Police Encrypt Radios To Tune Out Public 242
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.'"
It won't work, Sheila! (Score:4, Funny)
You can tune me out from monitoring your radio, but you can't tune out my love.
Re:Buzz words (Score:3, Funny)
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.