NYPD Considers Using Encryption To Block Public From Radio Scanner Broadcasts (gizmodo.com) 126
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The NYPD says it wants to reimagine its current police communication system and transition to encrypted messages by 2024, according to a recent amNY report confirmed by Gizmodo. While law enforcement has spent years fighting to make encryption less accessible for everyday people, police think they need a little more privacy. Critics worry a turn towards encryption by law enforcement could reduce transparency, hamstring the news media, and potentially jeopardize the safety of protestors looking to stay a step ahead.
According to amNY, the NYPD's new plan would allow law enforcement officers discretion on whether or not to publicly disclose newsworthy incidents. That means the NYPD essentially would get to dictate the truth unchallenged in a number of potentially sensitive local stories. The report suggests police are floating the idea of letting members of the news media monitor certain radio transmissions through an NYPD-controlled mobile app. There's a catch though. According to the report, the app would send radio information with a delay. Users may also have to pay a subscription fee to use the service, the paper said.
The NYPD confirmed its planning a "systems upgrade" in the coming years in an email to Gizmodo. "The NYPD is undergoing a systems upgrade that is underway and that will be complete after 2024," a spokesperson for the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information said. "This infrastructure upgrade allows the NYPD to transmit in either an encrypted or non-encrypted format," the NYPD said. "Some parts of the city have had the necessary equipment installed and the Department will begin testing the technology in these areas later this year. We are currently evaluating encryption best practices and will communicate new policies and procedures as we roll out this upgraded technology." The spokesperson claimed the department intends to listen to and consider the needs of the news media during the transition process. "The entire public safety news coverage system depends on scanners, and if scanners and scanner traffic are no longer available to newsrooms then news reporting about crime, fire -- it's going to be very hit or miss," CaliforniansAware General Counsel Terry Francke told the Reporters Committee in a blog post.
"Cutting off the media from getting emergency transmissions represents the clearest regression of the NYPD policy of transparency in its history," New York Press Photographers Association President Bruce Cotler said in an interview with amNY. "We believe shutting down radio transmissions is a danger to the public and to the right of the public to know about important events."
Gizmodo notes that New York joins a growing list of cities considering encrypting radio communications. "Denver, Baltimore, Virginia Beach, Sioux City, Iowa, and Racine, Wisconsin have all moved to implement the technology in recent years."
According to amNY, the NYPD's new plan would allow law enforcement officers discretion on whether or not to publicly disclose newsworthy incidents. That means the NYPD essentially would get to dictate the truth unchallenged in a number of potentially sensitive local stories. The report suggests police are floating the idea of letting members of the news media monitor certain radio transmissions through an NYPD-controlled mobile app. There's a catch though. According to the report, the app would send radio information with a delay. Users may also have to pay a subscription fee to use the service, the paper said.
The NYPD confirmed its planning a "systems upgrade" in the coming years in an email to Gizmodo. "The NYPD is undergoing a systems upgrade that is underway and that will be complete after 2024," a spokesperson for the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information said. "This infrastructure upgrade allows the NYPD to transmit in either an encrypted or non-encrypted format," the NYPD said. "Some parts of the city have had the necessary equipment installed and the Department will begin testing the technology in these areas later this year. We are currently evaluating encryption best practices and will communicate new policies and procedures as we roll out this upgraded technology." The spokesperson claimed the department intends to listen to and consider the needs of the news media during the transition process. "The entire public safety news coverage system depends on scanners, and if scanners and scanner traffic are no longer available to newsrooms then news reporting about crime, fire -- it's going to be very hit or miss," CaliforniansAware General Counsel Terry Francke told the Reporters Committee in a blog post.
"Cutting off the media from getting emergency transmissions represents the clearest regression of the NYPD policy of transparency in its history," New York Press Photographers Association President Bruce Cotler said in an interview with amNY. "We believe shutting down radio transmissions is a danger to the public and to the right of the public to know about important events."
Gizmodo notes that New York joins a growing list of cities considering encrypting radio communications. "Denver, Baltimore, Virginia Beach, Sioux City, Iowa, and Racine, Wisconsin have all moved to implement the technology in recent years."
As a LEO supporter (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely not. I get the arguments of why they want to, and none of them are compelling enough to overrule the "public oversight" argument.
