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"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.
This *must* be made into a Kickstarter project for one that works in the U.S.A.. Yes, imagine this bundled with a radar detector that sends location data of emissions to the cloud.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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?
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.
Make way! Someone more important than our safety is coming thru!
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.