant is required to track a citizen is because a citizen has an expectation of privacy in their daily activities. But, no warrant at all is required to track a government official since that expectation does not exist.
pigs gone crazy
-KI
#include bier;
I take it you have never seen either kind of speed trap.
1) They change the speed limit by a decent amount at the bottom of a downhill road making it near impossible to not break the law without going so slow it is hazardous.
I know this one heavily trafficked road just outside of Fort Bragg where the speed limit used to be at 45 MPH till you hit a big hill, then at the very bottom of the hill where you would end up at 60 MPH if you didn't ride the break, they had the speed lowered to 35 MPH. They changed it after a lot of complaints over YEARS but during all that time, they were racking up tickets on it, could tell when a cop didn't have his quota for the month from that place, you would see them parked just off to the side waiting to catch anyone who wasn't religiously riding their brake down the hill.
2) They have the speed set way lower than the road can handle and you even subconsciously want to drive faster than the speed limit because of it.
One place I lived at, the road we were off of had a speed limit of 35 MPH, it was a place in the middle of nowhere that was wide and clear and the speed limit signs were widely spaced apart and easy to miss. This road was capable of handling traffic at over 55 MPH all day (Higher speeds actually), but was used by the local police to get fines from the people passing through who didn't know about it. Also the only place I ever heard of where the local bank was robbed by guys who got away on 4-Wheeler ATVs and actually got away.
Because I have better things to do with my life than sit in my car, and because speed limits are always set far below the speed at which I feel safe driving.
Radars produce signal when not active. Normal ones aren't "off" when not taking a reading, they are inactive, which means their components are still warmed up. They emit detectable signals, nothing electrical is quiet when it is on.
Now there are what are called "pop" radar guns that go from off to on real fast... but they are, near as I know, not legal for measuring speeds since such a device cannot be made accurate. You can't make a 20GHz transmitter that turns on and stabilizes in a fraction of a second.
There is at least one legitimate use for this - I'm a deaf cyclist in a major metropolitan city and I've had many, many near misses with emergency vehicles. Approaching an intersection from a bike lane, for instance, regardless whether the light is red or green, you often can't see through stopped/parked/jammed vehicles to the oncoming emergency vehicle.
First responders are usually trained to know that there are some deaf cyclists/drivers out there, but I know from their...reactions...as they fly past, only inches from killing me, that they simply forget the world isn't all hearing people.
Because in some areas, the speed limits are not calculated in ways that make any logical sense. Is why some school zones are 20. Others are 25, 30, or even 35. Town A has different speed limits than town B. Etc, etc.
:| ( You can't make this up ) Obviously, the fix is to slow traffic down. So that's exactly what they did. For county X and one county beyond in all directions.
Example: The speed limit on the stretch of road I drive daily is mostly 65mph ( 104kph for you non US folks ). This particular road is six lanes of Interstate that traverse my entire State running North to South. In my section of it, the speed limit is mostly the 65mph I noted above.
However, once you cross the county line, it magically increases to 75mph.
Did the road magically become safer ? No.
What's happened is the idiot legislation within my State bought the argument ( from the petro-chemical industry ) that the reason the air quality in this particular region is so bad is because the vehicular traffic just drives too fast and thus, outputs more exhaust.
It cannot possibly have anything to do with the fact that the area is industrial with multiple petro-chemical plants and a ship channel operating 24/7. Which, by design, also means it cannot possibly have anything to do with the near unregulated emissions of all the commercial traffic found in the area. ( Why is it my vehicle has strict emission rules, yet an 18-wheeler or dump truck can belch so much crap into the air when pulling away from a red-light or stop sign it blots out the damn sun ? )
Yeah, I've heard the argument. " Stricter emission standards on commercial traffic equates to higher consumer prices down the road. " To those I say, Fuck Off. What's good for the Goose is also good for the Gander as the saying goes I believe.
Nor can it have anything to do with the wind / weather patterns.
So, rant aside, the reason folks don't follow the local traffic regulations is because sometimes they are artificially low and calculated by anything but logic.
Install beacons triggering this device everywhere. Bang, all criminals stay low.
What a dumb post.
I vaguely recall that someone called Heinrich Hertz invented an RF detector back in 1887.
His detector was able to selectively respond to a relatively narrow band of frequencies as well.