Re:As a LEO supporter (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would you support them? To them you’re just a person who hasn’t yet committed a crime. Cops are nearly immune to wrongdoing, under no obligation to protect you, and can arrest you if they merely *believe* they are correct. When the tables are turned the story becomes ignorance of the law is no excuse. Five months of training is all you need. People need longer schooling and a license just to cut hair. Cops are the biggest organized gang in the country.
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Why would you support them? To them you’re just a person who hasn’t yet committed a crime. Cops are nearly immune to wrongdoing, under no obligation to protect you, and can arrest you if they merely *believe* they are correct.
I foresee a few possibilities:
* "Yes but they are hurting the people I want them to but don't you call me a racist!"
* "They only hurt the peasantry, not their betters."
* "[Profoundly ignorant statement about how police actions are justified.]"
Re: As a LEO supporter (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you support them?
One can support "police" without supporting all police officers or departments. Like I support free speech without supporting what every person says. As to why... 1. Because they do the stuff that regular people are not willing to do. Person assaulting random folks on the street? Are you going to start dealing with that? Guy beating his GF while all the neighbors listen to her scream without interviewing. Are you going to stop him, only to be attacked by both of them? Jackass road raging fires off a couple shots into your car. We going to make that everyone's responsibility to deal with on their own? You want more vigilantes? You think that will somehow work better and they would treat people better? 2. If you don't have police you are going to get more private security who will be less transparent than the police, and will increase the divide between rich and poor. And who is going to stop armed private security if they get out of line? Vigilantes again? 3. Because there are (or were) 800,000 of them in the USA, of course there are bad ones, as there are with any group that size, but this idea that you somehow know how the majority of them behave based on what you, as an individual, experience or see in the news is ignorance. If the police have no public support then the good ones will continue to get out of the career (as has been happening in many cities) and you will only have those with no other options.
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Who was doing the interview(s)? The GF, the guy, or some passerby? Just curious...
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My local police and sheriff use analog FM which means I can listen to everything they're doing (except when they call each other on their cell phones), and listening has given me a much better understanding of who they are and how they do their jobs. It changed my opinion from being very suspicious and untrusting to actually respecting them. That doesn't mean that every individual is perfect or that the institution wouldn't cover-up some mistakes, but I have listened to many calls where they back off and
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The public doesn't seem to care about "public oversight". If they did, our "closed door" government would be pried wide open, on the contrary, we have more secrecy every day, and people just shrug their shoulders and reelect the same old bums (over/under is about 90%), hoping for a piece of the pie
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Re:As a LEO supporter (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:As a LEO supporter (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a hard job that most people today have no understanding of
Many jobs are hard. When you have the legal power to do what would otherwise be anything from assault to kidnapping and even execution, they must be held to a higher standard than almost any other job.
Re: As a LEO supporter (Score:2, Informative)
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It's a hard job that most people today have no understanding of
It's a hard job, but it's constantly portrayed as harder than it is (it's more dangerous to be a plumber, or a handyman) and the extent to which the cops' actions make it harder is typically under-acknowledged. But more importantly, the cops' job is to maintain a fundamentally corrupt and unsustainable status quo.
The profession may not be perfect ( but then, what profession is? ), but I guarantee the lawless thugs are worse.
A lot of the cops are lawless thugs, literally. Therefore they literally cannot be worse than "the lawless thugs". And you can't tell which is which by looking at them, and "good" cops protect the
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As a LEO supporter
I don't see what low Earth orbit has to do with this. Are you against boosting the orbit of Hubble? Supporting a LEO implies that you'd prefer to see it dive into the Pacific Ocean. Such barbarism.
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What is REALLY funny is that every LEO agency that I am aware of already has encrypted comms for channels that cover sensitive transmissions. That drug raid? Not called over unencrypted comms. Telling a sniper to take a shot? Encrypted. In short, everything that needs to be encrypted already is. This is just about a lack of transparency from the police.
Re:As a LEO supporter (Score:5, Insightful)
How dare the news media report the truth! What ever will you do if the public has access to factual information?
Why are you so hot to make it easier for bad actors to hide their crimes and corruption anyway?
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How dare the news media report the truth!
BAHAHA! What country are you in where the media tells the truth over clicks and likes?
A scanner does not create truth in the for-profit American mainstream media. Lawmakers and the intelligence community does. And body cameras have probably done far more to root out bad actors than any "policing" of scanners has.
Besides, encrypted or not, if the legal case justifies it, the attorney should be able to request the comms data. And agencies damn well better have a good reason for destroying evidence when th
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And agencies damn well better have a good reason for destroying evidence when the triple-redundant battery-backed emergency-generator-powered system taxpayers paid too much for, "was down".
LOL! How naive are you?
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How dare the news media report the truth! What ever will you do if the public has access to factual information?
The news media reports the truth? LOL!
All they're really after from police scanning is a good car chase from the air or some primped-up news anchor pretending they care about the blood on the sidewalk in the background.
"If it bleeds, it leads".
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Ah, you're one of those people. Let me know when you join the rest of us here in reality.
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The smallest and the largest cities are the last to get encryption, and when they do, they go whole-hog and encrypt usually everything but fire traffic.
The first to get this were the well-funded suburban police, then the small towns started getting it, or hopping onto state-wide systems that are usually encrypted.
The big cities are the last to convert because they have large, expensive multi-site systems they have to retro-fit or replace and more complicated budgets to work out.
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Los Angeles upgraded their systems about a decade ago. The area covered is actually what necessitated the upgrade and "harmonization."
As to the pro/con on police radio encryption, I would have to be pro, and I am a police skeptic. What happens without encryption or some reasonably secure communication mechanism is that converstations are had via cell phone and not recorded. To me, out-of-band communication is much more dangerous. The media aspect can be dealt with in several ways while still permitting
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LA was special to Motorola. It was used to test the rollout of Moto's first digital attempt, ASTRO. It was basically P25 but but not quite, it used VSELP instead of IMBE vocoding and it was all swapped out a few years later with true P25 once the standard was finalized.
So, LA was kind of like Schaumburg, IL (Motorola HQ's back yard) in that it was a test bed for early digital systems and other Beta and test system deployments.
Re:As a LEO supporter (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens without encryption or some reasonably secure communication mechanism is that converstations are had via cell phone and not recorded.
One might reasonably argue that all of cops' phone calls should be recorded. The body cam should not shut off, all radio traffic should be recorded, and it should be illegal for cops to carry a phone which can make unrecorded calls. Yeah, good luck with enforcement, but there's nothing at all stopping them now and no real chance of consequences so any improvement would be welcome. Call it the accountability in police communications act.
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Those are P25 radios, the encryption you have when you don't have encryption. They're so badly engineered that most of the time you're sending in the clear even when you think you're encrypting.
So I fully support the police switching to P25, they get radios with encryption and we get public oversight of police communications.
Re:As a LEO supporter (Score:5, Insightful)
What happened to the "if you're not doing anything wrong what do you have to hide" crowd?
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Well at a minimum I would imagine dispatch would call to an officer to attend a rape scene of crime and give an address and probably some details that could be used to identify the victim.
Many, many PDs already use encrypted radio (Score:4, Insightful)
"The entire public safety news coverage system depends on scanners, and if scanners and scanner traffic are no longer available to newsrooms then news reporting about crime, fire -- it's going to be very hit or miss," CaliforniansAware General Counsel Terry Francke told the Reporters Committee in a blog post.
It doesn't have to be that way. The cops can simply issue radios to newsrooms. That serves the public interest, if it's done even-handedly. Which it won't be, of course, but the idea that encrypted radio necessarily means newsrooms can't receive the signals is false.
In my area the sheriff's office uses encrypted radio, but the fire doesn't. It would be nice to keep up with what is going on with the cops, but at least I have access to the most important information.
Re:Many, many PDs already use encrypted radio (Score:5, Interesting)
The cops can simply issue radios to newsrooms.
And who gets to be the arbiter, selecting which newsrooms are worthy of these radios?
If this goes anything like concealed carry permits, the difference of reality between "MAY ISSUE" and "SHALL ISSUE" legislation will be stark.
Open comms are important. If they want encrypted radios, we should demand unencrypted time delayed rebroadcasts without edits - and that delay should be reasonable, I'm thinking like 30min or less, but I'm open to much less.
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And who gets to be the arbiter, selecting which newsrooms are worthy of these radios?
The government which is represented by the relevant police force, obviously.
If this goes anything like concealed carry permits, the difference of reality between "MAY ISSUE" and "SHALL ISSUE" legislation will be stark.
My comment made it clear that I understand that.