Not a new idea at all.
In my area TETRA is used by a wide range of agencies. A quick tune with a VHF receiver shows that there are dozens of channels in use.
The base repeaters are running constantly and thus would continuously trigger any detector.
The bases are much stronger than any mobile.
Take the extreme positions out of the argument and both of you start making sense.
No, not all speed zone decisions are made based entirely or even in part on revenue generation possibilities.
No, not all speed zone decisions are made based entirely or even in part on traffic safety considerations.
The problem then becomes, as a driver, which are which? How do I know? How can I find out?
So, I use a radar detector in my daily drive to and from work. Ordinarily, I drive the same speed as everyone else but if I'm the only one on the road, I drive the speed limit. I believe this type of behavior is both civil and safe. And if you don't like the way I drive, you are free to slow the fuck down or speed the fuck up.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
they are illegal in most of Europe, which is why this company went through the trouble to make "Cop Detectors".
No, they can't and won't ban these, since they are passive receivers and they detect *any* emergency person carrying a radio. I do suspect that the mobile speed trap teams will switch off their 2-way when working and use their cell phones for connecting with home base. Radar detectors only have a single purpose and because of that purpose they get to ban them for "hindring police investigation". You can come up with semi-legit reasons for having a device that will detect if someone with an emergency service radio, but you can't come up with a single one that will detect speed trap radar signals.
Speed traps with their radios switched off, will only leave unmarked civilian police cars with cameras on board and special "ProVida" brand equipment that are used to film evidence of people speeding by driving behind them that can be detected. Those can't be detected with radar detectors and will be detectable by this system. Still, the amount of speeding people that get caught will be so large with these systems for sale, that I doubt they ar worried much.e
This system has been in "testing phase" for quite a while, I remember reading about beta tests probably over a year ago, so it's hardly news. If they'd be worried, there would have been something happening already.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Speed limits are rarely set by how fast you can drive at a safe speed on a given road, rather than arbitrary zoning.
But even that is following the canard that the only people wanting to know where the cops are are those looking to break the law. In the age of DWB, asset forfeiture, checkpoints, revenue generation, and cops being free to murder innocent people with impunity, that's obnoxiously naive.
I never thought of using it for driving. I thought it'd be handy to know if any cops are approaching or spying on you.
I am the AC you responded to. I believe some speed limits are set knowing their effect will be to create revenue, and if that is why they are set that way then they are wrong. The example another poster gave of having the speed limit drop drastically in a short distance, i.e. a speed trap, is an example of that. In that poster's example he mentioned it going from 65 to 45, but I have seen 55 to 30 which is just plain stupid, and dangerous. But convincing yourself that posted limits are bogus and using that to rationalize your driving around and ignoring them is also just plain stupid, and dangerous to yourself - and OTHERS. It was the latter I was addressing. I do understand people who want detectors to avoid the setups like speed traps some dishonest police do, but I also believe the vast majority of detectors are used as a way to allow people to pretend that they can ignore the posted limits when they drive. After all, 90% of the drivers on the road think they are better than the average driver and this superman mentality leads people to think the laws should apply to others, since it protects them, but shouldn't apply to them since "they can do it safely". Bullshit.
For California, at least: CHiPs Detector
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
One of the scanner companies did this a while ago.. I think it was Bearcat here in the US? It would pick up the radio link between the offices on person radio and the unit in the car that would relay the messages, and warn you when a cop was around (sort of like a radar detector but much broader as there was roughly a 2 mile range)
Argue with straw men much? He stated, quite clearly, how this whole thing becomes an issue for the driver:
The problem then becomes, as a driver, which are which? How do I know? How can I find out?
I'm not a psychologist, but I'm guessing it is because it gets you where your going faster.
What a great way to make it look like they are out patrolling an area when they are not. Use simulated signals to herd criminals to a small area and then arrest the lot of them. Convince the perp he is surrounded by officers when in reality there's just a couple of cops. Of course, to make best use of it the authorities must complain about it loudly, thereby publicizing it and making it more desirable to criminals.
Nullius in verba
Why are you so obsessed about following the law?
I remember a story out of the USA about a woman who published the residential addresses of the local police officers on her blog. The police promptly arrested her for inciting harassment and the courts demanded she stop. The police do not like being treated like ordinary people for some reason. Who woulda thunk it?