Open comms are important. If they want encrypted radios, we should demand unencrypted time delayed rebroadcasts without edits - and that delay should be reasonable, I'm thinking like 30min or less, but I'm open to much less.
I don't think they should be allowed to use digital radio for dispatch, period. And audio records of all encrypted transmissions (for tactical use only) should be stored in perpetuity so they can be subpoenaed.
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And who gets to be the arbiter, selecting which newsrooms are worthy of these radios?
Maybe the same folks who get to censor things on social media? I mean we already trust them, apparently ...
Time delayed unencrypted rebroadcast. (Score:2)
If they want encrypted radios, we should demand unencrypted time delayed rebroadcasts without edits - and that delay should be reasonable,
That's a GREAT idea! It counters the "tip the perp that the cops are coming" argument nicely.
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Many, many PDs already use encrypted radio
Yes they do. This has been widespread for years. I'm amazed NYC didn't do this years ago; they got billions in federal money for security after 9/11.
You and whatever 'news' organizations you prefer have no right to real time police radio traffic. Yes, it should be recorded and the recordings should be subject to however many borough, city, state, and federal review boards you want to pay for, but that's all.
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Yes they do. This has been widespread for years. I'm amazed NYC didn't do this years ago; they got billions in federal money for security after 9/11.
Not just that, but the majority of police-grade radios out there will do at least P25 if they just configure it...
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Also I might add that CPRB are bad jokes in many if not most places. In fact for-some-reason-liberal-icon Jerry Brown signed into law an act in California that kneecapped them in the name of protecting officer privacy [lookout.co].
California! Uber alles!
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FWIW, the systems control receipt groups, so just giving them a radio might not achieve much. Really there should be something along the lines of RSS for accredited press or oversight groups that breaks down the most basic information like "shots fired, ## block of homeowners street, officers responding."
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FWIW, the systems control receipt groups, so just giving them a radio might not achieve much.
I'm not familiar with the terminology you're using (is it vendor specific?) but if you mean selective calling then it comes down to how the radio is programmed.
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The selective calling can (as I understand it) be enforced by the head-end though.
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You can specify which parties can receive the message. I don't know how it's enforced, it might be possible to bypass that with your own radio. But unless you have a way to get the key out of the radio and put it in another one, that's impractical. Certainly you could use this functionality to prevent the journos from getting some of your messages. The important thing is to record all messages which pass through a base station or repeater.
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"The entire public safety news coverage system depends on scanners, and if scanners and scanner traffic are no longer available to newsrooms then news reporting about crime, fire -- it's going to be very hit or miss," CaliforniansAware General Counsel Terry Francke told the Reporters Committee in a blog post.
It doesn't have to be that way. The cops can simply issue radios to newsrooms. That serves the public interest, if it's done even-handedly. Which it won't be, of course, but the idea that encrypted radio necessarily means newsrooms can't receive the signals is false.
In my area the sheriff's office uses encrypted radio, but the fire doesn't. It would be nice to keep up with what is going on with the cops, but at least I have access to the most important information.
Ultimately what happens is they take a lot of their conversations off the radio. It happened in Australia where a lot of radio traffic was "call number ending in 3943" precisely because of all the radio scanners out there. I think it's better to keep the radio secure, so cops can have sensitive conversations on there that are recordable subject to FOI and discovery, phone calls aren't recorded.
The bigger issue is rather that most US police forces are not trustworthy, not that they aren't monitored (as me
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Dunno, I can only speak to who's using what in Humboldt. Up here it's almost all VHF/UHF and about half of it is digital. I'm just glad that pretty much all the fire chatter for the county is on one frequency. That means I get to hear about any fire anywhere near me... or any non-fire ("not as reported") which is even nicer to know about.
Rio Dell still uses a siren to alert emergency personnel in town, I guess they decided it was cheaper than building their own paging network and issuing pagers. It also giv
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Every bozo with a blog or podcast will claim to own a newsroom.
P25? (Score:3)
Are they using p25 encryption? Last I checked you could broadcast interference on the trunking frequency and the radios fall back to unencrypted without alerting.
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you could broadcast interference on the trunking frequency and the radios fall back to unencrypted without alerting.
And that would be hugely illegal.
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Not like I’m randomly firing a gun into a crowd. https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com] But here we are.
Re:P25? (Score:5, Informative)
That's not true. FYI:
First, the digital repeaters don't care about whether the payload is encrypted or not, it's just a bit set in the headers.