Do you understand that the idea of a speed limit is so that all the traffic is doing the same thing? Think how much more difficult/dangerous manoeuvres like merging and lane changing would be, if you had cars around you zipping by at whatever speed they choose. The road is absolutely a safer place when the flow of traffic is well-regulated. It may be slightly less convenient for melchoir55 than a rules-less free-for-all, but, well, stiff shit.
We need this for Australia's Government Radio Network (NSWGRN, SAGRN).
Though State and Federal Police hide with digital encryption on the GRN with other emergency and government services to make it much harder to detect Police transmissions.
TETRA systems are now active in the USA: the FCC approved them under Part 90 two years ago, following trials in NJ and NY, among other places. http://urgentcomm.com/tetra/fc...
It is just going to be another digital option besides MOTOTRBO, P25, DMR, NEXEDGE etc. TETRA gear is cheap and proven so it should sell well, eventually. Pity a lot of it looks like old Nokia 5900 phones though.
Anyway, I question the value of such a detector device. Digital and analog two-way radio is used for so many things that have nothing to do with law enforcement, and/or law enforcement is using them for things other than coming after you, all in relatively close range. The thing is going to be going off constantly for no real reason.
For example, about 10 different law agencies cover my particular area and there's three different police stations within a few miles of me, not to mention fire, transit, and half a dozen other very active users. And that doesn't even include the private radio leasing companies which have their own trunk systems running EDACS. And then there are the stores using handhelds, hams, and who knows what else. Everybody is using two-way.
Basically merely knowing somebody is around using a two-way radio means nothing.
Sig for hire.
When they lower the limit for no reason and the road is clearly safe to go faster than any of the speed limit signs used then YES.
and presumably you can drink more than the average person stay in control ?
speed limits are always set far below the speed at which I feel safe driving.
The speed where you feel safe driving and the speed where you are safe driving...these are not the same. Not many people die behind the wheel thinking they are driving faster than then can handle.
Don't worry, though. You probably won't kill anyone. You're about as likely to roll a natural Yahtzee as you are likely to kill someone with habitual speeding.
The problem then becomes, as a driver, which are which? How do I know? How can I find out?
I don't think it matters, to be honest. If it's for safety reasons, you slow down because potentially killing random people is bad. If it's for revenue reasons you slow down so they don't get your money for bullshit reasons. Simple.
Also, if the police where you live do that kind of stupid things, what you do is create awareness of the problem, try to get people to care, and vote the bastards out of office. That's what democracy is for after all.
Make way! Someone more important than our safety is coming thru!
Let's see how US compares to Germany with traffic related death rate:
Germany: 4.9 road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle km
USA: 7.6 road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle km
Maximum speed limit:
Germany: unlimited (on 70% of the Highways)
USA: 120 km/h
This is not a problem at all, it's only meta-data. As the NSA has assured us, intercepting meta-data isn't a privacy concern.
Last year I was in a building in NYC trying to see if there was an open wifi I could log my phone into; didn't find one, but one of the secured wifis that came up was named "ICE Surveillance Van". (https://www.ice.gov/)
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Or you could, you know, follow your local traffic regulations instead of casually breaking the law.
Why is everyone so obsessed with breaking speed limits?
Because every day we're getting older, and we have stuff we want to do before we die.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Because every day we're getting older, and we have stuff we want to do before we die.
The minutes of your life lost by following the speed limit vs the decades potentially lost from a head-on collision with an 18-wheeler? Not necessarily a hard choice.
Because every day we're getting older, and we have stuff we want to do before we die.
The minutes of your life lost by following the speed limit vs the decades potentially lost from a head-on collision with an 18-wheeler? Not necessarily a hard choice.
why is the 18 wheeler going the wrong way on the interstate, and how am i going to avoid him with a closing speed of only 110 mph rather than 115? (assuming he isn't speeding)
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
why is the 18 wheeler going the wrong way on the interstate, and how am i going to avoid him with a closing speed of only 110 mph rather than 115? (assuming he isn't speeding)
He's not. You are, after losing control for assuming that an extra 5-10mph couldn't possibly make a difference, and the road conditions couldn't be that bad, could they? And speedometers are usually calibrated to show higher numbers to be safe, etc etc.