Second, if the system subscribers and console are secure-strapped (preprogammed to ignore the switch) they CAN'T fall back to clear (non-encrypted) mode, ever.
You can still jam the system, but you need a +6dB signal advantage to guarantee FM capture.
Ham radio Motorola Quantar owner and retired Moto design engineer here.
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Sadly, no. I have never been to the Spark Museum, but it sounds really interesting and fun. It has been about 40 years since I was last in WA state, sorry - it wasn't me.
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No, that's not correct either. There is a switch dedicated to encryption on/off on the radios, but whether the radio honors it or not is based on the system policy set by the customer (the police or whoever owns it. There is no preference or default configuration, all the buttons on the radio are programmable and can be turned on or off or changed to give the operator more or less flexibility or capability, depending on the eventual application of the radio and the expected experience level of the end use
How is this news? (Score:3)
How is this news? Police in other jurisdictions have been encrypting their radios for several decades, even transit radios.
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if it necessary to allow open access, then a website can be used to permit the public to listen in on general dispatch. This also allows the system to be shut down in case of emergency.
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if it necessary to allow open access, then a website can be used to permit the public to listen in on general dispatch. This also allows the system to be shut down in case of emergency.
Queue 25 years of re-authorizing a "state of emergency" so the public is prevented from knowing what their public servants are doing...
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Re: How is this news? (Score:2)
Burma (now Myanmar) has been under a "state of emergency" scince 1988 (IIRC)
"State of emergency", yeah that gives the bad guys in charge the right to smash a woman in the jaw with a rifle butt in front of her kids on suspicion of something or another.
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For various definitions of "emergency"...
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So would you support encryption if it the transmissions were made public 1 day later? There is no reason that a regular person would need this info in real time. Even if they heard something afoul, what will they do at that moment?
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Re:How is this news? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'm sure the restaurant will like this too, as they get to keep more of the money (No swipe fees), And probably the underpaid servers will love the pay by cash, as they could pocket the tip money right away and take it home that night instead of their employer having to handle getting it from the credit card processor, deducting fees, possibly mishandling the tip money or reducing it in other ways, and putting it to them in a paycheck some weeks down the road.
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Yeah possibly not. There was a spate of incidents just before the pandemic where restaurants in the UK where having their card payment systems jammed to force the use of cash and then provide an easy target for a robbery.
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spate of incidents just before the pandemic where restaurants in the UK where having their card payment systems jammed to force the use of cash and then provide an easy target for a robbery.
Interesting one. I suppose the risk/incidence theft of cash is a concern, but mainly insider theft...
But that's cause dealing with so many cash transactions was unusual for those businesses. If your business handles enough cash, then you have elevated measures and process in place to protect against losses - plus in
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But it's not. US police, fire, and transit police have had encrypted radio communications since the early 1980s.
Encryption of Public Service Comms is old news (Score:5, Insightful)
As indicated, this really is nothing new. As municipalities upgrade their communication systems, the providers of those systems sell on the idea that “digital is better than analog, and encryption is better than no encryption”. The buyer does have a choice. They can choose what specific channels to encrypt and which ones to leave open.
This has been going on for many years. Encryption does shut out scanner users and users of services such as Broadcastify (which consists of users “donating” their scanner reception to the streaming service). Many people, myself included, aren’t able to monitor at least some of their local public services.
Encrypted channels also present a problem for interoperability between agencies. An outside agency will not be able to communicate on an encrypted channel their equipment has not been provisioned for. This means added complexity as units must use a shared, open channel for shared communications.
Ideally agencies wishing to adopt encryption should do so on a limited number of secondary, tactical channels. Encrypting dispatch and other common channels introduces more issues than it solves in most cases.
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For varying values of "better".
The digital signal is narrower bandwidth, but crappier audio quality. Some contend digital has a little better usable range than analog, and narrow band signals seems to go a little further than wide band ones.
So, which is actually "better" depends on your yardstick, i.e. audio quality vs, occupied bandwidth vs. effective real-world range and reliability.
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Narrow band signals also mean you can pack more channels into your frequency allocation.
The problem is that FM, even narrowband FM, requires about 25kHz per channel (broadcast FM, or wide FM, is around 75kHz), which means if you have an allocation of frequencies, which everyone does, you can only pack in so many channels. If you're lucky and have a whole MHz of allocated frequencies, that's 40 channels with FM. Not all the space is used because you don't want each channel to spill over to the next channel,
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There's two issues (Score:2)
As for why it's a big deal NYPD is doing this it's because they had a huge push into transparency after several major scandals and it's a blue state so that transparency is expected.
If your criminals
Encryption for me, but not for thee (Score:2)
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I get your point, but it's a double-edged sword as usual.
Even reporting a regional power outage in a gun-controlled city, makes the area ripe for criminals. No more lights. No more house alarms. They don't even have to get off their ass, to go find the low-hanging fruit. You just told them.
Not to mention the sheer amount of PII that is likely broadcast on a daily basis, including minors. Names, addresses, drivers license numbers and of course every suspected/accused crime, whether true or not, guilty
nothing to hide (Score:2)
If you have nothing to hide...
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What do they have to hide? Why are they afraid of oversight?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p... [ssrn.com]
Yes and no (Score:2)
I think the opposite is in order. (Score:3)
Record at all times while on duty, for every employee. If they're able to order other people around and arrest them, then I want to know what they're doing and saying at all times while "on duty". And maybe more.
Off duty behavior reflects on the police department too. Like intimidating people with a badge flash. "Do you know who I am?"
"If you're not doing anything wrong, then why does it matter if I record you?"
NYPD considers using... (Score:4, Insightful)
something very standard in law enforcement in much of the western world?
When did America catching up with the late 90s become "news"?
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something very standard in law enforcement in much of the western world?
When did America catching up with the late 90s become "news"?
Maybe the real news is why is one the countries' largest police agencies, still sitting in the early 90s?
I wonder how many times New York taxpayers, have paid for a "communications refresh" already? Perhaps we should ask a former disgraced leader or seven about that shit. I'd love to see an audit right about now.
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Well I wouldn't go that far when talking about encryption. This is something that can be turned on and off at will at the base stations and by a quick software update to the portables and mobiles when they are at the station. The reality is P25 (and TETRA in Europe) despite being over 20 years old are still the latest and greatest standard for critical communications for emergency services the world over.
The world is slowly migrating to some LTE based services (and 5G introduced a whole host of features mea
Good (Score:2)
Fewer gawkers at accident sites, fires etc. is a good thing.
the cops been doing that for years (Score:2)
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a large chunk of the 800 MHZ band is blocked and missing from radio police scanners (blocked and locked out and gone)
Heh heh, police scanners. Those are for housewives.
They need a real time incident log under FOIA (Score:2)
There should be a website with EVERY incident reported as it happens. Maybe don't include exact address and names if it's residential but rather whole apartment building or the street/block. If it's a fire then the exact address of course. If there is a swatting or forced entry then it has to be on the website seconds before they take action with at least a couple different news media individuals from different outlets (say 4 people) on site already but not in the way.
Shiny! (Score:2)
Encrypted equipment is more expensive, forever, requires more power on both ends, increases communication delays, is harder/more expensive to repair (meaning more e-waste) and discourages multi-department interoperab
Like in a normal country? (Score:2)
Call me shocked.
Privacy for them, not for you. (Score:3)
They weren't already? (Score:2)
No Funny here? (Score:2)
Someone should have jumped on the LEO thread to ask what Low Earth Orbit has to do with it? (Just checking for Funny and disappointed as usual. Not actually interested in the story...)
Data please (Score:2)
Encrypted Police Radio isn't new, lot's of cities have already done it.
So how much of an impact on crime does it make?
What advantages/disadvantages have been observed?
Just raise the barrier to entry (Score:2)
Project 25 Phase 2 is a system used nationwide, which requires both an expensive scanner and technical expertise to program it. Any government agency seeking to completely block the public out of communications should be suspect. If NYPD wants to prevent the public from knowing what they're doing, my first question would be - what are they planning to do that they don't want the public to know about?
Of course (Score:2)
The cops want to be opaque as much as possible. Don't forget about the guy who was raped with a plunger handle by the cops right there in the city of New York.
The problem is trust (Score:2)
In many other countrys it is already encrypted, and police is required to post a datastream of events to media and private citizen alike. Because the police in these countrys have trust, and continually earn this trust, this works.
This blocks criminals from getting live info on exactly what police are doing and as such reduce the risk to the police of their information being misused.
In US, and especially NY, the police does not
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